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Work-Life Balance

Building A Routine for Mental Health

January 19, 2021 by Claire Brandon

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. 

Filed Under: Anxiety, Coaching, Happiness, Mental Health, Psychiatry, Self-Care, Wellness, Work From Home, Work-Life Balance

Working From Home Struggles

January 5, 2021 by Claire Brandon

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.

Filed Under: Mental Health, Psychiatry, Self-Care, Wellness, Work From Home, Work-Life Balance

Work from Home – Revisited

October 12, 2020 by Claire Brandon

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.

Filed Under: Anxiety, Happiness, Mental Health, Procrastination, Psychiatry, Self-Care, Wellness, Work From Home, Work-Life Balance

Flight Anxiety. Don’t let it get you down.

June 13, 2019 by Claire Brandon

An image of an airplane wing, depicting and symbolizing flight anxiety

While my travels are over, for now, I am excited to keep sharing what I learned while I was away. Travel can be exciting for many people, but others are distressed and at times held back from travel due to their flight anxiety, up to 70% of people, in fact!

While we might not know for sure what makes the difference, when I travel I like to try to troubleshoot for my patients who struggle with flight anxiety. These are a few tricks I find to help decrease flight anxiety.

Target your automatic thoughts of catastrophization. Statistics tell us that flying on a commercial airline is probably the safest way to travel. This is because the level of monitoring done on airplanes far exceeds that of what we monitor about cars and trains.

Another interesting statistic is that if you were in the unfortunate event of being in an airplane accident, it is likely that you would actually survive based on the most likely accidents that occur.

How To Deal with Flight Anxiety

What happens in the air though, even knowing all of these statistics? One issues is the lack of feeling grounded and in control. As humans we like to feel as much control as possible, being on an airplane, you have to give up that control. One idea is to try to take back control of your body with a few different exercises that might help.

  1. Write your name in cursive with your non-dominant hand over and over. 
  2. Utilize progressive muscle contraction to distract your body from the feeling of turbulence or take off. This might be squeezing your hands to make fists, or squeezing your legs and glutes repeatedly.
  3. Make conversation with the person next to you. You’d be amazed at who you meet on airplanes, and if 70% of people statistically have some level of flight anxiety, you are likely to find someone that is interested in being distracted as well.
  4. Listen to music that makes you happy and channel the confidence that artist has while you listen. 

Let me know if you enjoyed it on my Instagram page!

**This blog is not to be treated as medical advice, please discuss with your physician if you have any concerns.**

Filed Under: Anxiety, Brain Body, Brain Body Connection, Coaching, Depression, Flight Anxiety, Happiness, Mental Health, Panic, Psychiatry, Self-Care, Travel, Wellness, Work-Life Balance

Personalized NYC Mental Health · Dr. Claire Brandon

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