Open class on workplace mental health and stress relief

The core logic of maintaining mental health in the workplace is never to force oneself to "eliminate emotions" or "give up the glassy heart", nor is it to brainlessly advocate "naked words to solve thousands of sorrows", but to find ways to A dynamic balance between your personal stress tolerance threshold and current workplace requirements ——There is no universal standard answer. All methods that make you think "I will be more tired if I follow this" are essentially failure to hit your exclusive threshold.

Last week, a little girl from the operations department who I had worked with for half a year sat across from me and cried. The day before, she had happily shared with me the concert tickets she had grabbed and said she would go see them after the big sale. The reason for the collapse was very small: when I bought the steamed buns in the morning, the store missed the braised eggs she added. She squatted at the subway station and took a bite of the plain steamed buns. Suddenly she felt, "Why can't I even eat a braised egg?" and burst into tears.

This is really not hypocritical. There has long been clear research data in the field of psychiatry: the outbreak of workplace stress is never caused by a single incident, but is a compensatory release after long-term chronic stress is superimposed. You thought it was the stewed egg that crushed you, but in fact, you have already piled up plans that have been revised to 12 versions for three consecutive weeks, work groups that are still ringing at two in the morning, and the leader’s incoherent sentence "There is still something wrong with your plan."

Regarding how to deal with this kind of pressure, there are currently two completely different mainstream directions in the academic world. No one is right or wrong, it's just that the people who adapt to it are different. Researchers in the cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) faction advocate adjusting stress cognition first: converting "the leader is targeting me" to "the project requirements themselves are dynamic", and converting "I am too weak to complete it" to "the workload of this position is inherently unreasonable". The essence is to first break away from the inertia of "self-attribution" and reduce unnecessary internal friction. The viewpoint of the existential psychology school is more direct: you don’t need to force your own ideas. You can completely admit that “there is a lot of meaningless consumption in the workplace.” You don’t need to force yourself to “fall in love with work” or “find value from work.” As long as you control the consumption within an acceptable range, you can use the remaining energy for life.

I have seen too many people who use rigid methods to suppress their own problems. There used to be a little girl who was working on content. After watching the CBT adjustment tutorial on the Internet, her boss clearly dumped her work on her every day, but she still forced herself to ask, "Is there something wrong with my cognition?" Should I think of this as exercise? ”, after three months of hard work, the final physical examination revealed thyroid nodules, and I resigned the same day after taking the report. There is also a young man who believed in the saying that "work is just about making money and not investing in emotions". When he was a little aggrieved when he first joined the job, he felt, "This is a waste of money and I can't stay here." He changed four jobs in six months and spent so much money on his resume that he couldn't even receive an interview invitation, which made him even more anxious.

To put it bluntly, the method is that the dead are still alive. Only you know best whether you feel comfortable or not. I have met a big brother in back-end development before, and his adjustment method is very rough to say, but it is very effective: he made a simple stress scale for himself. A score of 0 means he is too busy to pick his hands, and a score of 10 means he feels like vomiting and slamming the keyboard. As long as the stress reaches 6 points that day, he will put down the mouse and walk downstairs for 10 minutes to feed the Sanhua stray cats in the park. If the score reaches 8 points, even if the last few lines of code in his hand are left, he will pick up his bag and leave on time. “I did the math and found that all the code I had to write with a score of 8 or above was full of bugs. It took me two more hours to correct the bugs the next day than it did today. The gains outweighed the losses, and even my boss couldn’t figure it out clearly. ”

There is another topic that everyone has been arguing about for many years: Should emotions be involved in the workplace? One group says that professionals must give up their emotions, while the other group says that suppressing emotions will cause problems sooner or later. The two sides are arguing fiercely. On the contrary, I have seen two completely different styles of selling crowns, and they both did extremely well. One is a standard "emotionless machine in the workplace". He slaps the table with a difficult customer, turns around and answers the next customer's call and smiles like he's fine. His solution is to go to the boxing gym to play Muay Thai for two hours on weekends. All his anger is thrown into the sandbags, and he never takes it home or into the next work scene. The other one is famous for his "bad temper". When a client scolded him, he would stand in the corridor and complain to his colleagues for ten minutes. He could even use swear words. After scolding him, he would turn around and give the client a plan without taking it seriously. Both of them have won the regional sales championship for two consecutive years. There are no "correct workplace emotional rules" at all. You can do whatever makes you feel comfortable.

Don’t think that relieving stress requires mindfulness meditation or yoga. The most effective method I have ever seen was taught to me by Sister Zhang from the administrative department: at three o’clock every afternoon, make a cup of chrysanthemum tea with roses, peel three sugar oranges, and eat them slowly. No matter who sends her a message in the past ten minutes, she will not reply. She will wait until she finishes eating the oranges. “I just keep these ten minutes for myself, and I can’t take up any work. For these ten minutes, I am not the administrative director, I am myself. ”

Oh, by the way, there is another point that is easily overlooked: If your stress has reached the point where you have had insomnia for a week, can't eat, and get flustered when you see work news, don't bear it, go to a professional psychological consultation, or go to a hospital psychiatric department for an evaluation. This is the same as taking medicine when you have a cold, and there is no shame in it. I once had a colleague who always felt that "going to see a psychiatrist means I have mental illness." He endured it for half a year and eventually developed moderate depression. It took almost a year to adjust, and the gain outweighed the loss.

In fact, after all is said and done, there are really not that many mysterious truths about mental health in the workplace. You must first treat yourself as a human being, not a work machine hired by the boss. Take a break when you are tired, say something if you can't bear it anymore, and change if you are really uncomfortable. Don't listen to the nonsense on the Internet that "you are not doing well because you don't work hard enough." After all, no matter how much money you make, it won't cost you half your life, right?