Working well, wherever your desk

In August, AXA Healthcare updated the remote-working Wellcome Sanger Institute staff on ways to work well, wherever your desk. For those of us on the coroncoaster, who have perhaps over indulged on the quarentinis and gained a corona stone or so, this was a timely intervention.

The key is of course to aim for sustainable health change, not just in COVID times. The basics sound very simple: Think well, move well, eat well. But could this be easier said than done?

According to AXA, 41% of us like working at home but are looking forward to being back in the office. There is a fairly equal split between those who like 100% home working and those who find it a challenge. (For me, it depends which day you speak to me whether I appreciate it or hate it).

AXA covered the 3 main aspects to health – physical, mental and social health.

Mental health challenges you might experience:

• Stress, anxiety and depression
• Problems setting life / work boundaries
• Motivation and self discipline issues
• Isolation and loneliness
• Presenteeism

Being solitary can give you opportunities for self reflection but risks becoming a negative experience over time. Around 39% of self employed homeworkers feel lonely due to long working hours and a lack of regular communication. If other issues come along, such as personal relationship breakdown or an unhelpful line manager, this can leave you feeling isolated without the support of colleagues.

AXA recommends keeping a balance between time for self and time with friends and family. Have a coffee with colleagues to give you a chance to share feelings and maintain two way communication. Make sure you put these things in place before you feel lonely, rather than as a fix once your health starts to deteriorate. After all, around 59% have found that their mental health has been up and down during COVID.

Looking after your mental health

Put a priority on ensuring you have a good life-work balance. Maintaining boundaries is crucial, including a start/stop schedule – when you are not working, make sure your laptop and phone are off or out of sight. Take frequent breaks with regular social interactions. Get away from the desk and take fresh air to break the cycle of feeling exhausted and unmotivated.

Most importantly, don’t bottle things up and make sure to seek help if you’re struggling before a crisis has a chance to get established. Looking after all aspects of health and wellbeing, such as physical health, will protect your mental health too.

Try to take a different perspective on home working to turn what you might feel is a negative into a positive – think about the increased control, autonomy and flexibility you have with your hours of work.

Five elements of resilience

• Being positive – see it as an opportunity for change
• Staying focused – identify what is important for you
• Be flexible – take a break or switch activities if you are flagging
• Be organised – establish a daily schedule
• Be proactive – pre-empt challenges if you can

Coping strategies include:

• Physical – stretches, exercise to release mental stress and tension
• Social – maintain social networks and communications
• Mindset – positive outlook, emotional and attentional control

In summary: Stay in touch, look after mind and body, cultivate resilience

How to stay active

General fitness protects against diabetes, cardiovascular issues, dementia, cancer and many other conditions. Government guidelines are to break up long seated periods and to take 150 minutes of moderate exercise or 75 minutes of vigorous exercise.

As life gets busier and busier again, you will probably need to be efficient with your time. Give yourself simple rewards or try something new to stay motivated. Use technology, like SMART watches to track your progress and commit in advance to exercise rather than waiting for the mood to strike. Fix a time to exercise and set achievable goals and you will be more likely to stick to them. I find that the time when I least feel like exercising, when I’m sad or self critical, is when I am most likely to get a boost from it.

There are 3 aspects to fitness, which include cardio, resistance and flexibility and your exercise plan should cover each one.

While working at your desk, set an alarm to move and vary position frequently. Take micro breaks and make sure that the environment is suited to the task you’re doing.

In summary: Optimise your time, utilise what you have, move more – something is better than nothing!

Eating well

Inadequate nourishment can reduce your efficiency by 20%, can affect your sleep quality, weight management, mood and lead to lifestyle diseases, such as diabetes.

A healthy diet is one that achieves an energy balance (between what you eat and what you burn up), is nutritionally dense and sustainable without gaining or losing weight. (Very much easier said than done when you spend your working day literally steps from the fridge!)

Try to eat a variety of fruit, vegetables and wholegrains, while limiting saturated fats, sugary foods and salt. Food is not just energy, it communicates with your body and makes you feel well or indeed, ill. 

Plan the meals for the week in advance (preferably not when you are hungry), make a list and include snacks. You’ll eat what you have in the fridge! Avoid highly processed items, which are high in calories and low on satisfaction. Be resourceful with recipes and try something different. I’ve tried getting a veg box delivered to coax me away from the usual endless carrots and spuds. Be mindful of what you are eating and make a meal out of meal times. The days of hastily stuffing down a sandwich at your desk in between meetings should be over (for now at least).

Don’t forget that water and milk are both good for hydration but milk feeds into the system more slowly and has other beneficial nutrients. Dehydration of as little as 2% of body weight can influence mood, lead to greater feelings of fatigue and reduced levels of alertness. Surprisingly, 20% of our fluids come from food anyway.

Aim to drink more, perhaps using fruit slices for flavour without adding sugars. Alcohol and strong caffeine work against the body, so keep to a minimum. You should increase the quantity of fluids when exercising but be careful not to overdo it.

In summary: Use variety, establish routine, be resourceful

Good luck, and whether you are still working from home or returning to the office, keep a close eye on your physical, mental and social wellbeing – this is still the long haul for most of us.

Positive Coping in a COVID World

As it is Mental Health Awareness Week (18 – 24 May), there have been a slew of well-being focused events at work lately. AXA Health Care spoke to us about ‘positive coping’. Those displaying positivity seek out pleasurable and meaningful activities during changing and challenging times. The great thing about positivity is that it can be shared with teams and family.

Any situation leads to thoughts, emotions, behaviours and physical sensations and these will be unique to you, even if the situation is the same for all.

AXA highlighted “5 Ways to Wellbeing” – connect, give, keep learning, take notice, be active. There are plenty of obstacles to wellbeing that can get in your way, including your thoughts, lack of time, less autonomy, varying emotions, other responsibilities such as home schooling and priority management.

The reactions to change and adversity that people experience are many and varied, including fear, shame, feeling drained, anger, anxiety, a racing heart, catastrophizing and uncertainty. It’s important not to judge yourself negatively on your reactions based on the reactions of others; conversely, don’t judge others based on your own reactions.

Traffic light behaviours and self protection

Positive coping strategies typically involve taking a conscious and direct approach to problems. You can use a traffic lights technique to help monitor your reactions. Write down and then look out for behaviours that are positive (green), warning signs (amber) or unhelpful (red) for you. How do you know when you are starting to move into the red zone?

Make sure you protect yourself – stay informed but don’t delve too deeply into areas that make you anxious. For me this means staying off Twitter and being judicious with watching news updates. Write down your core values, the ways of being you hold most important such as accountability, uniqueness, autonomy, reliability. Ask yourself how you can preserve these during challenging times. Focus on your strengths, like creativity, patience and kindness, as these will give you purpose and hence lead to positivity.

Another trick is to identify the resources you have used in the past to overcome challenges. You could use a time line tool to rediscover these. When have you encountered difficulties in the past, what skills did you learn from the experience and what does this say about you? Examples could include changing job, moving house, as well as more recent shifts such as switching to home working or trying to home school. One skill we are all honing at the moment is the ability to multi-task!

What you do in challenging times is important, so identify those small (or not so small) achievements each day e.g. reading a book. You can separate these out into the routine e.g. cooking, the necessary e.g. paying bills, and the more pleasurable e.g. socialising, hobbies, gardening. Try to do some of all these each day if you can.

Positive coping strategies

AXA recommended a few positive coping strategies to choose from:

Self management using the 6Ps – Plan; Perfectionist e.g. be flexible and realistic; Pass it on e.g. can someone else do it, Put things off e.g. does it have to be done now; Proactive e.g. plan ahead; Prioritise – is it A (essential), B (better done today), C (could do it today), D (don’t do today)

Self compassion – how would you treat a friend in this situation? Try to forgive your mistakes, write a positive letter to yourself, try out positive self-talk and tell yourself what you love about yourself.

Solution finder tool – identify the problem, write down all your ideas for solving it, list the pros and cons, choose one, plan it, implement it, review it, keep going or adjust

Immerse yourself in nature e.g. parks, gardens, pets

Diary writing to download events and process feelings, such as gratitude journaling, positive data journaling, positive future writing

Get creative to lose yourself in an activity and get into a ‘flow’ state e.g. arts and crafts, dancing, poetry, playing music

Just breathe – use breathing exercises to get into the ‘rest, digest, restore and repair’ zone. Try this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-6jDjBSGRVY

Progressive muscular relaxation – tense hands, arms etc one by one then relax

Humour – share jokes, movies, clips, memes

Create a happy box – this should engage your senses: sound e.g. music; touch e.g. fabric; sight e.g. photos, books; taste e.g. foods; smell e.g. candles, handcream. Also add the contact details for a person or organisation you can reach out to if these don’t restore you.

Ways to achieve a positive or balanced mindset

Catch the catastrophes – we are drawn to catastrophizing and worst case scenarios, when even the unlikely scenarios can start to feel inevitable. Write down…

• What is the worst possible outcome? (But don’t get too hung up on those!)
• What is the best possible outcome?
• What is most likely outcome e.g. what is the evidence for that?
• Plan for the most likely outcome

Helicopter view – take a step back from your opinion, is there another way to look at something which is not so up close and personal?

Worry tree – if this is not something you can control, let worry go e.g. write it down on paper and throw it away. Have a ‘worry time’ at a specific time of day when you will worry about things, then park them until the next worry time.

Tips for tolerating uncertainty:

• acknowledge worries;
• pause and try not to react;
• pull back;
• let go i.e. a thought or feeling is not a fact, imagine it floating away in a balloon
• explore and remember that right now all is well, focus on your 5 senses to bring you back to the here and now

Remember to help others, if you can- communicate regularly, show empathy, reassure and most importantly ask for help when you need it.

The Good Mood Café with Jenny Swain

I also attended a ‘Good Mood Café’ by Jenny Swain  aimed at parents and carers. She asked us to associate a good mood with a sound, like bird song, waves or for a parent, the blessed silence of contented / sleeping children!

In a household, even at the best of times we will be juggling lots of different moods in family members and these tend to feed off each other. If we focus on how to lift our own mood first, then we can see the domino effect on others around us, akin to putting on our own oxygen mask first.

Mental Health is a continuum, from optimum mental wellbeing to poor mental wellbeing. This is just as true for those with no diagnosable mental health conditions as well as people with serious diagnosable mental health issues. It is very possible for us all to move between the quadrants, day-by-day or over weeks, months or years. Which quadrant do you feel that you are in at the moment?

Jenny also recommends self compassion. To counteract depression and self hatred, practice self care.

• Tell yourself that the task was very hard and lack of success is not total failure.
• Not everything is our fault. Most people have normal, average lives and very few beat the odds to show ‘brilliance’ – don’t compare yourself unfavourably.
• Luck is involved in most success and failure, and this is not in your control.
• Remind yourself you are not entirely to blame for everything that happens in your life, or indeed in the lives of your family.
• You are not only your achievements – rehearse the voices of those who have been kind to you, especially when you were young
• This too shall pass – reduce expectations to zero in a crisis and take some rest

The School of Life has a great video on self care: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-kfUE41-JFw

Rumination or over focus on what causes us distress is our enemy, so try to get out of internal loops of negative thinking – “I can’t cope, why can’t I cope, I should be able to cope” and so on. Switch focus to something external to yourself. For example, what were you doing the last time you were outside, walking, relaxing or gardening? Freeze frame that moment and focus on your 5 senses at that point. Don’t forget that physical movements generate endorphins, so get your exercise!

Jenny left us with some challenges – you might want to try a few of these when you have a few moments.

Challenges for achieving a good mood

• List 5 things you notice each day that make you feel happy
• Identify your 5 favourite tastes or flavours and the associations that go with it e.g. a holiday food
• Think about a favourite piece or style of music, then pinch your thumb and forefinger together to ‘anchor’ that good mood feeling in your mind
• Create a good mood play list of your favourite tunes
• Try a breathing exercise to promote calm e.g. “How to avoid becoming a lizard“

What can you do for 3 minutes or even 30 seconds a day to lift your mood?

Places to go for help

Mental health at work.org.uk: https://www.mentalhealthatwork.org.uk/
MIND: https://www.mind.org.uk/
WHO: https://www.who.int/mental_health/en/
NHS Choices: https://www.nhs.uk/oneyou/every-mind-matters/
CPSL Mind Qwell: www.cpslmind.org.uk/qwell
Learn.4mentalhealth: www.learn.4mentalhealth.com
Anxiety UK: www.anxietyuk.org.uk
Young Minds: www.youngminds.org.uk

Book review: “Quiet” by Susan Cain

This week I have been trying to make inroads into my ever-growing pile of books on equality and diversity. Motivationally speaking, it helps that reading lends itself much better to soaking up the spring sunshine than answering emails does.

A long standing tenant of my shelf has been ‘Quiet’ by Susan Cain. Actually, I ‘borrowed’ it from my husband’s shelf but I’ve had my eye on it for ages! The subtitle is ‘The power of introverts in a world that can’t stop talking’, which drew me in immediately as a self-identified introvert.

What is an introvert or extrovert?

The book takes a close, well-researched look at what defines an introvert or an extrovert, and examines the ‘Extrovert Ideal’ – the rise of the outgoing, energetic personality type as the ‘preferred’ way to live and work. Cain identifies that the introvert – extrovert scale is one of the few that most psychological models of personality agree on. The term ‘introvert’ can include a constellation of attributes: reflective, cerebral, bookish, unassuming, sensitive, thoughtful, serious, contemplative, subtle, gentle, calm, modest, solitude-seeking, inward-facing, shy, risk-averse, thin-skinned. Conversely, ‘extrovert’ can include: ebullient, expansive, sociable, gregarious, excitable, dominant, assertive, active, risk-taking, thick-skinned, outward-facing, bold, light-hearted, happy in the spotlight. Being identified as an introvert often has negative connotations, while extrovert is often seen positively, especially at school, college or work.

The ‘introvert-extrovert’ scale is of course not the only story, and people may not be exclusively at one end or the other, or may behave differently in different circumstances. Personally, I’m fine giving a talk to an audience, and in fact relish the opportunity, but find making small talk at parties with strangers frustratingly challenging. The ‘introvert-extrovert’ spectrum can also be coupled with other scales such as ‘openness to experience’, ‘conscientiousness’ and ‘neuroticism’ for a more nuanced picture.

As children, and often into adulthood, introverts are often (but not always) ‘high reactors’ to stimulating environments and seek out quiet spaces. Conversely, extroverts are often (but not always) ‘low reactors’ to stimulating environments and seek out ever more stimulation.

Relationships, socialising and personal characteristics – gregariousness is optional!

Human relationships make both introverts and extroverts happy but “gregariousness is optional” as Cain puts it. She recommends that introverts think of quality over quantity when it comes to friendship. For introvert-extrovert couples, it’s important to respect your loved one’s need for solitude (if they are an introvert) or socialising (if an extrovert) and come to a compromise to achieve balance.

When you encounter an issue, extroverts are apparently less upset than introverts if someone is angry or aggressive about it – extroverts see this as confirmation that the person is passionate about their cause, but an introvert will be put off by it.

So how do we spot an introvert or an extrovert among our friends, family and colleagues? It may not be that easy. Some people act like extroverts but behind the scenes, it costs them energy, authenticity and even physical or mental health to suppress their true, introvert selves. If someone seems aloof and withdrawn, they may still be keen to be social underneath, but in their own way.

Introverts tend to dislike large crowds and having multiple shallow, small-talk style interactions. They prefer conversations with smaller groups at a deeper level to discuss issues, feelings, thoughts and ideas. At a party, you will probably find them in the kitchen, in deep discussion with one or two others over the chips and dips, rather than schmoozing their way across the dance floor. For good mental health, introverts should carve out restorative niches to recharge after events that drain their energy. In contrast, extroverts should seek out stimulating spaces that energise them after solitary activities (important to know in our lockdown times).

Work, careers and advice for managers – the power of quiet

The key to success at work should be to play to your strengths. However, introverts may literally struggle to make themselves heard over louder, more outgoing colleagues – back to the ‘extrovert ideal’ again. Managers should remember that one third to one half of their staff are natural introverts, although they may not appear that way due to having developed extrovert work personas.

Ideally, introverts should use their powers of persistence, concentration, insight and sensitivity to focus on work that they enjoy and find meaningful. It’s especially important for introverts to pursue the jobs, pastimes and activities that they actually enjoy, rather than the ones they think they should prefer. I spent years early in my career trying to be successful in environments that valued vocal, outgoing, sociable personalities over quieter and more introspective ones (me). Eventually, I realised that I didn’t actually have to change myself to match my job – I could change the job to suit my personality better.

Of course, introverts can often behave in highly extrovert ways for causes they passionately believe in – they ‘lose themselves’ in the moment, carried away by their enthusiasm. Cain recommends finding training to help give you confidence in areas that you find daunting, such as networking and public speaking, to develop an extrovert persona for when you need it. She suggests making a deal with yourself on how many networking, social or other draining events you will attend before you allow yourself time out to restore. I do this all the time at conferences!

In the office (if you can remember what it is like to spend lots of time in one of those since COVID-19 reared its head), introverts do not appreciate open plan spaces or big social work dos. They find open plan offices over-stimulating and draining and may underperform in them if they don’t have quiet places to retreat to. It’s worth bearing in mind that extroverts find single offices and lots of solo working under-stimulating and may underperform in that environment too. However, introverts will under-perform more in noisy environments than extroverts do in quiet environments. Managers should remember that stimulating, communal spaces do more damage to introverts than quiet ones do to extroverts.

Cain showed that introverts slow down their decision-making in high risk situations; extroverts tend to speed up, which may compound mistakes in areas such as finance or banking. Introverts will think deeply, strategise, solve complex problems and foresee problems or risks ahead of time but can struggle to make their opinions heard over more extroverted colleagues. Managers should also beware of ‘Group Think’, when groups may align to the opinions of the more frequent or early speakers, who may not offer the best solutions. Ensure everyone solves problems individually first before getting together to discuss them and make sure the quieter, more reflective staff are heard without criticism or impatience.

Don’t equate eloquence and verbosity with intellect – there is no association between extroversion and having the best ideas!

Interestingly, research shows that proactive teams will perform better under introvert leaders, perhaps because these leaders are more inclined to listen to other people’s ideas and are less inclined to impose their own. However, passive teams may perform better under extrovert or charismatic leaders as they provide clarity on what is needed.

Children and education – the difficult early years

For those with introvert children, you may be frustrated that they don’t seem to enjoy the activities you think they should – birthday parties, sleepovers, team sports or family gatherings. You might feel that they are ‘missing out’ on the fun things in life and be keen to encourage them to fit in with their peers. Bear in mind that for some children these occasions can be painfully daunting and even damaging to their self-esteem in the long term. Of course, they don’t have to miss out forever. You can encourage introvert children to get used to new situations and people gradually in ways that make them comfortable – ideally start as young as possible. Encourage introvert children to socialise with a few close friends at first, rather than large crowds and always ask them before you set up social occasions or let them leave a bit early.

Try not to force it or you may cause a lifelong aversion or trample on the early seeds of confidence!

Parents should role model behaviours and let children know about similar struggles they may have had at school themselves. I often tell my younger son how shy I was at school but describe how much easier things got as I grew up (very nearly true!). Most of all, let introvert children be themselves and take pride in their originality, thoughtfulness and focus. Don’t make them be what you think they should be, or try to turn them into you.

At school, teachers should not forget to draw out their quieter students. Working in small groups rather than large ones will get the best out of them, especially if they are given a specific role such as note taker or rapporteur.

In particular, introverts may struggle at school as teenagers, when their talents for thinking deeply and developing ideas are not appreciated compared to the ability to easily vocalise and socialise. As a parent, it’s tough to watch them struggle through these difficult years, but comfort yourself with the thought that they are likely to be more successful later in life, when their ability to focus on long term goals and deal with delayed gratification will pay off.