Working a lot is one thing. But when work invades your entire mental space, to the point of waking up at night to write down ideas for presentations or develop the text of an email, it is time to act, explains it Wall Street Journal, who urges his readers to “stop being obsessed with work all the time”. The proliferation of professional communication tools (e-mails, video conferences, internal messaging) makes this detachment difficult because “we mentally prepare ourselves for notifications of all kinds, even when they don’t arrive.” And some people identify so much with their work that they no longer differentiate between personal and professional life.
All of this comes at a cost, points out Verena C. Haun, a professor at Julius Maximilian University in Würzburg, Germany, where she studies psychological detachment from work. Deleterious effects on sleep (and therefore, ironically, on productivity at work), bad mood, mental health problems… Here are some of the consequences of a lack of detachment.
Guy Winch is a psychologist and dedicated a TED talk on this subject. He offers some ideas for getting your life back in hand:
- Estimate the time spent thinking about work outside the office. “For many patients [de Guy Winch]this represents ten to twenty hours per week”, underlines the American daily.
- Occupy your brain with complex tasks – “something more complex than
Netflix or a walk”. Memory games that challenge your brain are recommended. You can also engage in physical activity.
If all that doesn’t work, these ruminations might as well be helpful. You can then ask yourself how to concretely solve the problems that obsess you: are they real? would it be enough to delegate? Or see the bright side of things. Or, even if it means constantly thinking about work, think about changing jobs.
2023-10-20 08:29:20
#Psychology #obsessed #work
