Business is not normal, and that might be raising your anxiety levels. Here are six natural ways to reduce stress.

For starters, focus on what you can control. The coronavirus pandemic has forever changed many social constructs that we’ve taken for granted—including face-to-face interactions, feeling safe, and traveling around the holidays. In this new normal, many might be feeling “ compassion fatigue ” from the collective trauma experienced this year. The pandemic has highlighted a host of complications that many have never experienced, ultimately causing anxiety due to unanswered questions about the future. Read Full Story

It’s an uncertain time for everyone. On this week’s episode of “Secrets of the Most Productive People,” we discuss all of the ways that we’re dealing with living in a time when stress and anxiety levels are high. We’re living in a time of uncertainty. No matter where you are in the world, it’s likely that COVID-19 has upended every aspect of your life. It’s an unprecedented time, and as a result many have had to make drastic changes to their day-to-day lives, sometimes at a moment’s notice. Read Full Story

Life is stressful. These four weighted blankets, tested by Fast Company editors, can help. 2020 has been an incredibly difficult year and around the world, people are experiencing record levels of stress. Some researchers have observed that that there’s been a spike in sleeplessness—they’re calling it Coronasomnia—which is leading to declines in productivity, shorter fuses, and increased health risks. Unfortunately, it doesn’t look like we’ll be out of the woods anytime soon, so here at Fast Company , we’ve been trying to find ways to manage our anxieties. Over the past few weeks, writers and editors here have been testing weighted blankets, which are designed to help people relax. Read Full Story

Lots of us are experiencing high levels of stress and anxiety right now. During a time when lots seems uncertain, these tricks can help you stop spiraling. If you, like many people right now, are experiencing high levels of stress, you may be catastrophizing. As the name suggests, this is when your brain goes into an active anxiety spiral that leads you down a long, scary rabbit hole to the worst-case scenario. Or, in other words: a catastrophe. Read Full Story

With Apple and Google announcing more details for their exposure notification API, it’s clear coronavirus contact tracing apps are coming. But it’s not clear people will use them. As the United States looks to slowly return to something resembling life before the coronavirus pandemic, officials and researchers have been considering ways to continue reducing the spread of COVID-19. Read Full Story

Posted by morgan.mcmurray For the last few weeks, you’ve probably experienced an influx of emails from companies detailing how COVID-19 is affecting them and thus you, their customer. It's... a lot, isn't it? So today, we want to take a departure from the world of "how this affects us" and focus instead on actionable things we can all do to make things brighter for ourselves and our communities. This won't be your regularly scheduled programming — we won't be discussing SEO or marketing. Instead, we're sharing ideas and advice from the folks at Moz who've been finding ways to be helpers as we all navigate this new normal. Donate and shop For those who have steady income during this time of economic uncertainty, it’s more important than ever to support local businesses and charitable organizations. Many employers, Moz included, offer charitable donation matching to make use of as well. Food …

Similar to productivity shame–the feeling that you’ve never done enough–time anxiety is when you feel you never have enough time to meet your goals or that you’re not maximizing the time you do have. How often do you feel like you just don’t have enough time? Despite trying every time management technique and productivity strategy in the book, do you find it impossible to shake the feeling that time is slipping away? This is called time anxiety. Read Full Story

Whether you care to admit it or not, the decisions you make today will be driven by your emotions. In emotional marketing, we talk a lot about using psychological triggers to get customers to click, convert, engage, etc. “By leveraging common psychological triggers all people have,” you might hear, “you can drive more sales.” While it may feel like we make decisions with our minds, using logic and reasoning, the “mental triggers” we hear about are tied more to emotion than anything else. Case in point, Antonio Damasio spent time studying individuals with damage to the area of the brain where emotions were generated and processed. While these subjects functioned just like anyone else, they couldn’t feel emotion. The other thing they had in common was they all had trouble with making decisions. Even simple decisions about what to eat proved difficult. While they could describe what they should be …

Academic evidence suggests that anxiety drives progress by enhancing certain behaviors that set us up for success. The self-help industry has devoted the past 50 years to demonizing anxiety, but anxiety is a universal human emotion that evolved to improve our ability to adapt to the real world and solve critical everyday problems . No human is entirely deprived of anxiety—even psychopaths are capable of experiencing it, albeit in smaller doses. Without anxiety, we would be incapable of evaluating risk, sensing danger, or protecting either our lives or our loved ones. It is tempting to imagine that a life free of anxiety would be a blessing, but the truth is that our capacity for survival would be seriously handicapped if we weren’t able to worry, fear, and stress. Read Full Story