Taking Your Workplace Stress Home?

Stress, work, pain.

Do you take your work issues home with you? Arrive depleted and distracted? In these working from home days that sounds like a stupid question. What I really mean is are you able to forget and/or stop bringing the stresses of the day job into your personal life? If you are saying “of course I can,” you are a rare bird. When surveyed, people reported the stressors and conflicts of the workday impacted their sleep, their ability to eat healthy foods, concentration, as well as distracting them from their children, relaxation activities, personal needs, and mood. What is this real culprit?Rumination.

During the day you don’t have the time, or bandwidth, to rethink that stupid comment you made or replay the reprimand the boss gave you. You are too busy thinking about the demands of the moment. Arrive home and into your personal world is when you realize the negative thoughts have traveled with you. They are frequent, disruptive, and vivid.

Liz Fosslien and Molly West Duffy are the authors of “No Hard Feelings: The Secret Power of Embracing Emotions at Work.” They see this obsessive kind of negative thinking as rumination, claiming, “It happens when our minds wander towards the negative events in the past or the possibility of negative events in the future.” Can you hear yourself, “tomorrow is going to be worse than today”?

Do you know where the term rumination comes from? It’s a bit gross. It refers to the fact cows chew their food, swallow it, and then regurgitate it successfully. Using that definition, and the visual that goes with it, is this really what you want to do with those negative thoughts of the day during your down time? Probably not, but you have a hard time finding a way out.

Psychologist Guy Winch studied the rumination topic extensively after observing his own obsessive behavior. He was exhausted, had nothing left to give, replayed the horrors of the day continuously, feeling at the end of his shift what his patients were probably feeling. He found himself questioning his job and chosen profession. Been there?

Winch concluded rumination is useless. Why? Because it is obsessing over something that happened, not solving the problem, or adding any reflection.

In his TED Talk on the topic, he repeats a very familiar complaint, “I have so much to do!” He would say this is ripe for rumination because it does not really look for a solution for the issues. He suggests posing it as a problem, “What is an alternative?” or “How might I reschedule things and relieve some of my stress?” In those two instances you have framed a problem and you are setting up for a solution. No need to ruminate, just restate it in a way that will not become obsessive.

Here are some suggestions by people who have studied the topic of rumination as a work issue.

1. Ritualize your closing the end of day. For me it is shutting off the lights and closing the home office door.
2. Leave a list of the three most important things for the next day.
3. Clear off your desk and desktop (close the lid at least).
4. Get out of your work clothes (even if they are only sweatpants and a tee shirt) and change into something that says, “I’m home.”
5. Chose a time to end the workday and stick to it. If you must look at emails and texts after the close, set a time to do it and limit the amount of time you will spend on it.
6. Eat dinner. Don’t just grab something to eat but sit down and enjoy a meal.
7. Meditate. Headspace’s 10-minute daily meditation is fast, easy, and free. It helps you get into a different frame of mind.
8. Have a conversation about something other than work.
9. Walk, maybe with the dog. Even if only around the block or up some stairs, anywhere away from your workstation.
10. Decide you will sleep. Before hitting the sack say out loud, “I am going to have a peaceful and restorative night’s sleep.”

Fozzlein and West Duffy said it all when they quoted Harvard Psychologists Matthew Killingsworth and Daniel Gilbert. They estimate we spend only half of our time focused on the present. Why does that matter? Because we’re happiest when we live in the moment, no matter what we’re working on. In a study of over 5,000 people, Killingsworth and Gilbert found that a wandering mind (obsessive thoughts) is usually an unhappy mind.

Try this self-help tip. Keep track of the number of times you think about and fret about work issues during personal time. Look back at it in a period of time you pre-set. How often did you ruminate? And when were there solutions to think about instead? Train yourself and reap the results.