Business stressing you out? 7 ways to soothe your nerves

Entrepreneurship and stress seem to go hand in hand.

But that doesn’t mean there isn’t something we can do about it. So as a public service, here are some stress hacks for the entrepreneur.

1. Chill out: During the nine years that he was creating his eponymous show, Jerry Seinfeld had much to be stressed about. How did he deal with it? Transcendental meditation. Every day at lunch, no matter how busy or crazy the day, Seinfeld would steal away to a private room and meditate for

20 minutes.

2. Interrupt the pattern: Often stress takes the form of obsessive thoughts, patterns or reactions. An event happens and we are conditioned to react in the same way we always do. Yet that conditioned reaction only reinforces the pattern and the stress. The answer then is to interrupt your normal reaction, interrupt the pattern.

Take a walk. Take a break. Do something different to relax your mind and shift your physical reaction.

3. Transform the energy: There are lots of ways to harness the energy of stress for good. One simple one is to workout. Exercise alleviates stress as the physicality of ex- ercise counteracts the physicality of stress. Another way to transform the energy is to reinterpret it. Psychology Today suggests people can reinterpret anxious feelings as excitement. Those who do have been shown to have more positive feelings about the task at hand than those who strive to just “calm down.”

4. Do breathing exercises.

5. Do yoga.

6. Get some sleep.

7. Do something: While not a transformational tool, a lot of small-business stress comes from something not yet done. So just do it!

Steve Strauss, @Steve Strauss on Twitter, is a lawyer specializing in entrepreneurship and has been writing for USATODAY.com for 20 years. The views and opinions expressed in this column are the author’s and do not necessarily reflect those of USA TODAY.