Fatigue and Stress Fuel the Tendency to Ruminate; a Mental Break Helps Us Leave the Bad Mood Behind
It is so easy to arrive home from work in a bad mood, cranky and frustrated.
Our
grandfathers’ generation found a solution in a dry martini. Today, it
falls to psychology to help us transition happily from work to home.
Psychologists call it “boundary work”—devising routines and rituals that
create mental space between the day’s frustrations and the evening’s
rewards.
The routine could be hitting the gym or something as
simple as running errands or stopping for an espresso. “It’s all about
what makes you happy,” says Cali Williams Yost, a consultant on flexible
workplaces and author of “Tweak It,” a book about making small changes
to improve well-being.
To leave behind his work caring for
children with complicated medical needs, Gregory Kraus, a New York City
pediatrician, says, “I’m embarrassed to say that I watch celebrity
gossip apps on my phone.”
After the stress of working, preparing
dinner and putting his 4-year-old daughter to bed, Dr. Kraus says
browsing through images of celebrities’ seemingly carefree lives brings
his blood pressure down.
In the past, Dr. Kraus found a quirkier
way to unwind from the stress of working in an intensive care unit.
“I’d stop at Filene’s on the way home and methodically go through the
tie rack,” he says, checking out the color and texture of the fabrics.
Shaking off the after-work blues can be hard, especially when
we are tired. The human stress response is a chemical chain reaction of
hormones coursing through one’s syste-m, says Jordan Friedman, a New
York City stress-management trainer and author. Add fatigue, “and it’s
like dousing those chemicals with lighter fluid.”
This physical
state fuels the normal human tendency to recall and ruminate on negative
experiences. But if people can distance themselves from the office,
create a mental break and avoid thinking about work, they tend to feel
more upbeat during the evening, according to a 2013 study led by Sabine
Sonnentag, a professor of work and organizational psychology at the
University of Mannheim, in Germany.
Some people need to check
their email when they get home before they can take their minds off
work. Others limit the use of mobile devices after hours and create
mental space by immersing themselves in a novel or movie.
It
helps to think about the transition from work to home in three stages:
leaving the office, getting home and walking through the door, Ms. Yost
says.
Figure out what triggers negative thoughts and feelings at
each stage and either eliminate the triggers or develop new routines and
rituals to get around them.
A feeling of competence at the end of the workday can ward off a bad mood, research shows.
An
executive at a Washington, D.C., nonprofit deliberately arranged her
schedule to evoke these feelings in herself, building a 30-minute
“buffer zone” into the end of the day when she barred meetings and
calls, says Michael Kahn, a Severna Park, Md., psychologist, author and
executive coach.
The executive, who participated in a study Dr.
Kahn conducted, used the time to wrap up important tasks and end the day
on an upbeat note, he says.
Before leaving work, consider
setting aside your unfinished to-do list and instead write down all your
accomplishments, says Deb Levy, a Cambridge, Mass., business and life
coach. Some people take a few minutes for deep breathing to relax.
Ms. Levy says a manager who participated in one of her studies
envisions putting all his work concerns into a cardboard box and
closing the lid.
Using public transportation can help. Just give
yourself enough time to catch your bus or train without rushing. Some
people build time into the evening commute to get coffee or run errands,
Ms. Levy says.
Biking or walking to and from work can ease
unhappiness, and taking a bus or train allows time to relax or read,
according to a study last year at the University of East Anglia.
Playing
a mobile game called Brick Breaker on the evening commute home helped
Julie Burstein detach from her previous job as a radio producer.
After
a day spent managing and listening, hurling a digital ball at a wall of
bricks was a welcome change, says Ms. Burstein, author of “Spark: How
Creativity Works” and host of “Spark Talks” at the Metropolitan Museum
of Art in New York.
Many commuters tune out their surroundings, but a recent
University of Chicago study found talking with strangers can lighten
one’s mood.
Researchers did nine experiments and found commuters
ignore strangers because they mistakenly assume that talking with
others would be unpleasant or that others don’t want to talk.
A pharmaceutical executive looked forward to her drive home across the Chesapeake Bay Bridge each evening.
“She knew that by the time she got to the other side, she was in the world of her family,” Dr. Kahn says.
Another
executive always entered his house through the front door. “Not only
was he entering his family life, but as he closed it he was shutting the
door on his work life,” Dr. Kahn says.
Inside the home, it’s
important to figure out what might be happening when you walk in the
door to set you off, says Ms. Yost, the workplace consultant and author.
Some parents feel overwhelmed when children who are overexcited or demanding.
Set
up a new routine. Some parents explain to children in advance that they
need a few minutes alone after arriving home; others promise each child
several minutes of undivided attention. Either way, stick to it
consistently.
Look for workarounds. If your mood tanks at the thought of cooking dinner, buy takeout, or prepare and freeze meals in advance.
If
you get stressed at the sight of piles of dirty laundry, throw a load
into the washer in the morning, move it to the dryer after work and fold
it before bed, Ms. Yost says.
Deeper solutions are needed if
the after-work blues drag on for a week or more. “A mood is like a
fever,” Dr. Kahn says. “It’s a signal your system is giving you that
something isn’t right.”
For more than a year, Bethany Butzer left
work feeling so sad that she sometimes shed a few tears while driving
home. There was nothing wrong with her job as a research analyst, she
says. The work “just wasn’t speaking to me.”
She took up
breathing exercises and yoga to help her think more clearly, and says
she realized “the 9-to-5 cubicle life wasn’t for me.”
Ms. Butzer
quit her job, wrote a book, became a yoga teacher and now works as a
hospital research fellow, studying yoga’s potential to improve
children’s mental health. Her new job “combines everything that I
enjoy,” she says.
Her advice: “Don’t be too quick to try to get
rid of the bad mood right away. Pay attention to what your feelings
might be trying to tell you.”
