Dealing with work stress (in a pandemic)
High-strung Heroes! Graham here.
A friend of mine said something to me recently that struck a chord.
‘I had all these plans for this year, which are now totally on hold. It’s like, there’s no sense of progress anymore.’
Yep.
And yet, somehow, there’s still all this shit to do?
Whether your job has become even more stressful than usual, or you’re dealing with a radically different home life, or you’ve lost work and you’re now scrambling for what to do next... There’s all this important stuff that needs to be done, and yet somehow, the feeling that it’s leading nowhere in particular, for the foreseeable future.
It’s a recipe for feeling stressed out, pretty much all the time.
So what can you do with that right now?
It’s all just mush
It starts at the micro-level. Waking up each day to the same news story, for one thing.
If you’re working from home, there’s often no clear definition between ‘work’ and ‘not-work’. And even if you are heading into a physical workplace, there aren’t the same things to break up your week, the social events that help a weekend feel like a weekend.
As another friend of mine put it (in the episode of All In The Mind I made recently), ‘right now it’s all just mush.’
For me, it’s a feeling that I’m never fully awake, that my days and weeks never quite get properly started. Time slipping away (wait, it’s August already?) yet somehow going nowhere.
Tense times
The past week or so, I’ve begun to notice just how all this is sitting in my body.
I am, by nature, a tense human. (What?? No seriously.)
Lately this tension has been off the charts. I notice my posture as I type these words - hunched forward like I’m bracing for impact in a high-speed crash.
It’s as if I’m holding on for dear life, but there’s nothing to hold on to. So my body settles for holding itself. A fist clenched tightly around nothing.
Bodie gets it.
But it’s not completely out of my control
Often, my go-to strategy with tense, anxious feelings is acceptance.
‘This is how I’m feeling. It’s uncomfortable, but it’s not a problem. It’s just, what’s happening.’
But I realised this week, it’s not completely out of my control, all this tension.
In fact, I’ve been feeding it, hour-by-hour.
Every time I check the news, knowing it will only make me feel more anxious.
Every time I check my Twitter feed.
And a big one I only just put my finger on - every time I check my work email or some other work-related thing late into the evening, or first-thing before I get out of bed.
So often, it all comes back to work
I’ve written before about the other dreaded P word - ‘productivity’ - and how the pandemic offers a new challenge for sensitive cats.
So often, we define our embattled sense of self-worth through our work, a connection which is fraught at the best of times. Then a pandemic comes along and makes it even harder to focus and get things done (if we’re lucky enough to even still have work at all). All of which means, for many of us, it’s even harder to feel like a viable human.
So what do we do?
Work harder! Maybe that will solve the problem...?
'Extra' stress
Right now I'm working on a particularly delicate and time-sensitive project for Big Feels, that falls almost completely on me. I’ve been super stressed about it. But I’ve realised something.
A good chunk of the stress of this project is not baked into the pie. It’s 'extra' stress I’m piling on myself. It’s the endless checking that every little thing is progressing as it’s supposed to. It’s the busywork.
It’s not just the work I'm doing outside of work hours either, often it’s the little habits built into my workday that pile up the stress.
Whenever I have a moment to catch my breath, I’ll use it to log into our various project platforms, to see what minute fraction of a percentage our engagement stats have shifted by in the past hour (instead of just waiting and reviewing all at once at the end of the day, or the end of the week). I tell myself this hyper-keyed-in approach is somehow useful, when in fact it’s just exhausting.
‘Just one more thing’
Or a big one for me: always looking for ‘one more thing’. I’ll get something big done, say, writing up the first draft of this newsletter. I’ll feel it’s time for a break, but instead of closing the laptop I’ll say ‘just one more thing’ - and check my email, or similar.
It’s an unconscious habit by this point. I’ll go looking for more stress.
I’ll still eventually take that break, but it means that instead of feeling the reward of a task completed (newsletter written, close the laptop) I end on a more sour, stressy note. Oh look at all those unread emails. CLOSE THE LAPTOP, QUICK!
It’s as if on some level I’ve decided that, to be ‘good’ at my job, I must be stressed out of my skull. Like ‘extreme stress’ is one of my KPIs, and I have to get my numbers up.
Finally, a chance to change this script
This is not a new problem.
As someone who’s worked from home for years, I’ve tried and failed in the past to institute some clearer sense of boundary between work and not-work, to avoid these bursts of ‘extra stress’ that ultimately don’t achieve anything.
But I’m realising that, in the endless mush of the pandemic, there’s actually a new impetus to finally get this right.
This is what I’ve been telling myself this past week. Every time I check my email late at night (or whatever other busywork I find myself compulsively drawn to) I’m stirring up the mush. I am making my little patch of this mushy pandemic world even mushier.
Stirring up the mush like this only makes me more tense and overwhelmed.
If I’m going to get through the next few months of this, I need to create some clearer boundaries.
My new rules for working at home
So here are my new rules for working at home, designed specifically to stop me making an already difficult project infinitely more stressful.
(I think of them like little lines of string staked in a mushy garden bed. They might not keep the mush itself apart, but they help me stop clomping all over the place and making the whole thing even more of a mess.)
Before I do any of the usual ‘busywork’ - checking emails outside work hours and the like - I ask myself the following two questions, in this order.
Does this have to happen?
If it does have to happen, is now the right time to do it?
#1: Does this have to happen?
I was surprised at how often the answer to this question is, in fact, ‘no’. Do I ever need to check my email at 10pm? Turns out, I don’t.
If it doesn’t have to happen, I don’t do it.
On those inevitable occasions I can’t help myself, if the urge is too great or I find I’ve logged onto my work email at 10pm on autopilot, I ask myself the question again. In the most neutral and judgement-free tone I can muster.
'Ahem. Does this have to happen?'
It often helps me put the phone down, or close the laptop, right there and then.
#2: If it does have to happen... is now the right time to do it?
Sometimes things just have to happen and they have to happen right now. But for many tasks the timeframe is at least a little bit flexible.
I’ve noticed that throughout my day, there are times when I am more able to bring a sense of relative calm to the work I’m doing, and there are other times where that relaxed, calm approach just seems completely out of reach.
So this question - ‘is now the right time to do this task?’ - it’s not just asking, ‘does the task need to be done right now?’ It’s an inquiry into your own state of mind at this moment.
‘If this task does need doing, am I able to do it right now in a way that feels at least a little bit calm and detached from the outcome?’
Your body will tell you
The easy part is, I know immediately what the answer is. If the answer is ‘HELL NO I MUST GET THIS EXACTLY RIGHT AND IT MUST HAPPEN NOW’, my body will tell me that, in no uncertain terms. It will tense up, right back into bracing-for-impact mode.
This is my clue to put this task off, wherever possible. Even if it’s just for five minutes. To make a cup of tea, to take a stroll around the block. Or to schedule the task for a specific time later in the day.
Teaching your body a new pattern
Just using these two key questions - does it have to be done? If so, is now the right time to do it? - has been surprisingly useful this past week. It’s given me some much needed breathing room around all the tasks on my to-do list.
I’ve been thinking of these two questions as a kind of ‘triage’ for my work tasks, helping me determine what needs to happen and when. Except, unlike a lot of productivity hacks, the idea here isn’t to make sure I get the right things done at the right time.
(My natural anxiety and perfectionism take care of that well enough thankyou.)
Instead, the aim of this triage is to protect me from unnecessary stress. To help me find a clearer set of boundaries around work and not-work. To find some ground to stand on in the mush.
I’m teaching my body that it doesn’t have to be stressed out in order to get things done. I’m teaching it that, often, the way to release that stressy, tense feeling is not by leaning into it and doubling down, but by stepping back, even for a moment or two, to reset.
So far it’s working better than I’d hoped.
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