Mental health has been a prime concern for a long time. In fact, during and after the pandemic times, depression, anxiety, and PTSD have affected a large section of the world population. Now, as we are returning to our normal life again, many of us are struggling to tackle the stress at work.
We know that anxiety, depression, and PTSD can make a person’s work-life challenging. In fact, there are many articles available on the internet that discuss these challenges. In fact, many of them also discuss ways to overcome these challenges. However, when it comes to chronic mental health issues, those ways outs rarely work. This is primarily because managing chronic mental issues demand long-term planning and practice. However, Leanna Lee suggests that tracking stress at work might increase one’s productivity. Leanna states that she has been learning to deal with her mental health for the last 15 years. She also states that it is very important to have such systems and tools that support one’s mental health. In fact, this has been true for her. Therefore, read the article to know more about this interesting fact.
The Pandemic Time And Unproductivity
Leanna Lee states that living with chronic mental illness has a weird side to it. It makes one prepared for every possible situation. In such a state emergency situations become parts and parcels of one’s life. In fact, in a mental state one feels that he/she is ready to face any situation.
Lee states that in the initial days of the pandemic such a feeling dominated her. She used to get up early and stayed up late at night. She also states that she took long walks, did her walk, and even thought of starting to bake bread. However, this energetic mood soon weathered away. Soon she crashed and became unproductive. It was at this point that she realized that she was unprepared to handle stress at work. Like everyone else in the world, she was also unaware of how the lockdowns can affect mental health. Therefore, it was time to get some help and invest in the business and her mental health. She did exactly that. She got herself a PPP loan and a business coach.
Planning For The Worst Mental Health Day
Lee states that initially after starting to work with her business coach, Lacy, she informed her that she wanted a business that will support her mental health. However, even at that time, Lee was unaware of the connection between time tracking and mental health at work. Finally, one day when she turned utterly frustrated, she remembered that Lacy asked her to plan for the worst mental days.
Therefore, to plan in such a manner, it was necessary to realize how work worsened her anxiety. For that, there was a need for a simple system. There was also the need for better ways of stress reduction, in order to become more productive.
Create A Mental Health Tracker
According to Lee, it is very important to create a system that can track mental health in order to handle stress at work. The first step towards this is to identify our main frustrations. These frustrations may be of various types. One might be frustrated with one’s own low energy and inability to concentrate. Similarly, our inability to handle our mental health can also make us frustrated. In addition, there can be a whole lot of other frustrations.
After the identification is done, we need to decide the outcomes that we want to achieve. In fact, the outcomes can be achieved by reversing our frustrations. For instance, if we are frustrated with the lack of energy, then one desired outcome will be to gain more energy. Then, using a simple platform like Google Sheets the mental health tracker may be set.
In order to track mental health, Lee’s coach suggested she measure her mood on a scale of 1 to 10. 1 is for worst and 10 is for best. Lee used a strategy called gut checks. Apart from mental health Lee also tracked her time blocks of work, type of work, working hours, level of satisfaction with the clients, etc. This helped her to bring out the pattern of her mental health and her activities.
Conclusion
Following these steps, Lee claimed that she was able to know the things that stressed her. She also came to know about the time period after which her productivity dropped. Moreover, this teacher also discovered the events that refilled her energy level.
Accordingly, she scheduled her work. This enabled her to maximize her productivity and thereby handle stress at work effectively. She even provided a sample of the mental health tracker that we can use. Follow the link for the tracker:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1LlwKgVsu91QM3VcTr0tbcYu939TBcNFKVxjKDFy5HTQ/edit#gid=0
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