The New Nation - Internet Edition

What do you do when you get home from work? More than an entire week! You have to work that week. You have no room, no time, and especially no energy for a house guest.

The National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) reports that one of the best ways for us to cope with our work related stress is to balance our work life with our personal life.

Most people use their after work time to eat, catch up on household chores, and "decompress," which almost always is a nice way of saying "watch TV or surf the Internet". Think about this: When you spend 40 hours a week at work, and 40 hours of your work week sleeping then you're left with an unaccounted for 40 hours that is all yours! 40 hours! When we spend 40 hours sleeping, what's the use in spending another 40 hours sleepwalking?

The things experts suggest to keep our stress level down are basically just general guidelines on how to love your life, no matter what day it is:

Keep your sense of humor: Try to keep things in perspective. So the copy machine is broken: is your life really over? Or will you just be scrambling for the rest of the day?

Develop interests outside of work: Probably making paper snowflakes will only take me so far, but do anything you enjoy and that will make your evenings go by slower - in a good way.

Make sure you get enough sleep and exercise: These two go hand in hand anyway. The more active you are during the day, the better you're going to sleep at night. Even if your day was demanding and the last thing you want to do is see the inside of a gym to pump iron, you can always take a long walk in the park - something pretty and low intensity. Yoga is also a great stress-reliever.

Be spontaneous: Just go do something totally different and unexpected without any prior planning. Don't fall into the old "Tuesday is chicken day, Wednesday is Friends re-runs and pizza day" trap. If you have nothing to look forward to, nothing to spice things up a bit, your weekdays can stretch out to be long and monotonous.

Read, learn to cook fancy dishes, or re-arrange your furniture. Changing things up a bit outside of work really makes the dreaded hour of 6:00 a.m. a bit more bearable.