She woke up with a sense of dread. The stress of logging in to work was weighing her down. She looked around her. The thought of the EMIs, the school payments for her children forced her to get up and moving. Her heart pounded hard as she visualized her day. Her body contracted with frustration at the thought of the pile of work and acrimonious debates. Joy had been replaced by worry, a nagging tension band of a headache and perpetual creases on her forehead. She headed to the medicine cabinet and popped a couple of pills. Her nerves got calmer and she said to herself, “Move! Let’s get it done and over with!”
Work-related stress ranks high among people and is the biggest cause of absence from work. Almost 15.4 million man-days are lost due to it and inadvertently, affects the productivity of an organization. With mobile phones becoming our mobile office and the recent WFH culture, you are ‘on-call’ and ‘available’ 24×7. There is no possibility of disconnection as the lines between work and leisure are blurring. People are working on 6-7 things with several windows open at the same time. Add to this the ‘house work’ and numerous Zoom meetings. My guess is, it has only gotten worse and calls for immediate redressal.
Work has a way of affecting your mind, body and spirit, leading to stress caused by any or one of the following:
Economic downturn. Unclear expectations. Long hours. Over-demanding supervisors/managers. High pressure working environment. Work overload. Perceptions of an unjust or insensitive environment. Layoffs, mergers or big changes.
Stress is not a bad thing. However, when it gets persistent, excessive and comes in the way of your daily function, it is an alarm bell. It can affect your overall mental health, causing anxiety.
Stress and anxiety highly affect your workplace performance, relationship with fellow workers and superiors as well as productivity. This in turn permeates into your personal life with compromised family relationships, lack of sleep, unhealthy eating habits and dependency on substances and even psychological and physiological disorders.
As an employer, how can you help to avoid such situations and prevent productivity loss?
Train leaders to set expectations by defining the roles and responsibilities of each member.
Inspire them with a purpose not a job. People know what is to be done, the why makes it all the more meaningful.
Align job function with employee capabilities
Provide a career growth plan. In the absence of direction, anxiety and resentment may quell their motivation.
Promote a culture of transparency and communication. With WFH, it’s important that the lines of communication be continuous. Use check-ins, town hall meetings to share information with parity
Create ‘water cooler’ moments to boost positive emotions.
Place a hard stop on work hours – no calls or messages after 8pm and no meetings on weekends unless the earth is collapsing.
Create an environment that respects work-life balance, diarise meetings and seek permission for unexpected calls/meetings, especially in the wake of the pandemic.
As an employee, how can you help to avoid getting stressed?
Stress can never be eliminated, completely however steps can be taken to reduce it as much as possible.
Priorities. You don’t have to undertake 5 things at a time. Select what’s important and urgent. Use the Eisenhower Matrix, it’s a useful time-management tool.
Perfection is a myth so go easy on yourself. Focus on what is within your control.
Acknowledge and celebrate your victories, no matter how small.
Do not take things, personally. In case you feel slighted, discuss issues face-to-face.
Seek feedback. Give feedback. And, be honest and gracious about it.
Leverage the power of hydration. Consume 2-3 liters of water. It’s encourages an alert brain and improves creative thinking. Avoid Caffeine and alcohol.
Mind your posture. Switch to a standing desk and have walking meetings. Move around while making or receiving calls. Clock 10000 steps on your fitness band.
Stop eating your emotions. Stress eating makes you worry more. Change the trigger, consume water instead.
Use the Creative Power of 5 – use 5 mins to draw, listen to a peppy track, watch a cat video, speak to a friend or colleague who is motivating or make tea.
Speak slow and mindfully. Stop any ‘victim’ talk, it adds more fuel to your stress.
Socialize at work. Have lunch, join a fitness class over zoom, share culinary tales or catch up for an informal evening. Make sure to avoid gossiping and bitching.
Turn off all screens at one-hour intervals and walk towards a window and soak in the day.
Sleep well and on time. Use a sleep app to monitor your rest. Take cat naps in between.
Use meditative techniques to calm your mind. Doodle, cook, garden, try origami, dance or read. Watch the needle move on the clock and just breathe in and out. Empty your mind and stay in the moment.
Stand against the wall. Slide down and sit as though you were in a chair. Be in that position for 30secs without looking down. Keep your spine against the wall. Focus on your breath. Breathe in, deeply through your nose, breathe out, through your mouth. Plant your feet on the floor and visualise the stress flowing out of your body. Slide and stand up. Shake your arms and legs. Jump up and down, 3 times and get to work.
This technique allows me to reframe my thoughts and change my state, physiologically as well.
Under normal circumstances, you would be able to see the tell-tale signs of stress. However, with remote working, you are relegated to a small window and most often the window is shut. So, take care of your well-being and those of your co-workers for you spend the most time at work. Be mindful of your triggers and, importantly choose to be around people who lift you up instead of those who kill your vibe. If there’s something that you do that hasn’t been listed, I’d love to hear from you.
It’s you. You’re the one I want. You’re the one I want to come home to after a bad day at work.
You’re the one I want to roll over to inn the middle of the night and wake up next to everyday, for
the rest of my life. You’re the one I want to go on late night runs with for food just because we
wanted to get out of the house. You’re the one I want to take on cute little dates like to a movie,
or to a nice , fancy dinner, or to an early morning breakfast before we both have to go our separate
ways for the day. You’re the one I want to take on cute all day dates to things like aquariums,
and zoos, and amusement parks. You’re the one I want to go on fun, exhilarating adventures with, such
as a day at the lake, or a hike through the woods, or even just a late night walk when everything is
quite. You’re the one I want to stay in with for the night and build a cute little fort while we
watch movies under it and eat our favorite foods. You’re the one I want to make happy for the rest of my life.
You’re the one I want to love, and to hold when times get tough. You’re the one I want to be there
for when everything in your world comes crashing down. All my good days and all my bad days, you’re the one
I want to spend them with. Its you. You’re it. You’re the one. And I swear to you, I have never been so sure about someone or something in my entire life. Its you, and I say this without a single doubt in my mind.
Wednesday evening, sitting in my room while working, with a blink i get a thought of how everything changes from last year . When all the year i expect my sibling to be here with us at home, because sometime i feel alone and emptiness. But when my sister is here with her daughter in this winter vacations, for welcoming new year together. But I’m no longer the same person who love noise and crowd .
Everything is changes as now i prefer to have silence . i love silence more over anything.
From everything that I recall about my life so far, I can say one thing with absolute certainty.
I have been an extremely passionate person.
Passionate about everything. Be it life in general, work, friendships, relationships. Bustling with energy, I have always liked to give my heart, my soul, my mind and my energy completely into things that matter to me.
I take the leap and I go all in like there is no middle spot.
And that always seemed to work for me. I was always on the high wave, getting things done, maintaining the happiest relationships and believing with certainty that I could achieve absolutely anything.
Until, I reached a day when the things that really mattered to me were at a point of collapse and I collapsed along with them.
And my story is not really unique in this sense. my story is just revolving .
Mental fatigue and burnout is almost like the epidemic of the century. Some of the brightest people with immense energy and passion go through this phase of extreme exhaustion which might last for months if not years.
And that’s because there is a bit of a downside of being too passionate. To put it simply, when you go about attaching your happiness, your existence and your life’s meaning too deeply with your work, your relationships or anything else for that matter, you put yourself at risk. And today i completely agree with this thought that im at verge of loosing everything or may be this is my turning point, where anything could happen just in moment , a magic moment. May be i took risk without any security.
And why is that?
Because with attachment comes a very strong urge to control the circumstances.
While you can exercise some amount of control over what happens in your life, that will absolutely never eliminate the possibility of things going haywire or the possibility of your plans and ambitions not quite turning into reality.
You put yourself at risk because you put so much of yourself into something unwilling to believe that there is a tiny chance that it might not quite work out the way you plan.
And I don’t deny that this kind of confidence is necessary. It is probably the only reason behind strong risk-taking capabilities and subsequent achievements.
That’s why the problem hasn’t entirely got to do with being passionate alone. Passion is everything, after all. Defined as ‘a strong and barely controllable desire’, feeling passionate is what makes you feel alive.
The problem turns out to be with delusional thinking.
Remember how people say ‘Love is blind’? What they essentially imply there is that feeling too much passion and attachment towards something can skew our perception of it.
It can make us unwilling to accept the possibility of things going wrong. It can make us unwilling to see the flaws in our plan. It can make us oblivious to the truth that is right in front of us. Be it in our work, in our relationships or anything else in our life that we feel strongly passionate about, we all have a tendency to look at it in a skewed manner.
“Attachment is the great fabricator of illusions; reality can be obtained only by someone who is detached. ”
― Simone Weil
So if the ceiling breaks and things go wrong one after the other, because sometimes they do despite your best efforts, you might find yourself really struggling to cope up. These days im completely busy in something , struggling hard to come out of this situation . I was always so passionate about my work, to much attached but everything turned out different .
But does that mean passion is a bad thing? Should you never give yourself completely into anything? Should you not love unconditionally and whole-heartedly? Should you not embrace life fully with enthusiasm and be ready to take risks?
I don’t think so.
But you should always and always stick to an idea of ‘self’ that is independent of anything else in your life.
“Remain in the world, act in the world, do whatsoever is needful, and yet remain transcendental, aloof, detached, a lotus flower in the pond.”
― Osho, The Secret of Secrets
Is there anything that remains when I strip your life of your work and your deepest relationships for a while? Is there a core within you that is separate, detached and at peace irrespective of how things go in your life?
Or are you constantly on a roller coaster ride based on what happens? Exhilarated because great things are happening at work, miserable because the last batch of orders didn’t get delivered on time and customers left bad reviews. Exhilarated because things are going well in your relationship, miserable because he/she suddenly stopped giving you enough time.
Letting the things that you feel passionate about dictate your mood, your energy levels and your overall enthusiasm towards life is not a very healthy approach as you are relying over something external, something that is not entirely under your control to dictate your life.
The only difference between people who collapse after failure/loss and those who dust themselves off and start again quickly is that the latter know and practice the art of detachment.
What exactly is the art of detachment?
It’s the art of withdrawing desire from lesser things, letting them fall away, so as to harness their power to reach the heights of what a human being can attain.
Oxymoronic though it may sound, it’s said that you can achieve the greatest heights only through detaching yourself from the things that matter to you to a certain extent and by taking a step back.
And it doesn’t mean that you should always feel detached either. It just means that you should be capable of practicing detachment when required. To be attached is to live in the fear that what you want will not materialize and traps you in a continuous state of desire.
In my experience, I have found it useful to practice detachment in following forms —
Detachment from Material Goals
To understand this form of detachment, the best example is the story of Joshua and Ryan, the two people behind the concept The Minimalists. They said, “While approaching age 30, we had achieved everything that was supposed to make us happy: great six-figure jobs, luxury cars, oversized houses, and all the stuff to clutter every corner of our consumer-driven lifestyles.
And yet with all that stuff, we weren’t satisfied with our lives. We weren’t happy. There was a gaping void, and working 70–80 hours a week just to buy more stuff didn’t fill the void: it only brought more debt, stress, anxiety, fear, loneliness, guilt, overwhelm, and depression.”
There are just too many people who are too attached to the things they own and too addicted to buying and hoarding more and more things without asking this one simple question — “Is it important enough?”
Credit : Google Source Help
When you detach yourself from the compulsion of owning things just for the sake of owning them you begin to experience real freedom and joy from things that really matter.
“Detachment is not that you should own nothing, but that nothing should own you.”
Remember, less is more.
Take a step back to understand what things add value to your lives. By clearing the clutter from life’s path, we can all make room for the most important aspects of life: health, relationships, passion, growth, and contribution.
2. Detachment in Relationships
Most people struggle the most with this aspect of detachment and it’s only natural. Most of us misunderstand love to be all about really holding on to the other person, trying to fix them and taking care of them in all ways possible, even if it comes at the cost of neglecting your own well being. It gets even worse when we let our lives revolve around certain relationships.
It might be relationship with your parents, with your spouse, with your best friends or anyone else who has a big influence in your life.
In all relationships, there is a need to practice a certain amount of detachment.
Because if you are not getting same in return , you start feeling exhausted with everything around you.
We might wonder why?
The answers are many. Detachment is needed so that you do not take everything personally because you don’t control their reactions. Detachment is needed so that you don’t seek their validation to the extent that your own opinions start to diminish. Detachment is needed to understand that love is about acceptance and not about control.
It is needed to understand that you alone are the master of your own lives and you need to draw boundaries so that others don’t control you.
Detachment in love is necessary to maintain that optimum amount of distance that is most essential for growth. No lines sum up the thought about loving detachment as these lines from Kahlil Gibran’s poem
“But let there be spaces in your togetherness,
And let the winds of the heavens dance between you.
Love one another, but make not a bond of love:
Let it rather be a moving sea between the shores of your souls.”
3. Detachment from your experiences
Life is meant to be lived and to not to be over-analyzed. Yet, more often than not we find ourselves stuck in our head recounting experiences, mostly unpleasant ones over and over again till they bring us down.
Not only that, we also tend to carry them with us around like a bad weather. They form our prejudices and biases about our view of the world. We tend to over-generalize and assume things when we hold on too tightly to our past experiences.
It’s one thing to take the learnings from an experience and move further in life with new wisdom and it’s totally another thing to carry the bitterness, guilt and regret over the past experiences and letting them taint your present days.
This often happens when we fail to completely accept and let go our bad experiences.
When something bad happens, feel free to feel the pain, grieve and let go. Only through acceptance, you can free yourself from the weight and detach yourself from it.
4. Detachment from your work
“You are not your job, you’re not how much money you have in the bank. You are not the car you drive. You’re not the contents of your wallet. You are not your fucking khakis. You are all singing, all dancing crap of the world.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club
Wallace Inmen’s Globe and Mail, “Losing Your Job, Losing Your Identity,” survey 0f 12,000 respondents on the topic reveal that more than 30% define their personal identities through their career.
Does this describe you? You have few interests outside of work; you feel restless when you’re not working; you can’t carry on a conversation without referring to something at work; you make yourself available to people at work 24/7; and when you’re at home with family, your mind is back at work. If it does, you’ve defined yourself too much by your job.
And that’s not good for your mental and physical health.
Detachment from work means that when you leave your workplace you leave your work related worries there. Detachment from work means that you do not define your personal worth too closely to your performance at your workplace or to the validation that you receive at work. Detachment from work means that you do not rely on work alone to give you a feeling of completeness and to provide a meaning to your life.
In fact, detachment from work can lift off the pressure to be at your best all the time, allowing you to take a step back, relax and just focus on the work without any anxieties. It can improve your overall mood, your performance and might even lead to more creative ideas.
5. Detachment from your own thoughts
Out of all forms of practicing detachment, I find this one most profound in the ways it helps me grow. Most of us are too attached to our thoughts and our obsessive thinking patterns.
I’m totally this kind of person, who cant detach herself from all the thoughts . and I truly believe that this thoughts are the one , who completely ruined your life.
Very few of us are able to take a step back to exercise a certain amount of control over our thoughts. It turns into a problem when we confuse our thoughts with feelings and end up taking actions on impulse. Somehow, we conclude that every thought needs to be acted upon and it doesn’t turn out very well.
Detachment from thoughts, often practiced through meditation till it becomes a usual practice, allows you to look at your thoughts as an outsider, letting them come and go without allowing yourself to feel too much about them.
This allows you to practice a certain amount of detachment and you begin to see that not all thoughts are important. You realize that most of them are just clouding your head and it will be best to free yourself from them.
Detaching yourself from your thoughts requires an understanding of the fact that — Our thoughts are just thoughts. They are not the ultimate truth or reality.
You enter a state of mind in which you witness, clearly and calmly, with good will, whatever you are seeing, hearing, thinking, enjoying, or suffering. You watch your problems, fears, and challenges as if you are not bound or preoccupied by them but viewing them calmly — a witness.
With practice, your turbulent thoughts and negative emotions will lose their grip on your mind. They will not be able to drive you or distort your inner potential and well being.
“Mind can be your best friend or worst enemy.”
― Kabira, Birthplace of Happiness
6. Detachment from sense of time
Man alone chimes the hour. And, because of this, man alone suffers a paralyzing fear that no other creature endures. A fear of time running out.”
― Mitch Albom, The Time Keeper
A lot of our anxieties are caused by thoughts of not having enough time for all that we want to do. We have huge plans for months and even years whose enormity makes it difficult for us to live our present time in the best way possible today, the only time we have in hand for sure.
Detachment from sense of time can help you become aware of the transient nature of our lives and help you become more and more peaceful as you understand that the only time you have control over is now, this present moment. All that has passed before and all that is coming ahead is immaterial.
All in all, unconditional mental peace should be the only constant in life and practicing detachment can help us achieve it.
Autumn 