Being professional at work not only means forging strong expertise in your area to stay competent, but also promotes taking a measure of control over your emotion to get on well with your surroundings. These emotions can have a profound impact on your productivity, your mental health, your performance and the relationship with your co-workers. When it comes to dealing with emotion at the workplace, I wouldn’t argue that most of these emotions are not that pleasant. In fact, everyone experiences low mood on day-to-day work. The low mood may not be necessarily triggered by your work or colleagues, but can be associated with lack of sleep, your lifestyle or literally every aspect of your life experience. Feeling down is more likely to reflect the unmet needs and it will fall into a vicious cycle if no intervention is involved. For example, when our goal wasn’t achieved, we would feel unhappy, angry and frustrated. This will reflect on our physical sensations such as unhealthy eating order and loss in long-time concentration. Influenced by the changes in physical sensations, our behaviour will start to divert. Prompt by the urges and anxiety, we may stop making an effort to meet our needs or working towards our goals. The further distance we keep from the destination, the more negative thoughts we are likely to have, which can bring in a more low mood. With this pattern (Greenberger & Padesky 2016), it’s quite possible that you will get stuck in a downward spiral, constantly surrounded by low moods or negative emotions.
Rather than resort to professional advice or self-help, some of us turn to entertainment tools to help resolve the low mood. This explains why most of the social media platforms and video streaming platforms use cascade browsing design to induce users to stick to the platform for a long time by enabling them to scroll through content indefinitely. Here is the caveat. The indefinite scroll can constantly feed new content to draw your attention by letting you immerse yourself to the content and temporarily pushing away the negative feelings. It works in the short term as they provide instant relief and distraction for us to forget the bad feelings temporarily. When we turn down the TV or switch off the mobile phone, the feelings come back with more intensity. With the assistance of these tools, the escape from reality doesn’t seem to be working. However, when you become aware of the contributing factors behind the emotional pains and start to understand them, you can use the things that you can control to manage how you feel.
1. On dealing with stress
The terms stress and anxiety seem to be used interchangeably, more often than not, as we are never good at describing our feelings properly. To me, anxiety is more relevant to the fear and excessive worries aroused from the uncertainties of an issue or experience whereas stress is associated with a challenge you are less capable of dealing with (but can make it through if you decide to change the course of action or get support from your surrounding). Having some good stress and learning to live with them in short term can be of great value to us as it potentially helps us perform by strengthening our stress response mechanism from both mental and physical perspectives.
At the workplace, the stress can be generated by your colleagues and your work (e.g. co-workers who are hard to work with, stringent deadlines, technical challenges in your project, long working hours, mistakes made in the work artefacts that have significant implications to businesses etc.). Chances are we will likely burn out after being stressed out for too long. To avoid this, I would suggest first checking what type of stress you are going through. Is it short-term stress or chronic stress? Does it affect your mental health, physical health or both? How do you feel about the stress? Once the stress is identified and classified, we can start trying some activities below to make stress work in our favour.
- Setting up an attainable goal and breaking down this goal into steps and actions to take every day, then stick with it until the goal is achieved. You can also reward yourself if the goal is achieved.
- Mindful thinking and eating. When embarking on mindful thinking, you can calm down yourself to think about the stress from top-down; bottom-up; inside out and outside in perspective. Basically, to have a clear picture of what’s going on and what response strategies you should take to alleviate stress. Keeping a balanced eating diet definitely helps reduce the stress and pain your body takes, but also guides your sensations and brings your attention to the taste through processing the food.
- Feeling gratitude. Most of our stress originates from the mismatch between our envision and reality. It’s absolutely fine if our needs and wants are not met temporarily and it will take time to get resolved. There are other things worth our attention in our life. Why not spend a few minutes write down the little things that you value and are grateful for every day? These small pieces can build up and really make a difference in boosting your confidence, your motivation and your energy when you are in low mood.
- Turn to help. Talking to people we love by fully engaging in the relationship we keep with family and friends will help mitigate the short-term stress as social isolation in itself places the mind and body under great pressure according to Dr. Julie Smith’s book, Why Has Nobody Told Me This Before.
2. On dealing with self-doubt
Nobody is perfect and you don’t have to be perfect enough to please anyone! Criticism, disagreement and conflict are inevitable in the workplace. Not knowing how to confront this situation can cause paralysis in our ability to have great performance at work. Whilst we can’t stop others from judging us or commenting on our work, we can focus on nurturing our own identity and resilience to build confidence and self-worth. Tactics include:
- Having the courage to speak for yourself. Understanding why some people just being critical is one thing. Most importantly, having the courage to tackle the challenging situation and relating to the critics would come first.
- Recognise failure and reflect on it. Self-doubt links to the negative feelings or bad experiences associated with failure. When failure gets in the way, focus on your goal, beliefs and values and stick with them. Just be honest with yourself and realise that you are enough to get it through.
- Accept every aspect of you, no matter whether it’s good or bad and makes sense of it. Self-acceptance doesn’t link to self-defeat. Rather, you learn yourself, your emotions and how you would need to tackle various scenarios in your life and try to live with them.
- Don’t over self-criticise. Periodical self-reflection allows us to scrutinise our behaviour and how we are doing in both social life and family life.
Originally published at http://chrissylovesmarketing.com on May 1, 2022.
