While some wrestle with the ‘work from home’ vs. ‘back to the office’ debate, for many others working at home remains a necessity. For those undertaking remote work, how can the experience be strengthened, especially when it comes to mental health issues?
With mental health and home working, feeling stress, boredom, anxiety and uncertainty is often a normal set of feelings. When these are prolonged and unwavering, problems develop.
There are often differences in how different groups have been affected. For example, people who have multiple housemates or are working from their bedroom or a sofa, the impact on their mental and physical health is invariably concerning.
What are some tips to help enhance your work from home experience? Dr. Teralyn Sell, psychotherapist explains to Digital Journal about how working from home impacts mental health in different ways for people.
In relation to this issue, Dr. Sell spells out three important tips to create the best at-home work environment to help improve mental health.
These tips are:
Tip #1: Set apart your workspace
It is imperative that your workspace not stare at you every day and night. Even if you don’t have a dedicated office space, use a corner of your room and put a divider screen around your workspace when you are not working. ‘Out of sight, out of mind’ is a workable statement here.
Tip #2: Create boundaries and stick to them
While working from home we have a tendency to work longer hours than when we are in the office. This is good for your business, but bad for work and life balance. Create office hours for yourself and stick to them.
Tip #3: Create a transition time
Though the traffic during commute times was terrible, the commute itself allowed us to transition between work and home. However, when you work from home, there isn’t much transition there. In order to shake off the workday a transition is important. Perhaps it’s as simple as closing up your office and taking a few minutes to meditate or even just breathe.
You can also take the dog or kids for a walk to transition away from work and back into your home life.
