Workplace mental health and emotional stress management

The core goal of workplace mental health has never been to "completely eliminate stress", but to find "a dynamic balance between personal tolerance threshold and workload」； Emotional stress management is not a universal "chicken soup recipe". It is a set of personalized adjustment tools that need to be adapted to individual personality, industry attributes, and current stage.

Last week, I accompanied Lao Lin, who works as an e-commerce operator, to get the follow-up report for anxiety disorder. Last month, she held three big sales on the platform and didn’t get off work until after 2 a.m. for 21 days in a row. On the day of the accident, she finished sending out the last page of the weekly report in the project group. She suddenly collapsed in front of the computer. Tears fell on the keyboard and her hands shook when typing. She didn’t even have the strength to get up the next day. Before, she had always believed that "tears are not believed in the workplace. If you can't bear it, you are incapable of it." Until the doctor told her, "Your emotions have given you a warning for half a year. You should treat it as invisible."

There are currently two mainstream directions for workplace stress intervention in the industry, and no one can convince anyone. One group is a supporter of cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), which advocates that you first find out the irrational beliefs in your mind - for example, Lao Lin always felt that "if I don't come first in this project, my boss will fire me" and "my colleagues are working overtime and I will be unsociable if I leave." By getting rid of these black and white perceptions, most of the stress will naturally be relieved. The other group is the practitioners of the mindfulness acceptance school. They feel that there is no need to compete with emotions. Anxiety, irritability, and not wanting to go to work are all normal reactions. There is no need to force yourself to "get better quickly." When acute stress arises, do abdominal breathing for 3 minutes to bring your attention back to the present moment. Don't get consumed by your emotions.

My experience in doing enterprise EAP consulting for 5 years is that there is no superior or inferior method between these two methods. It depends on what kind of problem you encounter. If you are facing acute pressure where you have to submit a plan soon and have a report next week, mindful breathing adjustment and the 5-4-3-2-1 sensory grounding method can help you stabilize in 10 minutes. ； If you have been feeling that "the work you do is meaningless" and "I can't do anything well" for two or three months, then CBT's cognitive dismantling and unreasonable belief sorting out are the root solutions to the problem.

Don’t tell me, I’ve seen too many people go astray in stress management. There was a product manager of an Internet company who made emotion management a new KPI: he had to meditate for 15 minutes every day and exercise three times a week. If he didn't finish it on any day, he would scold himself, "What else can I do if I can't even manage my emotions?" This actually pushed myself into a more serious state of anxiety. There is also the big brother who is about to retire in a state-owned enterprise. He always says, "We worked much more overtime than you did back then, and today's young people are just pretentious." He suffered from dizziness and headaches for three years. The last physical examination directly revealed that he had grade 3 hypertension. He stayed in the hospital for half a month before he dared to ask the leader to reduce his workload.

Oh, by the way, there is another widely circulated saying: "Resign if you are not happy at work. Resigning will solve all problems." I came across 7 cases of people who resigned without permission last year, and 4 of them started to feel anxious after being idle at home for less than half a month. They checked the recruitment software until early in the morning every day, feeling that "there was no way they could find a job", and they were even more stressed than when they were at work. In the final analysis, emotional problems in the workplace are often caused by a problem with the matching of "individual-job-environment". Either you adjust your own coping style or talk to the company about adjusting the workload. When the match is so bad that no matter how you adjust it, it is useless, and it is not too late to consider changing the environment.

There is a popular saying in the Internet circle called "emotion buffer", which is to set aside 1-2 hours of "absolute blank time" every week. You do not reply to work messages or arrange any tasks, even if you are squatting on the roadside watching the uncle play chess, or wandering in the park and counting leaves. When I was working as an HRBP, I dealt with employee disputes and resignation negotiations every day. During that time, every Wednesday afternoon I would sneak to the cafe downstairs of the company to sit for an hour, order a cup of iced Americano and stare at the passers-by outside the window, thinking about nothing. Just this one hour could replenish most of my emotional energy for the week.

In fact, to put it bluntly, mental health in the workplace is the same as charging your mobile phone. Don’t wait until the battery reaches 1% and automatically shut down before you think of finding a charger. Usually when the battery is around 20%, you should take the time to replenish the battery. If the charger you are using is leaking and still loses power after charging for half a day, it is not a shame to change the charger. After all, you come to work to sell your ability and time, not your life and emotional health, right?