Working alone from home has a different environment from working at an office where one is surrounded by co-workers. At home, you are your own boss in a way and that, too, can cause unnecessary stress when you become your own manager, coach, and quality controller. This change in working conditions can bring about loneliness and depression. Luckily, those who have been working at home provide us with good advice on how to cope with these.
So how does one cope when working from home is depressing you?
- Recreate an environment where there are people around you;
- Taking short breaks from your routine to get some level of social interaction;
- Meet regularly with others who work from home and exchange stories and advice one another on how to manage certain situations;
- Take breaks doing something you enjoy;
- Be a good boss to yourself by acknowledging your accomplishments;
- Share your positive and negative feelings with people you trust can listen;
- Reward yourself and celebrate!
It isn’t just the breaking of routine or patting ourselves in the back that will dispel depression, but what it is we do during the breaks and how we manage ourselves.
10 Steps to Follow so you don’t get Depressed Working from Home:
- Be around people you can interact with;
- Do something you enjoy;
- Reminisce past successes;
- Listen to music while working;
- Look for collaborative projects;
- Trace the source of depression;
- Share your negative feelings;
- Acknowledge your accomplishments;
- Reward yourself;
- Celebrate the seasons.
- Be around people you can interact with.Even if you don’t feel like it, force yourself to go to a place where you can interact with others. Bring some work to a Starbucks, for example. The simple act of ordering from a barista helps in a big way. Set up a business lunch with someone. The hour-long meal can be an enjoyable way to get work done and get some interaction as well. Enroll in a gym. Even if you don’t talk to anyone, you are putting yourself in a place where there are people. What this does is it provides you with enough social interaction that you are missing when working alone at home.
- Do something you enjoy.To some, taking a break is a waste-of-time because it disrupts work, and to some breaks aren’t interesting at all so they skip it altogether. But continuously working on something can drain you of your energies. It can stress you out and erode your immune system. So taking a break when your work at home is an essential activity. Build it into your routine.
Take a “myself-break” to do something you like. It could be painting, fishing, window-shopping for shoes, reading a book by the bay, taking a picnic in a park. The point is to make taking breaks interesting, or else it becomes a difficult task. Of course this comes with the caution of taking too many breaks. - Reminisce past successes.There will be failures in the life of any worker and that is normal. What isn’t normal is feeding on the negative thought on them. The way to balance this is to think of past successes as well.
- Listen to music while working.Turn on the radio to your favorite station, listen to a playlist on Spotify, or listen to your own playlist from your collection of music. By having ambient sound, you create an impression that there are people around when someone is singing or when someone is playing a musical instrument. This is particularly true when you tune in to a radio station where a radio host speaks once in a while. Advertisements are your friend in this case as most have a human voice that replaces someone talking to you. This, of course, depends on the person and on the work being done. Some people can’t work with music, and some work requires concentration where music is a source of distraction. In these cases, you can be the judge if the ambient sound is distracting and need to turn it off.
- Look for collaborative projects. Working alone for long stretches can get lonely. Working on projects that require others to collaborate can break the seclusion. The whole point in working at home is to avoid traveling, so a virtual team that works online is best in this case. The interaction with the rest of the team members helps ward away depression caused by isolation. Some work-at-home veterans like to use Skype or other apps with video so you can see whom you are speaking with. That is a big help in creating a “work environment” at home.
- Trace the source of depression.Quite often, depression is trigger by something. When negative feelings ensue, trace the source right away. Is it because your proposal got rejected? Is it because your balance-sheet isn’t balancing? Is it because some online co-worker is getting on your nerves? Isolate the cause and focus on how to avoid or reduce it. Most of the time a single trigger will avalanche into multiple feelings that encroach on everything that you do. By focusing on the trigger, you can “fix” the source and prevent depression from evolving to an uncontrolled level that seeps into everything you are working on.
- Share your negative feelings.We all undergo different levels of anger or depression, and that is normal. Share what you feel with your spouse, partner, or a close friend you know will not judge you. What you are doing is “sharing the burden.” When you unload your feelings to someone, you lighten the load you are carrying. Even if the other person really can’t do anything about it, you feel he or she shares it with you, and that can be enough.
The warning, however, is to share your feelings with a few people you trust can help you. The problem with sharing is that it can be overdone. With some people, every time they share with another person, the feelings and stress can escalate – and this is the opposite of what we are trying to achieve. Some like to vent out on social media and the replies they get fan the flames of resentment rather than put it out. So share your feelings with one or two people who you know can commiserate and calm you down. - Acknowledge your accomplishments.At the end of the day, go over what you have done in your mind. Recognize the things you have accomplished. They do not have to be momentous milestones. Returning a call or an email is an accomplishment. Even work-in-progress is an accomplishment so recognize that you’ve done the work that is in the process of being completed too. This especially helps if a project is long and arduous. Break down the project into minor milestones and give yourself credit for the accomplishment every step of the way.
Share your positive feelings. In #7, you want to share your negative feelings; so you should also want to share your positive feelings. Tell someone your accomplishments, minor or major. In #7 the point is to unburden, but in #8, the point is to share your joy. When someone smiles or rejoices with you, it multiplies your positive feelings. - Reward yourself!Attach rewards to accomplishments. This way you can associate happiness with the work you’ve done. For example, if you’ve finished writing a proposal, reward yourself with a pizza. It is not just sustenance for the body but your mind connects it to accomplished work. This conditions your mind to see work in a positive way consequently motivates you.
- Celebrate the seasons.Just because you work alone at home doesn’t mean you shouldn’t celebrate the seasons. Decorate your work area on Valentine’s Day, Halloween and other holidays you celebrate. Have a “Christmas party” for your home office by having dinner out with someone on “home office” expense. This, too, associates work with something joyful.
Related Questions
How can I reduce work-related stress?
Doctors who treat stress-related maladies say that the top reason for stress is improper eating or sleeping. They recommend eating a good breakfast as well as balanced meals throughout the day. Getting enough good sleep is important too. Sleep doctors say that you get good sleep if you wake up naturally; if you need an alarm to wake you up, then you aren’t getting enough sleep.
How do I avoid overworking?
Because you work at home, there is a tendency to work as long as you want and on everything that comes to your desk. But there are things that aren’t urgent and you need to learn to determine what these things are and put them off for the next day. Trying to do everything can lead to low-quality work and stress. Why do this when you can manage the work-flow by doing urgent and important things first and scheduling the non-urgent activities for another time.
You can also determine the time you start and end work at home. You don’t have to be a slave-driver to yourself (or to anyone). Set a time you should start and stop working every day. This not only protects you from overworking, but it also forces to discipline yourself. A good way of “forcing” yourself to stop work is to schedule something after work. A family dinner is always a good reason to stop work. Schedule a movie at your nearest theater.
To give you a mindset that work is over, “close” your home office by turning off your computer (or putting it to sleep), unplugging your phone, and turning off the lights. There are some times you may have to extend your work hours for pressing reasons. It would be good to not extend more than thirty minutes beyond your “closing” time.