Stress – friend or foe? And what can you do about it before your coffee cup flies into the wall?
Guest post: Aku Hentilä / Population Welfare Association Ltd.
Stress has become a bit like the godfather of work life – it keeps everything running behind the scenes, but no one really knows when it will become a problem. Sometimes stress is a good thing – it keeps us sharp and gives us a boost to perform. But if things go too far and stress builds up, it becomes a silent efficiency killer, eating away at our stamina and productivity bit by bit.
At Väestöliitton Hyvinvointi Oy, we focus especially on proactive and low-threshold solutions for mental well-being in working life. In practice, this means that people don't have to wait until stress explodes in their heads or HR starts handing out stress balls as a "solution" . But how do you recover before your body and mind say error ? Here are a few tips.
Microbreaks: a small but effective way to recover during the day
There is a lot of talk about recovery in working life, but it often means something abstract like "remember to rest" . It is worth being more concrete! It is good to build recovery into everyday life, and it happens, for example, through micro-breaks - small breaths that keep stress under control even during good weather.
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Moving your body – walking, interval training, stretching. You don't have to run a marathon, just taking your head off the machine for a moment is enough.
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Breathing pauses – a few deep breaths can already lower your heart rate and activate the parasympathetic nervous system.
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Neurosonic and other restorative methods – If deep breathing alone isn't enough, you can always let technology do the work for you.
Neurosonic as part of low-threshold solutions
Neurosonic is one concrete example of how recovery can be brought into everyday life without having to book a holiday to Bali. At Väestöliitton Hyvinvointi Oy, we use Neurosonic as part of both low-threshold work well-being services and more demanding psychotherapy processes. We have Neurosonics at our Helsinki and Tampere offices, and we also rent mobile mattresses to companies.
This is not just a nice addition, but a well-researched fact: the balance of the nervous system directly affects alertness and stress tolerance. That's why it's worth integrating recovery tools directly into your everyday life, not only when you're already in the collapse phase. Neurosonic can be used independently - or it can be combined with conversation support and work supervision as part of a broader recovery strategy.
My experiences: sleep quality, alertness and the famous flow
In my case , the effects of Neurosonic have been visible in measurements from Oura and Nuanic , where the quality of my sleep has clearly improved. Deep sleep has increased by up to 0.5–1 hour, which is a significant difference.
But recovery is not only important when stress starts to negatively burden you. Eustress – that is, positive stress that is stressful in a good way – can be just as draining if you don't recover from it. For me, this is especially evident in creative work: when ideas are flying and things are progressing, the body tends to go into overdrive. Then the workdays can insidiously get longer and recovery and sleep are lacking.
I have learned to utilize Neurosonic's programs in a variety of ways in my own life. In the evenings I use longer relaxation programs, and in the morning and during the day the activation and R10 programs have been my favorites when I need to increase alertness and have a better flow for creative work.
How do you keep stress useful and avoid burnout ?
Stress isn't the enemy, but without recovery, there's a high risk that it will eventually become one. Instead of waiting for it to spread, why not do something about it beforehand?
At Väestöliitton Hyvinvointi Oy, we believe that mental well-being should not be a distant luxury product, but a basic building block of every work community. That is why we are constantly developing low-threshold solutions that are genuinely practical and easy to implement. Neurosonic is one of many ways to bring nervous system balance and recovery into everyday work – either independently or combined with other services that support mental well-being.
About the blogger:
A combination of business realism and welfare humanism
Aku Hentilä is a therapist and business manager responsible for organizational services at Väestöliitton Hyvinvointi Oy and an expert in the Mielihyvin duunissa project. Aku has almost 20 years of experience in business and finance, and has been in the welfare sector and work supervision for eight years. This means that he has sat in the conference room scribbling budgets as well as in the therapy room listening to people . So understanding can be found in both numbers and people – and that is what creates a functioning whole.