How to Reduce Stress
Reduce everyday stress with a 1-week trigger log, 5 minutes of box breathing, regular exercise, a stop time for work messages, a daily worry period, and daily recovery time. Know when to get help.
You will end up with a short list of what triggers your stress, a 5-minute breathing exercise for the moments it spikes, and five habits for the long run: regular exercise, a stop time for work messages, a daily worry period, fewer repeated decisions, and daily recovery time. None of them needs equipment or a subscription.
Stress is a physical and emotional reaction to the challenges in your life. The National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health (NCCIH) calls occasional stress a normal coping mechanism. It says long-term stress may contribute to or worsen digestive disorders, headaches, and sleep disorders, and that stress has been linked to depression and anxiety. The steps are aimed at keeping everyday stress from becoming constant.
They do not replace treatment. The closing covers when to talk to a professional and what to do in a crisis.
Log your stress triggers for 1 week
For 1 week, keep a stress log. Each time you feel stressed, write down what set it off, the time, and how strong it was on a scale from 1 to 10. At the end of the week, read the log and group the entries. Look for the same time of day, the same task, or the same person appearing more than once. Circle the two or three triggers that appear most. Those are the ones the later steps work on. The reason to do this first comes from the National Institute of Mental Health's fact sheet on stress, which says that learning what causes or triggers your stress, and which coping techniques work for you, can help reduce your anxiety and improve your daily life.
Use box breathing when stress spikes
When you are under stress, your body releases hormones that produce the fight-or-flight response, and your heart rate, breathing rate, and blood pressure go up. Relaxation techniques such as deep breathing work in the other direction. The NCCIH says the relaxation response slows the heart rate and lowers blood pressure. If you are pregnant, or you have heart disease, glaucoma, or a history of seizures, ask your doctor before you practice breath holds. The trial this exercise comes from excluded people with those conditions, so it says nothing about safety for them. Sit down in a chair, or lie down, and set a timer for 5 minutes. Inhale for 4 seconds, hold for 4 seconds, exhale for 4 seconds, and hold again for 4 seconds, breathing through your nose if you can. Repeat the pattern until the timer ends, then return to breathing normally. If you have to strain to reach 4 seconds, shorten all four counts to 3. That is the box breathing exercise from a 2023 Stanford trial, in which 108 adults, most of them university students, were assigned 5 minutes a day of a breathing exercise or of mindfulness meditation for a month. In the box breathing group, anxiety scores fell by an average of 3.75 points on a 20-to-80 scale from before each session to after it, about the same as in the meditation group. Anxiety measured as a lasting trait did not change in any group over the month, so use the exercise for the moment and do not expect it to change how anxious you are in general. A second pattern in the trial, cyclic sighing, raised mood the most. To do it, inhale slowly through your nose, add a second, shorter inhale to fill your lungs, and exhale slowly and fully through your mouth, for the same 5 minutes. The wider evidence points the same way with less certainty. A 2023 meta-analysis in Scientific Reports pooled 12 randomized trials with 785 adults and found that breathing exercises were associated with lower self-reported stress than control conditions, a small-to-medium effect. Its authors rated most of the trials at moderate risk of bias and urged caution.
Exercise more than 3 times a week
Regular exercise is associated with a moderate reduction in cortisol, a main stress hormone. A 2025 review pooling the trials on exercise and cortisol in people under psychological distress put yoga at the top and high-intensity interval training at the bottom. It covered 44 trials with 3,284 participants. Sessions of 30 to 60 minutes produced a significant drop in cortisol, the largest benefit came with more than 3 sessions a week, and longer programs predicted greater reductions. Low-intensity exercise showed a larger effect than high-intensity exercise, so you do not need hard workouts. The benefit also stopped growing past a certain weekly amount, which the authors place at about the lower limit of the 150 to 300 minutes of moderate activity a week that the World Health Organization recommends. Pick an activity you will keep doing, such as walking, cycling, swimming, dancing, or yoga. The review's authors tell clinicians to weigh a patient's preferences, because long-term adherence is essential. If you are starting from nothing, follow the CDC's advice for managing stress. Start small, build up to 2.5 hours a week, and break it into 20 to 30 minutes a day.
Set a stop time for work messages
Pick a time each day when work ends. After it, do not check email and do not answer work messages. Turn off work notifications at that time, so the phone does not pull you back in. If your job expects you to be reachable, agree specific off-hours with your manager, or start with one small rule, such as no email before breakfast or no Slack after 8 PM. Time spent watching for the next message is time you are still at work, and the stop time is what ends it.
Good to know: Start with one rule. Add a second only once you keep the first without effort.
Schedule a daily worry period
Set aside one 30-minute period a day for worrying, at the same time and in the same place each day. When a worry comes up outside that period, write it on a list and tell yourself you will deal with it then. During the period, go through the list. Cross off anything that has resolved itself. For each worry you can do something about, write down one specific next action. For each one you can do nothing about, acknowledge that and move to the next item, which is the split the NHS's worry time advice uses. The 30 minutes and the fixed time and place come from a 2013 trial. It randomly assigned 53 people with high levels of worry to 2 weeks of this technique or to a comparison group that was told not to avoid worrying when it came up. The worry-period group improved more on measures of worry, anxiety, negative mood, and insomnia, and no more on depression or positive mood. The trial was small, and its authors call the evidence preliminary. The NHS suggests a shorter period, 10 or 15 minutes, before bed. Start with the 30 minutes the trial tested, and shorten it if your list runs out sooner.
Turn repeated decisions into routines
Take the small decisions that repeat every day and settle them once. Wear the same few outfits on rotation. Eat the same breakfast on workdays. Plan the week's meals on Sunday. Automate bills and recurring purchases. Lay out tomorrow's clothes tonight. Each one is a task you no longer have in the morning. This step is practical, and we could not find a trial that tested whether it lowers stress. The popular explanation for it is decision fatigue, the idea that every choice drains a limited pool of willpower. Do not rely on that explanation. A preregistered test of it across 23 labs with 2,141 people found an effect close to zero, and a larger one in 2021, across 36 labs with 3,531 people, did not find evidence for the effect either.
Schedule recovery time every day
Put one recovery activity into every day, at a set time, with the same priority as a meeting. Choose it from the CDC's list of healthy ways to cope with stress. Spend time outdoors, either active or relaxing. Do a relaxing activity you enjoy. Talk with people you trust about your concerns and how you are feeling. Write down specific things you are grateful for. The same list says to take breaks from news and social media, because constant information about negative events can be upsetting, and to limit alcohol. So do not count scrolling or drinking as your recovery time. It also says to get enough sleep, and our guide on how to sleep better covers how. For a sitting practice, our guide on how to meditate teaches a breath-focused session and summarizes the evidence for it, including the risks.
Start with two things this week, the breathing exercise from step 2 for the moments stress spikes and one habit from steps 3 to 7. Judge the habit over weeks, not days. FAQ 2 below gives the length of each trial. If a technique makes you feel worse, stop doing it. The National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health says relaxation techniques are generally considered safe for healthy people, and that occasionally people report negative experiences such as increased anxiety or intrusive thoughts. If you are struggling to cope, or the symptoms of your stress will not go away, talk to a doctor or a mental health professional. FAQ 4 below lists the signs. If you are in immediate distress or are thinking about hurting yourself, call or text the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline at 988, or chat at 988lifeline.org. It is free, confidential, and open 24 hours a day across the United States. If you have been dealing with flaking or itching, our guide on how to get rid of dandruff explains how stress can make flare-ups more likely and what to do about it.
Questions we get asked about this
Answers from experience, not a textbook.
The National Institute of Mental Health draws the line this way. Stress is the physical or mental response to an external cause, such as a big test or an argument with a friend, and it goes away once the situation is resolved. Anxiety is your body's reaction to stress, and it can occur even when there is no current threat. It involves a persistent feeling of apprehension or dread that does not go away and that interferes with how you live your life. The steps above are for everyday stress. The NIMH says you may be at risk for an anxiety disorder if your symptoms interfere with your everyday life, cause you to avoid doing things, or seem to be always present. That is the point to talk to a professional (FAQ 4 below).
It depends on the technique. Breathing works within the session. In the Stanford trial from step 2, anxiety scores were lower straight after each 5-minute session, and the mood benefit grew the more days people had practiced. The worry period in step 5 was tested over 2 weeks. Exercise takes longest. The trials in the review from step 3 ran for at least 3 weeks and for 12 weeks on average, and longer programs predicted greater reductions in cortisol. We could not find a trial that timed the work stop time, the routines, or daily recovery time.
Yes. The National Institute of Mental Health says stress can be positive or negative, and gives the example that it may inspire you to meet a deadline or may cause you to lose sleep. The CDC calls feeling stress a normal coping response. The harm comes from stress that lasts. The CDC says long-term stress, also called chronic stress, can lead to worsening health problems. So aim the steps at the stress that keeps coming back, and leave alone the pressure before a single deadline or presentation.
Chest pain is not a stress symptom to manage at home. If you have chest pain or other symptoms of a heart attack, call 911 immediately, which is the CDC's instruction. For everything else, the National Institute of Mental Health says to seek professional help when severe or distressing symptoms have lasted 2 weeks or more. Its list includes difficulty sleeping, changes in appetite, difficulty concentrating, loss of interest in things you usually find enjoyable, and being unable to complete your usual tasks. Start with a primary care provider, who can refer you to a mental health professional. Mention physical symptoms too, such as headaches or stomach problems that keep coming back. Psychotherapy and medication are the two main treatments for anxiety, and the NIMH says many people benefit from a combination of the two. In a crisis, call or text 988, the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline.
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