Signs your workday is too tense, and how to ease off

You can usually tell a workday has gone tense before you can say why. Your jaw is clamped shut. Your shoulders have crept up toward your ears. You catch yourself holding your breath while you read an email. It is 3 PM, you haven't eaten, and at 7 you are still at the desk without ever deciding to stay.

These are the common signs of a body bracing against the day. None of them is dangerous on its own, and most ease quickly once you notice them. This post covers the signs worth watching for, a 30-second way to check yourself, small ways to let go during the day, and when tension is a sign of something that needs more than a deep breath.

Signs in your body

Tension tends to settle in the same few places. Check these first.

• Your jaw. Teeth pressed together, a tight feeling at the hinge just in front of your ears, or your tongue pushed hard against your teeth. Plenty of people clench during the day without ever noticing.
• Your shoulders. Raised, rounded forward or pulled in. If dropping them feels like a big movement, they were up. There is a whole post on why your shoulders creep up at the desk.
• Your breathing. Short, high breaths in the chest, or pauses where you stop breathing altogether while you read or type. People sometimes call the second one "email apnea".
• Your hands. A tight grip on the mouse, fingers hammering the keys, a fist on the desk while you listen in a meeting.
• Your face. A furrowed brow, narrowed eyes, a squint at the screen that has nothing to do with the font size.
• Your stomach. A knot, or no appetite at lunchtime even though you skipped breakfast.

Signs in how you work

The other signs show up in what you do, or stop doing, as the day goes on.

• Meals slide. Lunch becomes a few bites at the keyboard, or nothing until dinner.
• Water stops. The glass on your desk is still full at 4 PM.
• Breaks disappear. You go from one call to the next and realize you haven't left the chair since the morning.
• The day stretches. Email at 9 PM, then 10. Leaving at a reasonable hour starts to feel like falling behind.
• Every notification makes you jump, and you answer messages the moment they arrive.
• Your fuse gets shorter. A small request feels like an imposition, and you snap at someone you like.

One of these on a busy day is normal. Several of them, most days, is a pattern worth taking seriously.

A 30-second check at the desk

You don't need to set time aside for this. Do it the next time a file is uploading or a page is loading.

1. Jaw. Let your teeth come apart. Lips together, teeth apart, tongue resting lightly on the roof of your mouth.
2. Shoulders. Lift them toward your ears, hold for a moment, then let them fall. Notice where they land.
3. Hands. Take them off the keyboard and rest them on your thighs.
4. Breath. Breathe in through your nose, then let the breath out slowly, a little longer than it went in.
5. Face. Soften your forehead and the muscles around your eyes.

If one spot was much tighter than the rest, that is the one to come back to through the day. Most people have a favorite place to hold tension, and it is usually the same place every time.

Small ways to ease off during the day

None of these fixes a hard job. They are ways to stop a hard day from setting in your body.

Breathe out longer than you breathe in

Slow breathing, with an out-breath a little longer than the in-breath, is one of the most common ways to calm down quickly, and small studies suggest it can ease feelings of stress. Three breaths is often enough to feel a difference. If you like something more structured, box breathing (in for four, hold for four, out for four, hold for four) is a simple pattern you can do with your eyes open in a meeting.

Put a gap between things

Tension builds fastest when there is no space between tasks. Go straight from one call into the next and you carry the first one with you. Even a minute between them helps: stand up, refill your water, look out of a window. If you book your own meetings, end them five minutes early.

Eat lunch, away from the desk if you can

A skipped lunch makes the afternoon feel harder than it is, because everything is more irritating when you are running on empty. Eating away from the screen, even for 15 minutes, also gives your eyes and shoulders a rest that the desk never does.

Move something

Walk to the end of the corridor, do a slow neck stretch, shake out your hands. Movement is one of the quickest ways to burn off the restless, braced feeling of a tense day, and it is hard to stay hunched while you walk.

Decide when the day ends

Pick a stop time in the morning, and write down the first task for tomorrow before you leave. A clear ending makes it easier to leave work at work, and harder for the day to drift into the evening. A short shutdown routine, the same few steps at the end of each day, turns that ending into a habit.

Letting something else notice for you

The hard part about tension is that it builds while you are busy. By the time you notice your jaw, it has probably been clenched for an hour. A nudge from outside your own head helps.

That is part of what the Self-care characters in Notchpals are for. Kapi, the calmest capybara alive, waits until you have gone an hour and a half without leaving the keyboard (between 10 AM and 8 PM), then pops up at the top of the screen with a request for three slow breaths.

KapiNothing is urgent for three breaths. Not even that. Breathe slow.

Once a day, between 11 AM and 5 PM, Kapi also asks how you are really doing. The rest of the crew can cover the other signs on the lists above: a Posture character asks you to drop your shoulders now and then, and a Meals character turns up around the lunch time you set, which helps on the days lunch would otherwise slide to 4 PM. None of them knows whether you actually unclenched. Done is your word for it, and Later moves the nudge 20 minutes down the road if you are mid-reply. And the crew holds off while your Mac's camera or microphone is in use, so a tense video call is never interrupted by a capybara; the breath can wait until you hang up.

When it is more than a tense day

Everyone has tense days. It is different when the tension doesn't lift.

Talk to a doctor or a mental health professional if:

• you feel tense most days for weeks, including weekends and holidays;
• you sleep badly, wake in the night thinking about work, or start dreading Monday on Saturday afternoon;
• you feel exhausted in a way that rest doesn't fix, or detached and cynical about work you used to care about;
• headaches, chest tightness, stomach trouble or other physical symptoms keep coming back.

The World Health Organization describes burnout as the result of chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed. It lists three marks: exhaustion, mental distance from or cynicism about your job, and a sense of being less effective at it. Burnout is not something breathing exercises fix on their own, and it is not a personal failing. Many employers offer an employee assistance program with confidential counseling, so it is worth finding out whether yours does. If your jaw aches in the morning or your teeth feel worn, mention it to a dentist, because clenching often carries on at night.

If you ever feel unsafe or in crisis, contact your local emergency number or a crisis line straight away.

For everything short of that, the small habits above do add up. Notice where you hold the day, let it go a few times before evening, and give the day a clear end.