Mental health awareness week: coping with stress at work
Does telling people to take time out of their day to play board games really help their mental health? Does having less time to spend doing the same amount of work make someone more stressed? Would helping people deal with being stressed be more helpful than distracting from it? Could a few simple workshop-type activities start to give people the skills for dealing with stress?
I have a few ideas about things that can help our mental wellbeing and cope with stress.
Getting perspective
Sometimes, when we’re really focused on something we can lose a sense of perspective about how important the things that are making us stressed really are.
Write down what the most important thing in your life is. It might be your family or loved ones, or achieving something meaningful to you, but whatever it is let’s give this most important thing a score of 100. Then, list the things that are causing you stress and give them a score between 0 and 100 to describe how important they are to you, not to anyone else, or to your job, but to you. Hopefully, when you add up all those scores they won’t even come close to the most important thing in your life.
Comparing the things that are causing you stress to the most important thing in your life can hopefully put those things into perspective.
Sharing achievements
If we spend our time thinking about all the things we haven’t done, how long our to do list is, and how those deadlines are looming, it’s easy to lose sight of the things we have achieved.
Share with someone (you have to say it out loud) some of the things you have achieved this week. Let them ask you questions about it if they want, but the important part is for you to recognise that you are getting things done and achieving things, even if you still have lots of other things to do.
Recognising and sharing achievements can help us feel good about ourselves as we have to admit that we have have made progress towards our goals.
Be kind
When we’re stressed we can often be quite terse with people, especially if we feel like they aren’t recognising that we’re really busy.
For every person that you speak to that day, try to say something nice, compliment them on something they’ve achieved, thank them for something they’ve done.
Taking the time to actively say something nice to someone not only makes them feel better but makes you feel better about being a nicer person.
Breathe
Just breathe.