Whole Body Psychiatry

Personalized Mental Health in New York City

Work From Home

Building A Routine for Mental Health

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Studies have recently been showing that people who stick with and find value in a routine can find more meaning in their lives. This often translates into a more positive perspective in life and outcomes that result in a higher quality of life. It stands to reason that if routine can build a better life, it might be beneficial to use in our mental health goals. 

Find your “peak hours.” Peak hours are when you feel the most focused and most able to get things done. Peak hours shouldn’t be used for routine or mundane tasks that don’t require a significant amount of your brain’s attention. I’ll use myself as an example. My peak hours happen to be quite early in the morning (5:30-7:30am) for 2 reasons. First, it’s extremely quiet at 5:30am. When there isn’t a ton going on, such as emails or phone calls, focus doesn’t get diminished as quickly. Once those emails start, it’s tough to find time for ourselves and by evening, I’ve used a ton of my brain energy capacity. Second, I have created a routine where I enjoy my coffee while doing things like writing podcasts, books, or reading for my continued education. 

Make lists. Don’t just write out everything you need to do in broad strokes. Break it down into manageable items in order to make more traction on it. Let’s look at an example. If you are tasked with writing up a proposal on a product you’ll be pitching to your executive team, writing down “do Project X” will generally result in feeling overwhelmed. You don’t know where to start. Instead try breaking down “Project X” into larger pieces. 1. Outline, 2. Competitive research on current landscape of similar products, 3. The Why of investing in this product, 4. The slide deck. These get broken down even further. What places will you search for research on the landscape. Where will content for visuals come from for your presentation, etc. Doing it in a small bites approach makes it much easier to get started, because you can do one thing and start to build momentum. 

Triage that list. Once you develop your list, you also need to triage it. We use the word triage in medicine a lot. It means figure out what is most urgent and do that first. This is especially true in the emergency room. We have criteria for how we need to triage certain patients and how much time we have to get that done. If we apply this idea to personal life and work, consider what time line you’re looking at and what is actually urgent. For example, do you have a due date for something tomorrow? Then don’t clean the bathroom that you might be able to do another time. You also need to triage what you’re actually capable of doing in the time period you have at any given time. You don’t want to commit to 17 hours of work in a day if that’s not going to happen and then feel like you let yourself down when it wasn’t realistic in the first place. 

Reflect. Reflect on the hard work you’ve put into the work you’ve done over the day, week, month. Reminding yourself about what you’ve accomplished helps to predict your future success and keeps your mind focused on being able to successfully accomplish your goals rather than focusing on the things that don’t go perfectly. 

Everyone uses routines differently, find one that works for you and try to put it into practice for a few weeks to see how it impacts your view on life. 

Working From Home Struggles

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If you’ve been working from home even intermittently during this pandemic, it’s not impossible that you’re feeling a bit burned out. After all, by working from home, you’re asking your brain to both be productive and relax in the exact same space every day. 

Tips to trick your brain into seeing a “new workspace”

  1. Do a more usual routine. Get up, workout, have breakfast, get dressed as if you were going to work like usual. 
  2. Add plants to the space you’re working in. Plants not only add to air filtration and improve subjective human loneliness but green plants also provide a color that helps us feel more positive. Green has been proven to allow people to see things more positively. 
  3. Change what you’re looking at. If you’ve been looking at a white wall for the last few months, can you change the positioning of your desk or chair so that you’re seeing something else? You could also do this by putting up some temporary wallpaper or a new picture. 
  4. Take yourself out on a walk at least once a day. Getting natural light and moving can help make our day feel more broken up. 
  5. Set boundaries. If you aren’t required to do so, make sure that you’re not blurring the boundaries of when your day is over by repetitively checking your email or work chat. 
  6. Plan meals and exercise. Just as you might have in the past when going to work, set yourself a time to do your exercise, whatever that may be. Plan out your meals and meal prep if possible. It takes the guesswork out of meals and results in you feeling more control in eating healthy for you.

Work from Home – Revisited

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A woman working from home during 2020

This week, let’s check back in about working from home. You might be hitting your 7-month mark of working from home and many of us are experiencing burnout from the redundancy of working from home. I’m putting together a few tips on ways to stay refreshed while working from home.

How To Deal With Working From Home

Feeling grateful for working from home.

As a physician, I feel very lucky every day to be able to help my patients. I also feel incredibly grateful that I can do this work from the safety of my home without being in the hospital or having to wear PPE every day to protect myself in the hospital. It’s worth taking a moment when you feel burned out to feel grateful about the benefits and safety of working from home. 

Creating the atmosphere that makes you most efficient. 

  1. Define your workspace. Even if you don’t have a desk, pick one or a few spaces where you’ll plan to do the majority of your work. Define them as places where you’ll be at peak focus for especially tough tasks versus 
  2. Not working in relaxing places. Avoid your bed and couch, where you tend to relax if possible. By avoiding these spaces of relaxation we preserve them as places to wind down, which you especially need when you’re working from home.
  3. Take breaks as you would have at work. Snack break, fresh air break, coffee break. Try to keep up with taking some breaks even if that is just stretching or getting a glass of water. At home we’ve lost some sense of that and it’s worth planning that out between your meetings.

Plan your day accordingly. 

It might feel tough to plan out your day especially when random meetings and calls pop up. However, if you at least try to sketch out your day, by the hour or half hour, you can try to schedule things out in a way that helps you feel that you can keep progressing in your day, even if timing gets a little or a lot off track.

Take advantage of healthier habits. 

Do you remember thinking to yourself, I wish I didn’t have to get take out for lunch/dinner all the time? Maybe you wished you could have coffee from a ceramic mug or focus on finally trying to eat a lower inflammation diet (low/no gluten or dairy).

Now is the time to try this out. Meal planning even if you’re at home is still worthwhile by making things at the start of the week and putting it into containers can save time and make healthy eating a no-brainer. At the same time, planning your workouts remains incredibly important. It might feel that you don’t need to wake up until right before your first meeting of the day, but if you were a morning workout person, try to get back to that, even if it’s at home.

Could you fit in a 20 min workout at lunchtime now that you don’t have the commute back and forth? Pick a health goal and try to focus on it every time you consider not following through. 

Pick a cut-off time.

Just because you’re working from home, doesn’t mean you need to work from home 24/7. Know when your last meeting is and plan something that causes a cut-off time. Maybe you’ve signed up for an online workout class that you’ve prepaid, or you have a facetime or in-person dinner date with a friend.

Having something that forces you to cut off work is incredibly important to continue not just a physical space difference from work at home, but a mental difference so that you can unwind and relax, preparing yourself mentally and emotionally for the next day.

Follow these ideas and create some of your own. We can breathe life back into working from home and make it our conscious choice rather than something we feel relegated to doing for an unknown amount of time longer. 

If, after reading this, you still feel like you need some help coping with working from home, consider reaching out.

Do It For Your Future Self

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A sign depicting the words difficult roads lead to beautiful destinations on the future self blog post page

What can you do now for your future self? Is it just self-care?

In a time of such uncertainty, how do you maintain motivation to keep looking forward? Right now, if you’re working from home, it can feel like you’re busier than ever, or it can feel incredibly boring and a waste of time. Either way, it can feel increasingly difficult to stick with a routine. Moreover, in a crisis, we don’t see a point to a routine.

I’ve heard over and over, what’s the point of looking to the future, there’s nothing to look forward to because who knows how long this will last? Of course that is true, the timeline of this virus is uncertain, as Dr. Fauci says, “the virus makes the timeline”, however, can you reframe your view of this crisis in a way to help where you can and still plan for your future and hurdles you’ll have to get over once you’re back to a more regular routine? 

Ways to think about your future haven’t changed so drastically, but if finding motivation might get in the way. Working from home might feel at first like a great break. You get to sit on your couch, no commute, and watching TV on your breaks.

But these same things that made it feel nice at first, might be in your way from keeping your mental energy focused during work time, and then prevent you from being effective in your downtime.

Things To Do For Your Future Self

Here are some tips to think about as you go along with your social isolation and work from home endeavors:

  1. Maintain your sleep schedule. While it could feel easier to be on a holiday or vacation sleep schedule (staying up later, waking up later), this can actually shift your brain into a less productive mode. You should maintain your needed hours of sleep, scientists say around 7-8 hours of sleep is needed for an average adult to have added immune system benefits. But that might require you to shift the cycle you’re already in. Even if you’re tired in the morning, wake up earlier, the same as you would for your usual work schedule. This will help you feel tired on time at night and shift your sleep. 
  2. Meal Prep. Maintaining a healthy diet and eating healthy or keeping on target to eat healthy can boost your immune system and helps to tackle anxiety and depression that right now in the face of a pandemic is soaring. Meal prepping can help to decrease stress eating by taking out the decision part of our brain that says “eat snacks” that release dopamine like high carb and high sugar, rather than maintaining fiber, protein, and good fats.
  3. Reading > Netflix. Reading a book is helpful for the economy (buying the physical book can help writers during this difficult time), it’s a great break for your eyes from blue light of your phone, TV, and computer screens, and it also stimulates your thinking. When you read, you must create the images in your mind, it uses a different part of the brain. It might stimulate your motivation and ideas to work towards your goals. 
  4. Identify your distractors and plan to overcome. Do you find yourself scrolling through Instagram or playing games on your phone more hours in the day than you would have anticipated? Sometimes our brains are trying to give us some distance from stress, so when you notice this, try to switch to doing something that might burn off some anxious energy, like taking a walk, crunches or pushups. You might also try to reset by drinking ice cold water or splashing cold water on your face. This can activate your nervous system to calm down and allow you to get refocused. 
  5. Keep your goals close at hand. Just because where we work and what we do day to day might look different, doesn’t mean you have to lose track of your goals. Try creating and keeping a dream board or simply using post-it notes in your work space. Anything to help you remember what your goals are and stay aware of what the bigger picture you’re working towards looks like at all times. 

**Please note this is not to be taken as medical advice. If you need medical care reach out to your provider or utilize emergency services.