I don’t think I have ever come across anyone working in either law or social care that hadn’t dealt with excessive work place stress at some point in their career. And, to a certain extent, stress, responsibility and pressure are an inherent and unavoidable part of these roles. How we deal with these things is what determines where our breaking point is.
I am not going to pretend for one minute that I am an expert at this. And you might think that someone who spends such a large proportion of their free time blogging about their job isn’t in any position to be doling out advice on work-life balance. You may have a point there, but I think I have been quite open on this blog about the toll my job has taken, and continues to take, on the rest of my life and that I’ve had to find ways to deal with it. Over the years, especially the last few years of especially difficult circumstances, I have picked up a number of tips and tricks: some of which I have found myself, others have been handed down to me by people much wiser than I. My therapist for one.
And that is as good a place to start as any: recognise when you need help. This is a lesson I wish I’d learned far sooner than I did. I thought it was a sign of weakness that I was struggling and couldn’t figure it out on my own. Which was absolute nonsense, of course, but that was how I felt at that time. It took me a few attempts to find what worked for me, and my early experiences in therapy weren’t great. But that didn’t mean I couldn’t be helped, just that I needed someone to take a different approach, and when I found that person, she helped me figure out what I needed and set me on the course that ultimately led to me moving out of local authority employment and being much happier and healthier. The link between the two is merely circumstantial and it would have been possible to achieve the latter without the former, I am sure. Just to be clear.
The best advice my therapist ever gave me was that you can’t make a job like mine smaller, so I had to make my life outside of work bigger if I wanted to keep the two in balance. I’d had a lot of trouble trying to explain to people why it wasn’t as simple as just not answering the phone when I had so many people relying on me, and I felt like I would never be able to do my job and feel well again. But hearing it phrased that way really helped. I started identifying things that mattered to me and making room for them in my life. I found it very difficult to switch off from work if all I was doing when I got home was watching reruns of NCIS and playing Tetris on my phone. But its easier to walk away from work when I am walking to something else. It doesn’t really matter what that something else is, and for some people that something might be NCIS (so no judgement if that’s you) but for me it’s been gardening, painting, learning embroidery and really anything that makes me feel creative. And yes, that includes this blog.
I’m also fortunate that I have a small but very supportive network here at home, who are very good at enforcing the boundaries that I have a tendency to let slip. The most important part of that network is my very patient husband, who comes home from a day at work and pries me away from my computer if I’ve been working too long. Our rescue cat fulfills this role during the day. He is absolutely fantastic at encouraging me to start a bit later on the days I don’t have to be at my computer at 8.30 on the dot. That encouragement usually takes the form of lying on my chest and purring a lot, which is pretty darn persuasive. He also pops by during the day to remind me to take breaks, and to use those breaks for important things, like getting 5 minutes in the sunshine, receiving cat cuddles and swirling his food around his bowl. He is the best office mate I have ever had, and whilst I worked fully remote, he was a very important part of the systems I had in place to stop work from blurring in to the rest of my life since I didn’t get to physically walk away at the end of the day.
I’ve noticed that, for me, symbolic things like that really make a difference. So I started a little end of the work day ritual where I turn off my computer, turn out the light in my office and close the door. It’s a simple thing, but not opening that door again until my next working day is a rule I try to abide by.
One thing I have always been pretty good at it, is that I don’t work when I’m not working. I’ll work long hours Monday to Friday if I have to, but at the weekend, it’s not happening. If I am on leave then my laptop and work phone stay in that closed office. There is always the temptation to ‘just check’ in case something urgent has come in that is going to catch me out when I come back from leave, but how I manage that is by making sure my out of office redirects to a designated person, and that person has my personal number. I tell them that if anything urgent comes in, and usually there are specific cases that I want them to look out for, then they should contact me on my personal number. That way, if no one calls I know that nothing urgent has come in. In 8 years, I can count on one hand the number of times someone has actually called my personal number, because despite how it feels sometimes, everything does not actually depend on me! Yes, I am probably a bit of a narcissist.
Sometimes that fear of the unknown gets too much though, especially on the last night before I return from a week or two of leave. And when that happens, I can’t sleep because I am worrying about all of the things I might have to deal with the next day. So on those nights, I allow myself a few minutes just to check my emails on my phone. I don’t respond to any, but I identify what particular monsters are or are not lurking in the shadows waiting for me, and that is usually enough to break my stress spiral.
I have a tendency, when stressed, to start listing all of the things that I need to do. Which means I just starting piling pressure on top of pressure in a ridiculously toxic cycle: my stress spiral. This used to get really bad and I would go days without sleep and getting increasingly unpleasant to be around. But I’ve learned how to break that spiral now: I pick something on the list that I can do something about, and do that something. It means I’ve been known to write this blog at 3 a.m., and start Christmas shopping in the middle of the night in mid-September, but it is usually enough to stop me from further spiralling.
I email myself things too, or write weird lists in the middle of the night, just to relieve some of the weight that I have needlessly piled upon myself by stopping myself having to remember things!
Another thing I have found particularly helpful is that usually the last thing I do on a Friday is write next week’s list of jobs. I noticed I was spending a lot of the weekend thinking about what I needed to do Monday, so I didn’t forget. By writing it down, I know I won’t forget and then I can be much more present.
I spoke with a colleague about this once, and for them Friday was the worst time to do a list. It meant they were more likely to think about it all weekend. So they were a Monday list person instead. Starting the week by organising their thoughts.
I don’t know if this is helpful or not for you, my readers. Somebody once said they appreciated openness and some occasional vulnerability so I took that to heart, I guess!
In case it isn’t obvious from the fact I still haven’t identified the authority I used to work for, or the organisation I now work for, the views expressed on this blog are my own opinion and not the opinion of that local authority or organisation.