Seven ways to reduce stress in your office

Stress is a fact of life and while the right kind can actually be a good thing, we all have quite enough in our home and working lives without inadvertently adding to it. For decades, psychologists have researched the little annoyances that feed into our feelings of stress - and here we reap the rewards of their work.

1. Reduce clutter

Psychologist Sherrie Buorg Carter gives eight clear reasons why clutter causes stress, from the bombardment of "excessive stimuli" to the frustration of not being able to find what we need quickly. So how much clutter surrounds you? Ask someone to take a photo of you at your desk - and don’t cheat by tidying anything away. This is your chance to see your working environment as it really is.

Now, walk away, sit down well away from your desk and take a close look at that photo. Just how much of your desk's contents and the areas around it are clutter? Now get rid of everything you can, even if that means tidying it into a box or drawer. If you don't need it after a week, ask yourself if you need it at all.

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2. Organise your paperwork

This ties in with clutter reduction and being able to find what you need quickly. If you use a particular document - or several - every day, then keep it easily to hand. That could be a tray on your desk or it could be on a shelf - but it should be an arm's reach away.

For all your non-essential paperwork, find somewhere else to put it, whether in a box folder or a drawer. Maybe it needs to be in a filing cabinet in your office, just so long as it is away from your desk. Maybe you can scan it and file it on your computer. Or maybe, heaven forbid, you don't need it at all. One thing's for sure: investing an hour or two to organise your paperwork will reap countless benefits.

3. Add personal touches such as pictures

Not everyone is a visual person – some prefer facts and figures and that's fine - but if you are, then consider adding a photo or two to your desk. Maybe it's of your partner, child, a family moment, a favourite landscape - it doesn't really matter. It just needs to make you feel relaxed when you see it.

4. Add some green

We all instinctively know that being surrounded by greenery makes us relaxed and this is backed up by a number of studies. There are peripheral benefits, too: a 2008 paper from the University of Michigan suggested that being "under the influence" of plants increased memory retention by 20 per cent. So if you don't have any greenery in your office, consider investing in a bit of vegetation; the act of making something living grow should also boost your mood.

5. Do a sound audit

Close your eyes. Block out all thoughts. Listen. If you work in a busy office, there's likely to be a huge number of sound sources, whether that's your charming colleagues, phones ringing or an aged printer chugging out ozone in the corner. Try to isolate all the noises, write them down and consider what's the most annoying. Then work out if there's something you can do about them…

6. Soften the lighting

It's amazing how readily we put up with poor, harsh lighting in the workplace when we pay such attention to it at home. You may not be able to convince your office manager to replace the strip lighting that bathes your office in sterile white, but you should be able to soften your own working area by adding a warmer light via a lamp.

You can also control the colour balance of your main screen by heading into its settings. Experiment. If you can, download f.lux to automatically adapt your computer's display to the time of day.

7. Take a fresh look at your office layout

We're not necessarily advocating feng shui or karmic flows, but it is worth taking a bit of time to consider what irritates you about the way your office is designed. Some things will occur to you immediately, but others will only spring to mind during the working day. Perhaps it's the view or you're sitting next to noisy people. Maybe you're too close to a noisy printer (see below).

Whatever it might be, don't just let it frustrate you and cause stress: take whatever action you can.

This article was paid for by HP. Why? Because its latest series of laser printers will also make your office less stressful: not only do they look far nicer than your average printer, they take up less space, make surprisingly little noise and the first page out appears in a matter of seconds. If you're the IT manager, take a look. If not, share this article with them.