Advice on Handling Stress as a Graphic Designer

Graphic design can be a stressful job. Working with numerous clients at any one time, keeping track of deadlines, on top of balancing any number of personal projects and working to build your skills can all take a toll on your mental health and wellbeing.

What so many of us overlook when starting our graphic design careers is putting into place processes and systems to deal with stress and help us to maintain good mental health.

The good news is that if you’re starting to feel overwhelmed, it’s not too late to make positive changes in your life to reduce stress and make things easier!

Work out what’s causing you stress

Each of us will get stressed by different things. For some, it may be spending long hours in front of a screen, and for others, it might be worrying about how much time is being spent on projects.

Whatever it is for you, you need to identify it.

The first step to mitigating stress in your work life is to actually figure out what the catalyst of stress is, when it happens, and how badly it affects you.

Set scheduled work hours

In my first few years as a graphic designer, I didn’t have set work hours during the week. Like many designers, and freelancers in general, I’d tend to work chaotic hours, going until a project was completed. Whilst this may be productive, it has a detrimental effect on your mental wellbeing.

If working chaotic hours is causing you stress (and even if it isn’t) you’ll benefit from setting specific working hours and sticking to them. For myself, I work from 8am to 6pm, Monday to Friday. Sticking to these hours, and not working at all outside of them, allows my week to remain structured.

You may be thinking that the whole idea of being freelance means not having to work typical, structured hours, but honestly, it’s much easier to stick to a standard work week. And anyway, those hours don’t necessarily mean I’m working during them, it’s more to control myself from working outside of them.

Get enough sleep

This one can be a symptom of the above. Having sporadic working hours can often lead to an equally sporadic sleep schedule, which in turn has a detrimental effect on the work we produce.

It’s vital that you’re doing your best to cultivate good sleep habits, as sleep is vital for a healthy body and mind. Sleep helps you to recharge, which our bodies need to maintain high performance.

Have realistic deadlines

I’m all about hard work, but when that hard work starts to cause you excessive stress, you need to change the way you do things. One of the main causes of stress that I had was tricky deadlines.

We all want to impress our clients, and part of that can often mean setting overly ambitious deadlines, telling the client that you’ll get something to them, or deliver a project, much sooner than you’re realistically able to do.

To mitigate the stress you get from deadlines, be honest with your clients from the very beginning. When they ask about the timeline of a project, be realistic, giving them a set time that you know will give you enough time to complete the work to a high standard, without causing you to burn out.

Be organised

As simple as it may sound, putting a system in place to help you stay more organised can both help to remove stress from your life, and also be more productive when working.

I use an app called Todoist to help me keep track of all the tasks and deadlines that I have to handle, breaking them down into individual client and importance level. I also use Google Calendar to keep track of upcoming meetings – because we all know you can’t be a freelancer without having a least a few meetings each week.

It’s so important that you have a system in place that works for you. Spend a bit of time testing out different apps and tools to find something that best fits in with the way you work. Once you have this system in place, so much weight gets taken from your shoulders.

For reference, I think I must have used over twenty different productivity apps before I settled on Todoist. Each and every tool is different, so I can’t emphasise enough how important trying a bunch of them out before you settle on one is.

Step away for a few minutes

Even if you’re the most zen person in the world, there are going to be times when stress is a bit too high. It’s important, I’ve found, that you’re able to recognise when you’re starting to feel overwhelmed, and temporarily remove yourself from the situation.

When this happens, going for a quick walk, or just standing outside in the fresh air can help you catch yourself before you become too wound up. Even something as simple as changing rooms and being away from your PC for a little while can be huge when it comes to mitigating stress.

Additionally, removing yourself from the stressful situation will allow you to process what’s going on objectively. There have been so many times where, sat at my desk, I haven’t been able to fix a problem, but the answer became clear after I stepped away for a few moments. A lot of problems don’t seem that tough when you’re looking at them from a distance.

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