What are the eight core contents of workplace mental health?

At present, the core content of workplace mental health generally recognized in the domestic EAP service field mainly includes eight dimensions: professional identity, emotional regulation ability, boundary establishment, stress coping mechanism, interpersonal adaptability, occupational exhaustion early warning ability, growth thinking, and self-worth calibration.

When I worked as a resident EAP consultant at a major Internet company for the past two years, I met professionals who were making mistakes in these dimensions almost every day. It is most likely for new school recruiters to get stuck on their sense of professional identity. Last year, I met a girl who was studying directing. The school recruited a girl to work in a company to review short video content. Her daily job was to check the rules and video compliance. After working for less than three months, she suffered from insomnia every day, saying that she felt that what she had learned for four years was in vain, and she could not see the value of the work. This is actually a typical manifestation of a lack of professional identity.

Just finding a sense of value in a job is not enough. There are too many bad things in the workplace, and it is really difficult to have no ability to regulate emotions. I worked with a To B sales manager before. When the performance pressure was high a few years ago, he would pound the table with his subordinates in the office every day, and he would feel bad when he went home to talk to his wife and children. He knew something was wrong, but he just couldn't control his anger. Later, he followed us and did emotional awareness exercises for two months. Now, even if he is rejected by customers ten times, he can still bring a strawberry cake to his daughter after get off work, and he will not bring the emotions at work into his personal life. This is the role of his emotional regulation ability.

When it comes to the separation between work and private life, we cannot avoid the topic of boundary, which has been particularly popular in the past two years. In the hot search for "post-00s rectification of the workplace" a while ago, many young people refused to work overtime for free and refused to help colleagues do private work. This is essentially a manifestation of a clear sense of boundary. However, this point is now controversial, and many people think that Drawing boundaries too straightforwardly can easily be regarded as "unsociable" in a workplace that values human relationships. We have met a girl before who was isolated by the department for almost two weeks because she clearly refused to write weekly reports for her colleagues in the same group. Therefore, how to establish boundaries and how to make a soft landing is actually a very practical part of workplace mental health.

As for coping with stress, there is actually no need to pursue a state of "no pressure at all". When you really don't have any pressure at work every day, either the company is about to go bankrupt, or you are about to be optimized. A good stress coping mechanism is more like adjusting a rubber band. If it is stretched too full, it will break, and it is useless if it is completely loosened. It is just right to control the stress to the level of "you can reach it with a jump". I have seen many hard-core working people who always feel tired and just carry on without taking the signals sent by their body and emotions seriously. There was a 32-year-old architect who stayed up late for 20 days in a row to work on a project. On the day the project was launched, he could not breathe at the workstation. In fact, as early as half a month ago, he did not want to go to work every day and was not motivated to tackle the technical problems that he was previously interested in. This is a typical early sign of career exhaustion. If he could detect it in advance and make timely adjustments, he would never end up in the hospital.

In addition to these aspects related to emotions and pressure, interpersonal adaptability is also very important. It does not mean that you have to force yourself to become a social leader and get along with everyone to be happy. It means that you can find a comfortable distance with different types of colleagues. There is also growth thinking, which is regarded as chicken soup by many people. It is actually a very real ability when it comes to mental health in the workplace. There was a girl who was working in user operations. She missed the discount stacking rules for her first large-scale promotion event, which cost the company a small loss of 100,000. She was scolded by the boss for half an hour at the whole department meeting. If it had been someone else, she might have resigned and run away. Instead, she led related product and technical colleagues to review the situation for two full days, and listed all possible pitfalls into a checklist. Later, the company conducted the same type of activities, and the plan she made had the highest conversion rate in the company. To put it bluntly, she would not regard a failure as a complete denial of her ability, but as an experience package for upgrades.

The last and most easily overlooked point is self-worth calibration. Many people are accustomed to taking promotions, salary increases, and other people’s evaluations as the only criteria to measure their workplace value. There used to be a design director who worked for ten years with an annual salary of one million, but he had to change the plan every day according to Party A’s requirements. In the end, he felt that he had no basic aesthetics. None. Last year, she quit her job and opened a ceramics studio. People around her felt it was a pity. However, she herself said that the days of squeezing clay every day are much more practical than when she was a director. In fact, she adjusted the standard of self-worth from "a successful director in the eyes of others" to "a state where she is truly comfortable."