Wake up and look around! Look around your Twitter feed, take a quick look on LinkedIn and check your Facebook page. We’re making significant inroads and de-stigmatizing mental health problems and have come to a stage where it is alright for people to talk about mental health problems and find good counsel and relief from others.
The importance of prioritizing and treating your mental health according to the need of the hour is a well-accepted principle. Celebrities are opening up about their mental health problems, and your local thrift store down the road has a whole new selection of Keep Calm stickers along with some pretty fantastic self-soothing products.
But even with the massive levels of acceptance and general approval out there, working women still tend to be a little murky with discussions about mental health and stability. There is no shortage of self-care strategies, but women are at a loss of strength to prioritize what’s necessary for life.
The professional world is constantly going on, regardless of how you feel or how exhausted you may be.
Finding ways to put your mental health first and prioritize it can help you maintain the strength required from you in the professional world and become successful at what you do without compromising on the well-being side of things.
If you’re looking to work on and improve your overall well-being in the workplace, you are at the right place. In this article, we look at some of the best ways to maintain your mental well-being as a working woman. Things might seem complicated, but remember that a little bit of self-care and me-time can do wonders.
Be Realistic in Ambitions
One of the most important ways to succeed in your work life is to set goals and work toward achieving them. While setting goals is a healthy way to succeed in life, one should remember that unrealistic ambitions and happiness standards bring more harm than good. As human beings, we can often be too hard on ourselves and set impossible goals.
A recent study found that unattainable goals are highly detrimental to the mental health of all working professionals, especially women. Instead of setting long-term goals that are unattainable, you should break your goals down into bits and put them in a way that is easy to achieve. Breaking goals down into smaller goals leaves room for improvement and allows you to reward yourself whenever needed. The reward doesn’t have to be expensive and extravagant, as anything small will do. A small bonus is a great way to encourage positive behavior and continue on the path to success.
Work on Meditation
Meditation is an excellent and effective way to help people manage stress levels in the workplace and improve their overall mental well-being. Almost all mental health problems in the workplace start with stress as the primary concerning factor. Studies have shown that meditation is a decent way to reduce your stress, maintain your mental health and even significantly improve your physical health in the process. That’s three birds you can get with one stone.
Most popular meditation techniques, including yoga, encourage you to meditate first thing in the morning after waking up or the last thing in the evening before you go to sleep. However, there are times when the stress relief provided by yoga is best-taken care of during the workday. There are meditation techniques that give comfort during the workday and help you get some much-needed stress relief. Take a couple of breaths, learn more about these techniques and prioritize mental peace.
Form Healthy Habits
Most working women spend a significant part of their day in the office. If we were to count hours, most working professionals spend around 8 to 12 hours a day in the workplace for five days a week. For many people, this is more than the time they spend at home. So, if you think about it, following healthy choices at work is more important than following healthy decisions at home because you’re spending a considerable amount of your week in the workplace.
It is easy to understand why convenient and unhealthy food is appealing to women in the workplace. It is easier to get, it comes fast, and it has a certain delicious feel to it, which you won’t get from other food items. However, filling up junk food during your workday can be an unhealthy choice for your body, both physically and mentally. As you start gaining weight, the detrimental impact of unhealthy food will also be seen on your mental health.
Go for Therapy
Sometimes all you need to improve your mental health is for someone to sit you down and talk to you about how you can follow to improve your mental health. Unfortunately, men and women in the professional world aren’t too comfortable getting help for their mental health. It is believed that only two out of every five people get the assistance and assurance they require to recover from anxiety and mood disorders. Anxiety is one of the most common problems facing women in the workplace today and is a severe issue that cannot be neglected at any cost.
It is convenient to brush off anxiety as stress, but it shouldn’t be considered the same. When coupled with depression, anxiety can form a severe ailment that significantly alters your style of living and leads you to additional stress. If you’re concerned for your mental health and feel that your fear is troubling your professional work as well, then you should probably sit down with a therapist and talk to them.
Therapy sessions, either in a group or individually, allow you to talk about your problems in the safe manner you want. This helps you get feedback in an unbiased way, without any issues. While you may not be able to squeeze in a weekly therapy session with a mental health therapist in your routine, remember that doing so will lead to beneficial results.
Take Breaks
In a bid to give our best at the workplace, all women professionals try to work as hard as they possibly can. Almost two in ten female employees are known to work 60 hours or more during a working week. Understanding the dynamic nature that we have developed due to the requirements of work, taking breaks might sound too unnecessary to many of us.
However, taking breaks is an efficient way to refuel during the working day and ensure that you don’t burn your engine out. Taking periodic breaks allows you to stay focused in the workplace and ensures that you don’t get bored or too stressed at your desk. If we’re looking from a physical perspective, breaks are necessary to give your body, especially your eyes and back, a break from the constant sitting in one place and staring at a screen experience.
Have a Healthy Bedtime Activity
We can’t come to think of the number of people who have unhealthy bedtime routines and cannot sleep properly, eventually feeling groggy and uninterested at work the next day. Our body needs 8 hours of sleep on average to function correctly the next day. If you aren’t giving that to your body, you will fail to perform effectively at work the next day, feel stressed, and eventually fall victim to unhealthy work patterns.
Instead of binge-watching series on Netflix before you go to sleep, try a little experiment where you don’t stream anything before you head over to your bed to sleep. Use the extra time you get to read something, practice some coloring, write a journal, take a bath, talk to a loved one or practice a musical instrument. It is helpful to find ways to calm you down from a tiring day and help you sleep well for the next day.
Limit Refined Sugar in Your Diet
Cutting down on added sugar in the form of sodas, pastries, and candies won’t magically reduce your depression. Still, it will do a great job of keeping your blood sugar levels stable and give you the energy levels required to run through the day without feeling tired, exhausted, or too stressed.
While there are no foods to fight stress or anxiety, magnesium items can combat fatigue and anxiety. Some foods high in magnesium and can be included in your diet include dark leafy vegetables, figs, pumpkin seeds, and avocados. You are what you eat, and following a healthy diet without any added sugars will help you limit the stress and anxiety of the professional world.
Discuss Mental Health at Work
While it isn’t all that necessary to disclose and talk about a recurring mental health condition at your workplace, you must bring it up if it impacts your job and affects the performance that you deliver. Instances of your work being involved as a result of the condition include:
- Visiting a therapist during work hours.
- Working from home occasionally as you try a new medication.
- Taking longer and more frequent breaks to recollect your thoughts.
Besides the cases mentioned above, mental health problems in stress and anxiety can also significantly reduce your productivity at work. If you feel like you cannot perform the way you used to and that the expectations associated with you will have to be reconsidered, you should walk up to your boss or your HR manager and talk to them about that. Discussing the condition with them will help make things more transparent and will also bring things into perspective.
Never neglect your mental health for a job or a career. Careers and professions come and go, but your mental health is essential and shouldn’t be neglected at all. Try some of the tricks we have mentioned in this article to improve your mental health and achieve success in your professional life.
