Working from home has a lot of advantages. For instance, it has helped a lot of people maintain work-life balance. It has also opened doors of opportunities for people to work in places where distance would have made it impossible to work. It is now important to note that working from home can also be damaging to mental health.
This is because the lack of physical connection can be challenging for many. Also, some people tend to take up more work and work more hours than they normally would have while working from home. Paying attention to your mental health is essential when working from home as it is possible to sometimes not quickly realize how much of a toll it can be. Below are some of the few guides to follow:
Taking care of your physical health
Your physical health and your mental health are strongly connected. Taking care of your physical health is an important step in taking care of your mental health. It is very likely to ignore one’s physical health when working from home. Feeding on junks, lack of exercise and a sedentary lifestyle can all contribute to a poor physical health, which might impact one’s mental health while working from home. Some of the healthy practices you can imbibe include:
Being physically active
It is quite easy when working from home to let yourself go, stay in bed all day while typing away at your laptop and moving from one meeting to the next. However, exercise has been proven to better improve your daily productivity, relieve stress and also boost your mood.
Including an active routine to your calendar for the day would be of great benefit to your mental health. You can take 5 minutes break every hour to walk around your room and stretch. You can also commit to doing 10 push-ups or sit-ups after every meeting you have before moving on to the next. Including a simple and feasible workout routine that ties seamlessly into the daily work schedule makes it more achievable and helps to generally improve physical and mental health.
Eating healthy when working from home
Waking early to prepare a proper meal to take along to work is one of the unspoken advantages of working away from home. You might wonder how that is an advantage, but it indeed is. Working from home increases the frequency of late eating, skipping meals or feeding on junks just to get through the day as sometimes there is no schedule laid out to prepare meals or eat.
Planning meals and eating periods to fit perfectly into the work schedule for the day helps to achieve healthy eating goals. Also, not going out frequently might lead to eating less fruit and vegetables as they’re perishable. Buying enough that can be stored in the refrigerator and included frequently in diet can help to prevent this.
Avoiding a sedentary lifestyle when working from home
This is one of the most common problems that comes with working from home. Sitting on a spot all day long will do no good for one’s physical health or mental health. Incorporating more activities that do not involve staring at a screen all day will be highly beneficial and especially help to prevent heart diseases. Activities such as cleaning the house, taking a walk in the neighborhood, folding clothes, reading a book or dancing to good music are all simple lifestyle additions that can help to brighten up the day.
Connecting with people even when working from home
Humans are social creatures. The bonds and connections with other people that an office space provides is noticeably missing when working from home. This can deal a huge blow to the mental health especially when transitioning from working in an office space to working from home.
Reaching out to your friends and family constantly is a way to reinforce one’s sense of belonging and preventing the feeling of being alone. Healthy relationships would also protect against the harms of stress and loneliness. Connect with members of your community, check up on your neighbors and you can even volunteer to be a part of an organization. Being isolated and cut away from other people is a primary cause of depression while connecting with people across board is an important step in improving mental health.
Maintaining a healthy sleep routine
As said initially, people who work from home tend to work way more hours and especially work into late hours of the day which doesn’t occur with people working in office spaces. The opportunity to leave work behind at the office and completely relax at home is not present with people who work from home. Turning your beds to workspaces can be tricky for the brain and make it difficult to fall asleep on the same bed.
Practicing a good sleep routine will help to improve mental health as being sleep deprived can be highly detrimental to both physical and mental health. Separating work hours and allocating at least 8 hours of the day for sleep will help to wake up more energized and generally help to improve mental health.
A note from Healthfacts
Working from home does not have to negatively impact your mental health. Practice these helpful tips daily to keep enjoying the pros and pros of working from home.
