Managing stress is an issue that all of us struggle with, and that stress is a result of a number of things: time management, day-to-day workflow, day-to-day stressors, and just the pace at which we consistently live our lives.

I’m probably the biggest culprit of managing stress poorly – or at least I used to me. As a “recovering perfectionist,” a high achiever, and a very type A personality, the idea of “having to do all the things all the time” was the norm for me for a VERY long time. It’s been many, many months of work, changing habits, changing my outlook, and working on that. But for me, what’s really helped me intentionally slow down the pace of my life has been focus – being very mindful and being very intentional about how I spend my time, and how I want to spend my time.

I have been thinking about the practice of reducing daily stress a lot, and it’s just been really taking shape in my life lately over the past couple of weeks, so I wanted to share some tip on how you can change the pace of your life, and address daily stress in your own life.

Where Does Daily Stress Come From?

We all have a tendency (especially women) to just go, go, go, go, go, go, go. Because there’s always so much to do, right? There’s always stuff that we need to be doing. It doesn’t end. And the sooner that we accept that, the easier this gets is that the to-do list is never going to go away completely. There’s always going to be stuff that you can do.

Now that we’ve got that settled… a couple of weeks ago, I saw this quote on Instagram, from the wonderful, the brilliant, Brené Brown. And this quote really resonated with me when I saw it. In fact, it still has and it’s very much impacted some changes that I’ve been making to my schedule and my daily workflow lately, so I wanted to share it with you. But the quote was:

“If you don’t want to burn out, stop living like you’re on fire.”

Brene Brown

You can read more about Brene’s thoughts on burnout and stress management in this article she wrote for Oprah (can we say “power women”?!), but essentially that quote is a great reminder that we are in control of the pace of our lives. We are totally in control of any potential frenetic energy that we create that comes from feeling like we have to do ALL the things all the time. We need to remind ourselves (and remind ourselves often!) that we set that pace, or that standard of “busyness” that we adhere to every day. We’re in charge of that.

But there is 100% a cultural standard of “busyness” that we grapple with on a daily basis. Are we doing enough? Are we busy enough? The concept of being busy and being able to “do it all” has become so glorified – but the fact is that this is radically unhealthy, since it’s putting us up against impossible (or nearly impossible) standards. And as a result, it’s setting us up for failure. Because, as I mentioned above, when it comes to busyness, there is no finish line. There is always more that you can do. There are always going to be asks made of you. So how can you set that boundary for yourself to reduce daily stress and overwhelm?

How to Reduce Daily Stress

The first way to reduce your daily stress (fortunately!) we’ve already taken together as a result of your reading this article: just empowering yourself with that information. Understanding that it’s up to YOU to change the pace of your life to proactively reduce stress, because if you rely on the boundary of “when I don’t have anything to do anymore…” you’re going to be sorely disappointed (and very burnt out).

Once we realize that tasks, work and stress are ever-present, the next step is to start thinking about: “Okay, well what is the pace at which I want to live my life at? How do I want my day-to-day flow to work?”

This has been something that, for me, over the last couple of months, I’ve been very mindful of. I’m a big list maker – I always write down everything that I need to do for the day, for the week, for the month, and I do my best to cross off all that stuff every day. And it’s been a process, getting more aligned with what’s realistic, what’s possible, and then being okay with things NOT getting done, which is a big mental hurdle for recovering perfectionists like myself.

But the big shift that I’ve kind of seen in myself lately is the shift to the daily pace of my work and the threshold of what’s “okay,” what’s passable, what I’m okay with in terms of my daily output and drawing a line there that’s comfortable.

How to Set Realistic Boundaries With Others

In addition to those personal mindset adjustment, in order to respect this new pace of life and workflow, I’ve found that it’s been crucial to make adjustments to my interactions with other people and with my clients to allow me to respect that pace of work.

And this has been really nice! I’m not going to lie because just slowing down a little bit has allowed me to focus, has allowed me to do better work, has allowed me to appreciate my wins as they come up even more and to ultimately be more successful. Because when you are more rested and you’re more focused, and you’re doing better work ,and your client interactions are better, that translates to just a better aura of energy, and that success energy can then attract MORE success. That’s how it works.

So not only have I been feeling better, my business has been doing better too, and I’ve been creating boundaries and respecting them and allowing space in my life for other things that are really important to me and my priorities. So that’s a really beautiful development that can occur as result of resetting the pace at which you life your life. And it’s an adjustment you 100% deserve, too!

3 Ways to Proactively Adjust the Pace of Your Life

I want to share with you three ways that you can make this sort of realization and make some changes in your own life because it’s not a huge, massive, “all or nothing” thing. It’s more of an incremental, habitual approach to how you work and then also your interactions with others and what you’re setting as your standard and your baseline for other people to respect.

1. Set better expectations

The first way is to just set better expectations. This is what I really struggled with when I was starting my business. I was so eager to please (again, that my perfectionist tendency, that people-pleasing tendency rearing its head) that I would have interactions with my clients and I’d be working on something for them and I’d say, “Great, I’ll have this back to you by tomorrow.” And I would just set this deadline out of reaction – and set myself up for a stressful scenario based on this decision.

Inevitably, either I wouldn’t get to the work that day or the deadline would come along and I find myself just slaving over work at 11:00 PM at night just to get it to the client that day that I said I would because I didn’t set good expectations. That makes no sense! None of the nearly hundred of clients that I’ve worked with is checking their email at 11:45 saying, “Alyssa, you said that you were going to deliver this today. I haven’t received it yet. Where is it?” That just doesn’t happen. So I started being a little bit more lenient with myself about that. If, for whatever reason, I DID set a deadline and I really tried but I didn’t get to the work that day, then I delivered it the next morning. No big deal. But that’s an adjustment I had to make for myself and my own expectations, mentally.

There’s no difference between delivering something at staying up until 11:45 PM at night, killing yourself to do something versus getting it in someone’s inbox the next day at 9:00 AM. So just being a little bit more lenient with that, that aspect of work and that aspect of interaction, but also just setting better expectations from the beginning.

Now, when I’m communicating with clients, I intentionally give them an idea of when to expect something, that has a lot more grace in it for me. And also, maybe that’s a little bit more open ended. Like, “I’ll work on this and I’ll get back to you shortly.” Nothing wrong with that. And if they really have a hard deadline, then do THAT communication work to understand, “When do you need this by? What’s your timeline like?” Do that initially so you know and you’re both aligned on whatever timeline you’re working off of. And I’m using this setting better expectations in the realm of client work and coaching. But this can happen in your friendships, in your work, with your boss, with the people you manage, with anyone that you interact with!

Setting better expectations for how you work and just making sure that you and your partner, in whatever way you’re communicating with them, are on the same page is going to serve everyone better in the long run. When you get in the habit of setting better expectations for yourself, you give yourself a lot more grace and lenience and less stress in your work, which allows you to then do better work and enjoy it more, which is important.

2. Find a sustainable cadence

The next thing you can do to reset the pace of your life and better manage stress is to adopt a maintainable, sustainable cadence – specifically, when it comes to your daily action items and the things that you want accomplish in any given day, time period. And to be honest: this is something that you kind of just have to try out and experiment with. You have to try out a bunch of different things and see what works for you until you figure out, “Oh, okay. This is a reasonable workload. This is something that I can actually consistently uphold.” Meaning every day, that’s a reasonable level of work for you. And the only way to figure that out is through trying it.

Know that you only have bandwidth for in a given day. For me, I know now that I only really like to do two or three client coaching calls per day. Because they are mentally and emotionally taxing! I also try to stack my call days, and block other days of my week for other work (writing, planning, reporting, sales, etc). Take some time to figure out what’s maintainable for you, and what allows you to work optimally.

Adopt this concept to your week too – figure out what is repeatable, what can you uphold on a day-to-day basis, and what’s a cadence that works well for you in that flow. And in case you need someone to tell you: it’s okay to set it slower than you think you should, especially if you’re like me and you’re just constantly used to cranking stuff out. Working at this level all the time is not sustainable. That’s exactly what Brené Brown was getting at when she said, ‘If you don’t want to burn out, then stop living like you’re on fire.” So you need to figure out what threshold and what cadence of daily work for you allows you to NOT feel like you’re on fire all the time, and shoot for that.

Granted, yes, there are going to be deadlines that come up. There are going to be urgent things and things that you have to jump on, but if you can do the work to not overload yourself on a day-to-day basis, then those crises, when they come up, are going to be more manageable.

So just play around with what is a repeatable cadence for you and your preferred cadence of how you like to work. When you like to start work in the morning, when you like to stop work in the evening, do you like to work on weekends? For me, that was something that I realized I was doing. I would kind of just treat my whole week as this is all available for work. But over the last couple of months, I’ve realized, “No, Alyssa. You really need to hold space for yourself on weekends. You need to have at least one day where you’re not doing anything and you’re actually treating it like a weekend,” which is usually my Saturday. So, whatever that is for you, whatever makes sense, whatever is a repeatable, maintainable cadence – respect it!

3. Hold space for yourself

And the third thing that you can do to reevaluate the pace of your life and reset it at a standard that’s more comfortable for you is just hold that space. I feel like that’s a term that I’ve been hearing a lot lately – “holding space for yourself, holding space for other people.” It’s basically just the act of being proactive and not overloading yourself, resisting the urge to fill your calendar and fill every available time slot.

If you can hold that space initially for yourself, and also hold it just within your week, you will end up creating less stress for yourself. For example, if I don’t really like to do meetings on Friday, then I’m not going to actively schedule meetings for myself on Friday. I’m going to reserve that time for something else or I’m going to choose to just end my day earlier on that day, and that’s okay! So, so much of this is mindfulness and just doing the work and doing the introspection and the reflection to realize how you like to operate, how you work best, and then holding space to allow yourself to do that.

The biggest thing I want you to take away from this article is to remember: you set the pace of your own life. And three ways that you can respect that for yourself are to set better expectations, to adopt a maintainable, repeatable cadence and to hold space for yourself because you deserve to. This is your life, y’all. Every DAY is your life. So how you’re living your life on a day-to-day basis is your happiness, your fulfillment, your joy. So don’t overload yourself constantly. Instead, work to find a cadence that works for you, find a pace of life that you’re comfortable with and that allows you to feel like you’re thriving, because you deserve to feel that way.

And remember, if you don’t want to burn out, stop living like you’re on fire. Thanks, Brene Brown!