5 Ways to Support Your Mental Health at Work

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Microfinance Jobs
Advice Apr 1, 2022 0

Taking time out of your busy schedule to take care of yourself is not selfish. Self-care actually proves to be beneficial for you AND the people you surround yourself with; including your workspace.

Keeping that in mind, MicrofinanceJobs.net has decided to list out five ways that can help you support your mental health at work. Read on to know more about the same!

Let’s start.

Notice the Signs

The foremost step in supporting one’s mental health is identifying and addressing it. Your mental health is intricately linked to your surroundings. If there’s added tension or conflict related to your personal life, it’s bound to impact your work life. Separating one’s personal from professional is easier said than done. Similarly, there might be passive instances at work that might be contributing to one’s poor mental health without them realising or identifying it. When you don’t know about it, you wouldn’t know how to act or how to work on improving it. To take out time from your professional life to identify signs such as excessive tiredness, moodiness, frustration, and anxiety, can be a preliminary way of providing yourself the space to get acquainted with your own mental health.

Make sure to check-in with yourself. Though mental health problems and their symptoms easily vary from person to person, noticing they exist is crucially important. The lack of awareness and knowledge of mental health itself becomes a big roadblock in supporting mental health at work. Familiarise yourself to your own mental health, notice the signs at work (and subsequently, at home) but do not self-diagnose. If you happen to have underlying problems associated with mental health, it’s always better to receive an official diagnosis from a medical professional, where they direct you to further ways to support it at work. But also, addressing the subject-at-hand, and not letting it worsen in a state of ignorance, is the initial medium to get you to further steps of self-care and support.

Reach out for Help/Communicate your feelings

It can be overwhelming to try to be productive at all times. We can’t be at our best 24/7, but we feel like we should be. It’s easy to forget about our feelings when we are focused on only one task during the whole day: to work. Often people purposely overwork themselves to try and forget about the issues or problems they are actually facing, burying their feelings and mental health needs deeper and deeper. As one can rightly guess, this isn’t a sign of a healthy lifestyle. To not make matters worse, we need to start considering our mind and body’s immediate needs. Avoiding the same only feels like an escape in the short-run; as it can easily add on to the pile of problems we are facing in the long run. It’s like a ticking bomb.

To avoid worse circumstances, we need to look after ourselves. And to do that, we need to start opening up and talking about it. People cannot realise what you’re going through until and unless you talk to them about it, making sure they heard you. Speak up about the problems you are facing at the workplace, and how it’s affecting your mental health. If you can’t find someone to talk to, and think a professional might help, reach out to a therapist. Mental Therapy is no different than Physical Therapy.

Just how common is going to the gym? Exactly. The same applies to therapy. Seek help to help yourself. Don’t give up on your progress.

Use your earned leaves

Do you ever think to yourself, “I don’t have to take these leaves, I can’t miss work. Maybe I will encash them later”? It’s not uncommon for employees in organisations to be afraid of taking leaves even when they need it. They want to come across as professional, as competitive, and hardworking. But knowing a human person’s capability to work productively and addressing and respecting it is a more professional approach to work and the organisation than you might think.

Company policies are curated to provide you a set of monthly or annual earned/sick leaves that can help you to take a break from the fast-paced environment of businesses. Though they also help you in emergency situations, it’s not a norm to only utilise them when there’s an urgent need. Regularly using the earned leaves granted to you helps you take regular breaks and intervals that ultimately prove to be beneficial for your mental health. They help you rewind and put your mind and body to a short but effective rest. You can also use these leaves/brakes to practise self-care, introducing the same into your daily lifestyle.

Know what it means to be productive healthily, for personal can easily become professional.

Remember to Eat

A lot of us are either working from home or from the office. Either way, the point of eating at regular intervals, maintaining everyday diets amidst a busy and hectic schedule, still stands. While it’s not always easy to follow the exact schedule of food intake in our work-from-home schedules, it can’t be made into a habit. People often report that they ‘simply forget’ to eat while working. It’s not effective, and it’s definitely not healthy.

It’s also true that experienced professionals working from home have to not only take care of themselves but their entire family, which becomes a hard task to adopt. This surely adds to their struggles, and their ongoing stress, ultimately impacting their mental health. Employers too should take notice of the same and introduce new policies for work-from-home professionals, considering that the living conditions of everyone is not the same. But you too, on an individual level, can make sure that basic requirements of survival such as eating food is not made a second priority.

Sit down to map out your entire day’s schedule, and purposely take out time to make time for yourselves. Make sure to take ample time to eat healthy. It’s also important to note the duration of your lunch breaks. Taking a 5 minutes break to eat is a false mimicry of supporting your mental health. Give yourself the time to eat food calmly and without a rush. Also make sure to eat healthy snacks throughout your working hours. With your brain producing more healthy chemicals via good and healthy intake of food, your productivity automatically starts to improve. Now the amount of work you did in 5 hours with a 10-minute lunch break, you can do that in relatively less hours with 40 mins of lunch break.

Note what suits you, and work on it. And always remember to eat.

Be Active and Exercise

Movement helps your body and mind sustain themselves. It also helps your concentration levels and can help you levitate your mood. Exercise is a great way to do that. To support your mental health at work, you can start movement by exercising at home and continuing to be active at work. How? With ways such as going for a walk in between your breaks at work, doing neck and shoulder movements that help you relax, etc.

If you are working from home and but do not have a desk, it’s better to keep a check on your posture; fixing it every hour and working on loosening your tight muscles in pain. If you’re working from the office, involve yourself in as many office activities as possible. You can recommend your manager to introduce more health-related activities that help in positively impacting your physical and mental health. As we know, mental health and physical health are linked and are dependent on each other. Once you exercise, become active, and engage in movements, you automatically notice your symptoms of frustration and moodiness decreasing.

Moreover, remember to decrease the strain on your eyes from excessive screen-time. To do so, we recommend you to introduce daily techniques to help relax your eyes and your mind. Also, remain hydrated.

Ultimately, make sure to create a time of activity in your daily life; before, during, or after work, that can help you adjust and adapt to your work more effectively.

We, at MicrofinanceJobs.net, hope we were able to sum up some of the ways to support your mental health at work! What do you think? Did you find the aforementioned useful? How do you personally deal with your mental health at work? Are there ways that you would like to add to our list? Share with us in the comments below!

You can also read more about this topic from a guide we referred to: https://www.mentalhealth.org.uk/publications/how-support-mental-health-work

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