Adjusting to remote working isn’t necessarily straightforward. In fact, you may have noticed several unexpected challenges arising from working from home that have cropped up over the last few months. These new challenges facing remote workers are in addition to the ways mundane administrative work can wear you down. Some of the greatest challenges of working from home are caused by assaults on our mental health.
No one can live entirely on their own, nor can any country or society exist in isolation.
Being overwhelmed is so prevalent in our lives, it affects almost everyone I know, old or young. And it makes for a nightmare working environment.
Today all of us, regardless of our roles, are under increasing amounts of stress and distress in our everyday lives. Some of this is “in your face.” But much more comes from subtle or hidden pressures to perform or conform. And the current situation adds additional pressure. This “new normal” may not be something to embrace and its effects on your mental, physical and emotional health can be insidious and cause long-term damage.
The modern, career-driven professional has many roles: mother, father, breadwinner, homemaker, friend, daughter, son, sister, brother and whatever other hat they are wearing for the day!
Are we demanding too much of ourselves? Is this sustainable? To make room for all of these roles, have we cast aside many of our activities for self-care?
You might feel like you:
Does any of that sound familiar? Because if it does, I’ve written another article on how to overcome anxiety. And because your mind and your body are interconnected, you might have also noticed you’re suffering from headaches, aches and pains and digestive distress. To find out more about how stress causes these and other physical ailments, check out this article on the mind-body connection.
Our society has led us to believe that being super busy, not sleeping, or taking time for ourselves is acceptable. I’m sure half the professionals in the country feel the same. The system is in a nosedive. How you feel is a rational response to an irrational situation.
I have a confession to make. Recently, I became obsessed with Brave New World, the TV series starring Jessica Brown Findlay. It’s based on the novel by Aldous Huxley.
Brave New World is a weird, futuristic, dystopian drama. In it, there’s a distinct hierarchical social class system. Those at the apex exist in an emotionally blunted, drug-fuelled orgy. While the poor buggers at the bottom are menial workers. Your position on the ladder is determined by your genetics. And since everyone is genetically engineered to fulfil a set role, there’s no room at all for social climbing. Anyone who steps out of line undergoes a painful reconditioning process. A manipulative, sentient artificial intelligence pulls all the strings. As you might have guessed, it’s NSFW.
In 1950, Aldous Huxley predicted that:
Given peace, it should be possible, within the next fifty years, to improve working conditions very considerably. Better equipped, workers will produce more and therefore earn more. Meanwhile most of the hideous relics of the industrial Middle Ages will have been replaced by new factories, offices and homes. More and more factories and offices will be relocated in small country communities, where life is cheaper, pleasanter and more genuinely human than in those breeding-grounds of mass neurosis, the great metropolitan centers of today.
What a utopia, right? Shame it didn’t work out that way.
Are you among the hoards of exhausted professionals who declare they were brought up in a family where work was the only purpose of life?
Only now, you’ve realised that work IS your life to the extent that you have no time or energy for anything else. Have you discovered you don’t have an identity outside of work – you don’t know anything else?
As a result, you’ve neglected all aspects of your life. So much so that you have no work-life balance worth talking about. And you’re starting to see how unsustainable your initiatives are. Yet you feel trapped in an endless cycle of production.
If you find the feeling of failure and the fear of poverty overwhelming, you aren’t alone.
And you’re certainly not alone if you’ve realised you’re doing too many things and struggling to focus. As a result, you can find that your work-life balance has become unsustainable in the long-term.
You’ve realised that your life needs to change for your benefit and that of your family’s. But feeling you need to do something about it piles on additional pressure.
And as a busy mom or dad, a full-time working professional, a partner, child, sister or brother, and friend, you’re always pulled in so many different directions. Your to-do list never ends. Talk about exhausting.
Speaking of exhausting, have you ever considered how your dietary choices may be contributing to fatigue? Few people realise that this can be because of the malnutrition that results from trying to follow government dietary guidelines. But you can discover why this is and how it affects you personally here. Let’s face it; there is a health crisis right now. Educating yourself about some of the underlying causes will help you make better decisions to protect your own health and that of your loved ones.
How long is your physical and mental health going to hold up under this relentless stress, pressure and workload?
In 2020 because of the COVID-19 pandemic, many companies have suddenly and without warning been forced to pivot away from more traditional work settings. And working from home has become the norm in a lot of industries. But adjusting to working from home has presented challenges in the workplace.
The idea of working from home is positioned as frosting on a cake by many. Telecommuting has its charms, like not having to get up before the crack of dawn for the daily commute. And the idea of a flexible work schedule is alluring.
But remote working at home also has drawbacks, whether or not you’re a new recruit. And teams working for many companies have had to scramble to adapt. In fact, many companies have been going through working-from-home growing pains. And these stressors aren’t solely to do with whether or not your wifi is good enough or if Zoom goes down.
Solitude, isolation, are painful things and beyond human endurance.
Have you felt it’s hard to be “in the loop” after losing your personal connection to co-workers when you left the office?
Working from home has made you realise how important human camaraderie is.
When you’re working remotely, it can be a challenge to develop interpersonal relationships, too. This might be the biggest challenge you face if you’re new to the company. So new recruits might not get to know the faces of their coworkers beyond video conferencing, the occasional MS Teams meeting call and Slack messaging.
Sometimes, you can go the whole workday without speaking to anybody if you don’t ask for help. So you end up expressing your sentiments and views only through text. Without proper human interaction, things can get real impersonal real fast. And this isolation can create an unhealthy work environment with increased loneliness and levels of stress. Which you’ll naturally want to combat. But is your usual way to counteract stress through emotional eating? Or through drinking?
“Why do people have to be this lonely? What's the point of it all? Millions of people in this world, all of them yearning, looking to others to satisfy them, yet isolating themselves. Why? Was the earth put here just to nourish human loneliness?”
If you’re shy by nature, you might try to look things up on your own instead of bothering others. And you might be afraid to ask stupid questions.
Having said that, what a lot of people struggle with most is actually taking a break! When in the office, you would get interrupted by coworkers and for meetings, not to mention the chitchat around the water cooler, all the time. But working at home alone from your kitchen table is a different matter. You feel as though you’re glued to your computer all day. No office chit chat whatsoever.
Working from home is brutal when your office communication style is heavily collaborative. And it makes on-boarding near impossible.
In large part, that depends on your personal circumstances. Do you live alone or with family or friends?
It feels like this situation we’re in might never end. I was worried that the impact of diet on your resilience to infection was being underestimated. So I ran some dietary analysis. Turns out, I was right to be very concerned. You can find out why here.
We can learn the art of fierce compassion - redefining strength, deconstructing isolation and renewing a sense of community, practicing letting go of rigid us-vs.-them thinking - while cultivating power and clarity in response to difficult situations.
What is the biggest challenge you face when it comes to working from home? And what can you do to improve the quality of your interactions with your network while working from home and looking after your mental health? Drop your comments below. Social isolation may very well be one of the greatest challenges of working from home. So make sure you protect yourself from it’s worst effects.
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