Remote work can be a liberating and convenient option for professionals. However, it can also be a drastic change of pace, and many who work from home find themselves struggling with mental health challenges after making the jump from an office environment.
Are you struggling to maintain your overall well-being when working from home? If so, keep reading to learn more about mental health tips for remote workers.
Set Boundaries on Your Time
Setting clear and strong boundaries on your time is one of the top mental health tips for remote workers. When you work in an office environment, this process is often much easier — you clock in at eight and punch out at five. But when you work from home, your home becomes your office, and it can feel like you are constantly in the workplace.
This can cause people to take on tasks even when they’re off the clock, such as responding to emails at all hours, or it can make them feel like they’re punched in all day. Setting strong and healthy boundaries on your time can help alleviate this feeling and allow you to truly relax after the workday is over.
Some simple boundaries to put in place for your mental health may include:
- Not taking work calls after 5 p.m.
- Only responding to emails during working hours
- Not working on the weekends or evenings
- Taking a dedicated lunch hour
These help separate your work and home lives, which are at great risk of becoming disruptively intertwined in remote work situations.
Practice Good Time Management
People new to remote work frequently struggle with time management. When you don’t have a supervisor looking over your shoulder or coworkers around you working, it can be all too easy to push your work off until the end of the day.
This can lead to rushing in the afternoon to finish your work on time. It may also cause you to work past your typical hours to get your workload finished on time and put a mountain of undue stress on your shoulders.
With remote work, proper time management is an essential skill. One useful tool you can use to help organize your time is called the Eisenhower matrix, which separates work tasks into four distinct categories:
- Urgent and Important Tasks: Complete these tasks as soon as possible to meet your deadlines and avoid stressful consequences
- Urgent but Not Important Tasks: Delegate these tasks to others who may have a more appropriate skill set
- Important but Not Urgent Tasks: Schedule time for these tasks in the future, but they don’t necessarily have to be done immediately.
- Not Important and Not Urgent Tasks: These tasks are typically only unnecessary distractions and should be deleted altogether if possible
You may also want to try different productivity software options to help you stay on track with everything on your plate. There is an abundance of task management software that can help you keep detailed to-do lists and schedules.
Additionally, productivity tools such as Pomodoro timers are available to help you stay focused. There’s even software that can keep you off of social media during work hours to help you stay on task.
Take Regular Breaks
Remote workers often fall into the trap of working continuously throughout the day. One of the best mental health tips for remote workers is to build breaks into your routine so that you have time to reset your mental energy, get proper hydration and nutrition, and stretch your body to break up a long day of sitting at a desk.
The Pomodoro method is a frequently used technique to help remote workers accomplish tasks faster while still emphasizing restorative breaks and relaxation. This technique is relatively simple and follows these key steps:
- Start a timer for 25 minutes
- Focus exclusively on your work for 25 minutes without distraction
- Take a five-minute break once the timer runs out, during which you focus on anything but work
- Repeat steps one through three another three times
- After the fourth work cycle, take a longer break of 20 to 30 minutes
This is an extremely effective method for demanding intellectual tasks for remote workers. It can keep you from feeling worn down or overwhelmed by your tasks for the day. By breaking work into chunks and scheduling regular breaks, you can ease the process of accomplishing your workload without feeling stressed.
Get Outside Often
Remote work can have people feeling like they’re trapped in the house all day. Since your work is at home, you might spend all day at your computer with no pressing reason to head outside.
Don’t let yourself become trapped in the house. Try to make time to get outdoors, run some errands, or simply take a stroll through your neighborhood. Doing so can keep you from feeling cooped up and unmotivated.
This could mean heading outside on your breaks or making a dedicated effort to get out on weekends. The goal is to avoid feeling like you spend your entire life at home, which can quickly lead to a number of harmful mental health symptoms.
Separate Your Workspace
Creating a dedicated workspace in your home is one of the most important mental health tips for remote workers. To the best of your ability or means, try to separate your workspace from your living or sleeping space as much as you possibly can.
This tip capitalizes on a simple psychological phenomenon, which is that your environment shapes the way you think, feel, and behave. For instance:
- Laying down in bed makes you sleepy since that’s the place where you sleep
- Sitting down on the couch is relaxing because that’s the place where you relax
- Being in your office can help you stay focused since that’s where you work
When you combine these different environments, your body and mind get confused about what you’re supposed to be doing. Working on a laptop in bed can make you feel sleepy during the day but also interferes with your ability to sleep at night.
Similarly, perhaps your workspace is in the same place where you play video games to wind down. In that case, you may find that you feel perpetually distracted when trying to focus on your work.
Of course, not everyone has a spare room to use as an office space. But delineating the workspace from the living space in some way — whether that be by sectioning it off with a partition, removing distractions from the environment, or otherwise isolating yourself from the living quarters — can vastly enhance your experience.
Emphasize Social Interaction
Humans are inherently social creatures, and making the shift from working in an office to a remote work environment takes away a key social avenue. People don’t often think of the workplace as a social setting, but your interactions with coworkers can have a much greater mental health benefit than you might expect.
When you’re working from home, it’s important that you try to replace this social interaction in some way. Some great ways to build more social connections into your life include:
- Joining a group fitness club
- Attending church or other spiritual gatherings
- Scheduling a weekly get-together with friends or family
- Hosting a game night with friends
- Joining a book club
Having regular, scheduled social interaction can counteract the loss of daily relationships in the workplace. There is an abundance of evidence that having meaningful relationships with others brings outstanding effects on your mental health and assists in preventing you from developing serious mental health conditions.
Maintain a Healthy Exercise Routine
A regular exercise routine can be one of the most powerful preventive mental health options for anyone. If you’re struggling with mental health due to remote work, schedule time to exercise and move your body. Doing so has the potential to reduce your symptoms and improve your overall quality of life and well-being.
A number of academic studies have shown that exercise can have a profoundly beneficial impact on both your physical and mental health. There are a number of ways that you can incorporate exercise into your routine, including the following:
- Signing up for group fitness classes
- Going on a bike ride a few times a week
- Joining a gym or hiring a personal trainer
- Doing calisthenics at home
- Meeting with friends for hikes or other outdoor activities
Getting physically active can be a direct tool for coping with remote work-related stress. It also provides you with an opportunity to build your capacity to overcome mental health challenges in the future.
Reach Out for Professional Help When Needed
If remote work stress is becoming too much to handle on your own, consider reaching out for professional help. Chronic stress is a key risk factor in the development of serious mental health conditions, and experiencing burnout can vastly reduce the quality of your work.
If you’re looking for professional assistance to deal with remote work stress, consider these treatment options:
In-Person or Virtual Therapy
Talk therapy has long been the gold standard of mental health treatment. It helps people with conditions such as:
- Depression
- Anxiety
- Post-traumatic stress disorder
- Any number of other mental health challenges
Even if you don’t think your work-related stress has transitioned into a mental health disorder, you should still consider working with a therapist. Doing so can provide you with actionable tools and strategies to help manage your stress and live a happier and healthier life.
Medication Management
Psychiatric medications can treat a wide variety of mental health conditions with minimal time commitment on your part. With medication management, this process is taken even further.
Medication management offers consistent support from mental health professionals. Your team can make sure you’re on the right medication and immediately address any side effects. And throughout the process, you can make adjustments with your provider as needed.
Deep Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation
Deep transcranial magnetic stimulation (dTMS) is a powerful tool for helping people overcome severe depression, anxiety, and other mental health conditions. Using a completely non-invasive neurotechnology, dTMS stimulates regions of the brain that are underactive in common mental health conditions, sparking lasting healing and recovery.
Ketamine-Assisted Therapy
Ketamine-assisted therapy uses the dissociative psychedelic ketamine to rapidly accelerate the talk therapy process. This innovative new technique can bring you powerful mental health relief in just a single session. Repeated sessions can ensure that you stay on the path to recovery and whole-person wellness for years to come.
Start Treatment With Plus by APN
Plus by APN is committed to providing our clients with the best in traditional and cutting-edge treatment options to combat mental health conditions that interfere with your ability to live life as you see fit. To get started with treatment at Plus by APN, fill out our confidential online contact form or call us at 424.644.6486 today.
References
- Gourgouvelis J, Yielder P, Clarke ST, Behbahani H, Murphy BA. Exercise Leads to Better Clinical Outcomes in Those Receiving Medication Plus Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for Major Depressive Disorder. Front Psychiatry. 2018 Mar 6;9:37. doi: 10.3389/fpsyt.2018.00037. PMID: 29559928; PMCID: PMC5845641.
- Wickramaratne, Priya J., et al. “Social Connectedness As a Determinant of Mental Health: A Scoping Review.” PLOS ONE, vol. 17, no. 10, 2022, p. e0275004, https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0275004. Accessed 3 Nov. 2024.