How To Work From Home & Not Lose Your Mind
I quit my last job during the pandemic. The owner had our teams coming into the office during the height of COVID in shifts. We were an agency, and the one thing I’m grateful for is that no one lost their jobs. But the lack of concern and care for overall safety and health rubbed me the wrong away, among a million other things in that company, and so I began searching for another job.
I’d always wanted remote work. Anyone who has taken a Tuesday off work to run errands will know what I mean – there’s something magical about not being in an office, about being able to snack when and how you want, about being able to finish your dishes from the night before during your lunch break. Or even taking an hour to sit on the couch to finish that show you’ve been binging all weekend. Just me?
I went through interview after interview. It took me longer than I’d planned and wanted, but I finally found a job that was perfect for me. Remote, flexible hours, unlimited PTO, an amazing and understanding boss, autonomous tasks and projects. And for the first year of my dream job I felt: terrified. I’m what I believe to be an anxious attached employee. Let’s break down what anxious-attachment is.
“The first attachment we have as children, sets the foundation for our adult relationships. Many of us grew up with parents who had attachment wounding of their own. This can cause anxious attachment. It looks like obsessive focus on our partners, fear based thoughts of being abandoned, or codependency behavior. Any time we become clingy, what we are really experiencing is our attachment wounding coming up. Because we don’t know how to meet our own needs and don’t trust ourselves to get through difficult emotions, we externalize— we look to someone else to meet all of our needs. Our job is to identity, learn our own needs, then to practice meeting them. To practice and hold boundaries. To begin to reflect and connect to our inner emotional world— to become vulnerable.”
I’ve been reading, studying, listening, and trying to understand my childhood wounds for the last few years. My personal attachment style tends to track more down the middle: both anxious and avoidant attachment. Professionally, I have deep wounds that have pushed me towards anxious attachment. I have a lot of fear around work and finances and am actively in therapy for it, but what I’ve realized is that my anxious attachment style at work tends to lead me towards working longer hours, taking on more work than I necessarily need to, and always being “online”. So what does all of this look like in practice?
For those with secure attachment styles, it probably looks like logging on at a reasonable hour, taking a relaxing walk around lunch time, and then logging off before the sun disappears. You probably don’t check your emails after you’ve shut your computer, you rarely think about work outside of work, and, on the occasional times you do, you don’t get overwhelmed by the messages. For anxious attachers, it looks like fire. FIRE EVERYWHERE. Fire always. Running around, never catching a break, checking your Slack messages at 4AM when you wake up in a panic because you’re really only ever on the verge of sleep. You make mistakes because you’re rushing to get things done. Perhaps it’s not this detrimental for you, but, for me, this was how I lived the last two years of my life never knowing how much I was ruining the healthy parts of my brain. Basically, the job I’d dreamed of since I graduated college became my prison. No, I didn’t go run errands in the middle of the day. No, I didn’t sit on my couch to finish an episode of a show I was binging. No, I didn’t take an hour to read for lunch. I didn’t enjoy any of the perks I thought I would with a flex schedule. I sat at my computer for 10-12 hours a day, never moving, and never knowing the science behind a blood clot.
“Overworking isn’t just bad for our health,” says Rebecca Seal, author of Solo: How to Work ALONE (and Not Lose Your Mind). “Overwork can contribute to something behavioral scientist call tunneling. Convinced that time is scare, but that work is never-ending, we feel panicky, hectic, and frantic.”
What’s worse, Rebecca goes on to discuss, is that having a tunneling mental state uses up so much of our mental bandwidth that we lose a measurable 13 or 14 IQ points when we are in this state (Mullainathan and Shafir, Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much). If you’re reading this like: “Oh shit, this is me and I’m going to die before I’m 40 from an ulcer if I don’t get my shit together” then that’s OK. We are in the same boat, and for the last three months I’ve been working towards figuring out how to not only be empathetic towards myself but to also help to relieve some of the burden I feel from overworking.
Turn off the notifications: When my boss first told me she’d paused her Slack notifications I felt sick. I didn’t think I was strong enough to have those boundaries. I started with turning my phone on silent, something I’m only now realizing a majority of people do. And then, one day, I did it: I paused my Slack notifications. And no one died. No one died if I didn’t answer a message at 9PM. No one died if I didn’t see a message until the next morning. No one got fired. No one called me lazy. If anything, I feel most people are beginning to respect my time. Did you know, when you get interrupted it can take nearly 18 minutes to get back into a flow state? How many times are we interrupted by our phones lighting up. Stop taking minutes away from your life: turn off your notifications.
Challenge Your Mind: I watch Netflix, but I have boundaries with how much time I spend in front of the TV. I listen to my body, and, for the most part, I usually need to watch a movie or show at least once a week but other than that I spend my time after work now reading. I am a ferocious reader, I find that when I read I feel more elated and awake and excited about life. You don’t have to choose reading, but Rebecca says to choose something that awakens your brain after work. Something completely separate from what you just spent all day doing. Do a crossword, write an essay, read a book, read an essay, get a word search, draw. Just do something that helps your brain heal itself after a day starting blankly at a spreadsheet or laptop.
Turn Off Your Lights: I started turning off my office lamp when I decide to end the day, and it’s a routine that serves as a mini-cue to end the day. The moment the light is off, I don’t go back in. I don’t jump on my laptop to answer a Slack or email. I am done for the day.
Take a True Lunch Break: For two years I ate my lunch at my desk. It was so much easier to grab leftovers or throw something together quickly and run back upstairs. I was needed! But what about me? I needed me, and I wasn’t there for myself. My clients’ needs mattered more than my own. But in 2022, I vowed to not eat lunch at my desk. And I haven’t. I’m halfway through the year, nearly, and I have not run back upstairs during what I deem to be a lunch break. Perhaps I eat my food faster than I should, but a majority of the time I sit with my fiancé, or I eat with my dog sitting next to me, or I put together a buddha bowl and turn on Bridgerton for an hour and keep my phone away from my hands. An hour at home feels like a lifetime; I never knew how badly I needed that lifetime back in my life until I tasted it.
Movement: Yoga was something I’ve tried on and off for years but finally found a studio and flow the worked for me. It’s a way for me to slow down after work or before starting a new work-week. It’s a way for me to stretch my body after sitting down all day. It’s a way for me to forget the tasks I didn’t get a chance to finish, and to remind me that nothing is on fire.
Stepping Away Every 90 Minutes: This is one I haven’t perfected, but after reading Solo I’m working towards making this a habit. Technically our brain can only focus for 90 to 120 minutes at a time – it’s not overly complicated, but the tunneling that Rebecca talks about in her book is one of the reasons it’s so hard to step away. Once you realize the thoughts circling in your head like, “What is someone pings me and I’m away” or “What if they think I’m not working because I’m not around” are just thoughts, that they have no merit, it’ll be easier to step away every hour or so to take a walk, pet your dog, stare out the window, anything but starting at your screen for another 90 minutes straight.
