Burning out while working from home

All of you need to be aware of burning out while working from home

Since the lines between home and work are blurred you may not realise it but you may be overworking yourself.

Some of the symptoms (not medical opinion) may include

1. In the morning when it is time to start work, you don’t feel energetic. Instead you feel lethargic or slow. You may mistake it to think you are being lazy. 
2. By the time you finish work for the day, you just feel like sleeping and can’t even keep your eyes open. Instead of relaxing by playing a game or watching TV or working out or talking to your loved ones

If you weren’t used to working from home full time prior to the start of the lock-down, you may not realise that this is happening to you until it is too late. Consider that when you were coming to office regularly, you were leaving the house in the morning and facing traffic etc. In terms of mental activity it is a different thing to do compared to staring at a screen to complete your work.

In office, you could chat with others, go out for tea/coffee or just relax by stepping outside for fresh air. None of that maybe available to you at present. Add the tension around COVID, we all need to acknowledge that just like our physical body our mind needs to stay healthy too.

One simple thing that we can all practice is taking a day off once in a while apart from the weekends. 

For some of you the new routine is 5 days of work from home and 2 days of weekend at home without going out. You may be packing too many activities on the weekend. Since all our social interactions are also happening online, mentally we are never off work.

It is not enough to take the day off, you also need to relax your mind. Some of you may practice meditation, some of you may binge watch shows. I personally find it difficult to switch off so I end up playing an app called Brilliant. Basically end up relearning bunch of cool math stuff.

The struggle is real, I worked from home alone for 8+ years and there is no shame in acknowledging that our mind gets tired and gets bored and wants to relax and do something else. Our mind may not know what that something else is.

Find someone to talk to. If you are comfortable within your team discuss this amongst yourself. If you worry that in guise of doing this you may actually start procrastinating, let your team members know so that they can help remind you when required.

Most importantly you should practice communicating what you are feeling and experiencing. Over time it will get easier and if you have any latent stigma about being thought of as lazy etc. it will go away.

Take care of each other and stay safe.