Stop Obsessing About Work All the Time
It’s one thing to work long hours. It’s another to surrender your free time to swirling thoughts of office predicaments and projects hanging over your head. Many of us can’t let work go.
It’s sinking our mental health and damaging our relationships. We need to shift the approach in our heads. Joe Mellin thought maybe a week alone in the woods would do it.
He journeyed by plane, bus and minivan to a remote pocket of Colorado for a program that coordinates solo wilderness excursions. Armed with a toothbrush, a journal and some dried split peas, the 41-year-old hunkered down to meditate and find out who he was. Turned out, he was someone who really liked obsessing about his job.
“I was literally saying, Joe, you’re in Colorado, you’re off work, you’re in the middle of a forest, stop thinking about work," the Washington-based tech worker recalls. By hour 36, in the quiet of his sleeping bag under the moon, he gave in. Soon he was sketching PowerPoint presentations in his journal, filling 20 pages with notes before he was finally able to let go.
Whether you’re on a spiritual quest in Colorado or at the playground with your kids, internally troubleshooting next week’s client pitch or entertaining revenge fantasies about a colleague, there’s a cost. “You’re getting aggravated anew each time," says Guy Winch, a psychologist and author who fashioned a TED Talk on the subject. We often think we have to fix our jobs to relieve our work stress.
“You might," he says. “But fix you first." Break the cycle Start by tracking how much time you’re spending ruminating about work, Winch says. For many of his patients, that’s 10 to 20 hours a week—after-hours.
Read more on livemint.com
