Workplace Mental Health White Paper

There is no universal standard answer to maintaining the mental health of people in the contemporary workplace. The essence is the dynamic balance of "individual adaptability adjustment + establishment of dynamic boundary sense + social support system supplementation". It cannot be completely solved by simply "laying down", "naked words" or "looking inwards".

The first visitor I received at the company's EAP station last week was a 26-year-old girl from the operation position. She just won the department's star employee award last year. Her KPI completion rate was 140% of the team's. When she entered the consulting room, she held a wrinkled commuting bag in her arms. Her first sentence was, "I've obviously done everything well, so why am I still afraid of being fired every day?" ”. She has more than 30 posts on her phone that say "the gap year will cure everything." There is a fresh dose of Sertraline on her bedside table. After taking it for half a month, she still wakes up suddenly at three in the morning and subconsciously touches her phone to see if there are any unread messages from her boss.

Don't tell me, the current discussion on workplace psychology on the Internet is basically between two extreme camps arguing most fiercely. A group of people believe in the "internal attribution theory" and say, "Your anxiety is due to lack of ability" and "Don't go out to work if you have a glass heart." I have been in contact with the HRD of a manufacturing company in the past two years, and I am a loyal believer in this theory.

Another group of people pushed all problems to the outside world, "All emotional problems in the workplace are because the boss is stupid and the company is rubbish. Just quit." Last year, a young man who studied interaction design came to me for consultation. He said that he had resigned three times in half a year after listening to a workplace blogger's theory of "resigning if you are not happy". Now he has been at home for eight months, can hardly pay the rent, and has cut off his social security. He is more anxious than when he was at work. "Now when I see notifications from recruitment software, my palms get sweaty, and I don't even dare to go for interviews."

In fact, both statements are too extreme. Taking the data from the "White Paper on Mental Health of Chinese Workplace Workers" released by the Institute of Psychology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in 2024, 62.7% of the workplace workers surveyed suffer from varying degrees of emotional exhaustion. Among them, the highest proportion of inducements are not "lack of ability" or "the company is too bad" at all, but "blurred role boundaries" - to put it bluntly, this is You can’t figure out when it is working time and when it is your own time. You are embarrassed to refuse the job offered by your colleagues, and embarrassed to tell you that you don’t want the pie offered by your boss. Even if you lie down in bed after get off work, you still respond to work news as soon as it comes. Gradually, you no longer have “you”, and all your emotions are controlled by work.

I have been doing corporate EAP consulting for more than five years, and I have seen people who can really adjust their mental state in the workplace. They use all kinds of strange methods, and there is no standardized template at all. For example, there is an older brother who works on algorithms. He followed the project for half a year last year. At the worst point, he felt like vomiting when he saw the code. Later, he thought of a trick. Instead of going home directly after get off work every day, he sat in the parking lot downstairs of the company for 20 minutes and played "Tom and Jerry" on the car player. He doesn't read any work news, just laughs along with the animation. Just relying on these 20 minutes of "free time", he survived two major version launches. Recently, he went for a review and found that the previous mild depression symptoms have basically disappeared, which is better than the effect of three consecutive months of psychological counseling. There is also an administrative lady from a state-owned enterprise, who is even more amazing. She specially applied for a work WeChat account and turned off the traffic of this account immediately after work. No one can find her. She said, "I only get a salary of 5,000 yuan a month. If the sky falls, I will wait until I go to work tomorrow." This year, her physical examination showed that all indicators were more normal than those of girls who had just graduated from the same department.

Of course, I don’t mean that everyone should learn from them. For example, if you are in a position such as emergency public relations or emergency administration, it is definitely not practical to shut down your phone after get off work, so you need to find another way. For example, in a media company I worked for before, people in the content department negotiated a rotation mechanism. Only one person needs to be on standby after work every week to receive breaking news, and the other people on duty will respond uniformly. After three months of implementation, the emotional exhaustion score of the entire department dropped by 40%, and the content output efficiency increased by 15%.

When it comes to this, some bosses will definitely jump out and say, "What should I do if the work efficiency drops after giving employees so much freedom?" ”, interestingly, ByteDance conducted a small-scale internal test last year and added a "do not disturb period" function to the OA of three departments. Work messages sent after 8 pm will be automatically marked as "non-urgent". Urgent messages must be approved separately. After half a year, the project delivery rate of these three departments was 12% higher than that of departments without this function, and the employee voluntary turnover rate was 8 percentage points lower. You see, leaving enough boundaries for employees is not a drag on efficiency.

A few days ago, I went to buy milk tea after get off work. I saw the little girl at the bar wearing a black headband when she was working. It said in white "I'm busy, don't call me when you have nothing to do". When she was changing clothes after get off work, she took out a pink headband and put it on, which said "I'm super cute". At that moment, I suddenly felt that there are not so many high-level psychological theories. The so-called mental health in the workplace, to put it bluntly, is that you have to leave a "switch" for yourself. When you are at work, you are an employee or a worker.

Oh, by the way, a very practical reminder at the end: If you can't sleep well for more than two weeks in a row, feel nauseous when you think about going to work, or have no interest in the things you liked before, don't force yourself to do it. Go to the psychology department of a tertiary hospital first to check it out. It's really not a shameful thing. It's just like taking medicine for a cold or fever. It's perfectly normal.