Effective techniques to reduce stress in the home office

Working from home can be a challenge, especially when it comes to separating work and play. Dr. Eva Elisa Schneider, mental health expert, gives advice on how to better manage the transition between work and leisure by working from home and reduce stress.

How can you better manage the transition between work and play when working from home to reduce stress?

We often make the mistake of not making any separation between work and free time when working from home: the laptop is on the dining table, the notebook next to the bed, the work document on the coffee table. It helps a lot to create a physical separation and have all your work-related things in a fixed place at home. Additionally, after work you should, if possible, put your laptop out of sight and reach and not access work content on your private cell phone. It's easy to pick up your cell phone and look at your email inbox and you're quickly faced with work issues again, even though your brain really wants to tune out.

I also recommend consciously leaving the house after a day of working from home and changing the context, for example for a walk, sport or social activities. We need to give our bodies and minds some transition time to move from work mode to leisure mode; Before it was the trip home by train or car, today we have to make these transitions ourselves.

Dr. Eva Elisa Schneider is a psychotherapist and expert in mental health in the workplace. She works as a speaker and trainer with international companies in the areas of healthcare management and organizational development. She previously worked as an executive and in science and healthcare. On her podcast “Work Healthy” she regularly talks about mental health in the workplace.

How can you integrate relaxation techniques into your daily work routine to reduce stress?

Relaxation should not take place just once, but ideally several times throughout the day. Of course, it is not necessary to do 60 minutes of yoga several times a day, but rather it is specifically about taking short breaks of 5-10 minutes in which mental efforts can briefly rest. In other words: open the window, go outside for a moment, stretch, take a few deep breaths, do a mini-meditation, or something similar.

We can do a lot of good for our body and mind by taking small microbreaks and therefore feel less tired at night. A great technique for regular breaks is the Pomodoro technique: you work for 25 minutes, then take a 5-minute break, then work again for 25 minutes, take a 5-minute break, etc. There are great stopwatches on the internet that can help you with this, for example pomofocus.io.

What resources or tools can help manage digital stress and promote mental health?

In general, I recommend consciously measuring your time on your computer and cell phone. For example, on your mobile there are weekly statistics that show how much time you spend in front of the screen. That often opens your eyes. On the computer, it is advisable to deactivate elements that attract attention such as sounds, notifications and pop-up windows so as not to be constantly distracted. On average, we are interrupted at work every 4 minutes; It's hard to concentrate. Therefore, we must ensure that we create a distraction-free environment so that our attention can remain on one thing.

It also helps a lot to turn off all applications, such as your email inbox and communication platforms, and only open them at certain times, similar to a telephone consultation. This can be very useful if you want to work deeply on a task.

What stress management techniques are particularly effective?

Stress is not always the same as stress. Many people only think about relaxation when it comes to dealing with stress, but relaxation is not always a panacea. There are three different ways to manage stress:

1. First, instrumental stress management. It refers to everything that stresses us on a daily basis at work, for example, too little time, too much workload, etc. It's about learning to set priorities or organize yourself well.
2. The second way is mental stress management: these are all the internal beliefs we have about ourselves, like “I have to do everything perfectly!” Mental stress management aims to change these internal assumptions and thus reduce the stress that arises internally.
3. The third way, regenerative stress management, has to do with relaxation. Regenerative stress management aims to calm yourself down, for example by taking regular breaks and having enough rest time. Successful stress management depends mainly on where the stress arises: if you have problems with time management, you should look into how to organize yourself better (=instrumental stress management) instead of attending relaxation courses (=regenerative stress management).

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