Health can easily fall to the back of your mind when your phone is ringing non-stop and a new deadline seems to appear every five minutes. However, your mental health is far more important than any assignment, deadline or contract which could ever come up at work. If you are completely stressed, you risk spiralling into a situation in which your relationships are strained, you feel terrible, and your happiness declines hugely. Not to mention, your productivity at work will also tank.
There are a number of easy steps you can take to avoid damaging your health in this way after Easter. Firstly take regular exercise. Whether you choose to take regular walks, or factor gym sessions into your daily routine, stepping away from your desk, breathing and exercising will leave you surprisingly refreshed and rejuvenated.
Reading is also an excellent way to protect your health. By transporting yourself to whichever fictional realm you have chosen to visit, you push day-to-day difficulties from your mind. There is no space for your boss’s memo in Narnia or Hogwarts. Ensconcing yourself in a good book prior to your 11am strategy meeting will leave you fully focused and ready to contribute positively during the discussion.
Healthy eating is also vital to your own wellbeing after Easter. The typical clichés regarding avoision of large quantities of chocolate over the festive period oversimplify this point hugely. While working, it is easy to skip meals without realising and then when we eventually do eat, to grab some fast-food or a meal-deal. Unfortunately, these ‘cheap and easy’ foods are actually expensive and incredibly unhealthy over the long-term. Eating unhealthy food can leave us feeling tired and sluggish in the short-term. Worse still, this diet, combined with sitting for long periods could cause us serious health problems later in life. Healthy eating can easily be fitted into the working day. You could make a salad before leaving home, opt for a banana instead of that chocolate bar in the cafeteria, or even cook when you get back home. Preparing food in this way may seem like an exorbitant imposition when fast-food is so readily available. However, a healthier diet will give you more energy, while saving you money and preventing you from being plagued by medical issues when you retire.
Spending more time with your family is also essential to improving your health after Easter. If those who love you the most feel like they are less important to you than an e-mail, their support for you will begin to wear thin. Nobody wants to feel isolated. However if you unwittingly push people away, due to an obsession with work, this is a risk you run. Worse still, you will end up talking incessantly about work problems at home, and home problems at work. Your colleagues may resort to drawing straws to determine who has a convenient errand to run in any other room than the one you have just entered. Such a reaction from your colleagues will only worsen your mental health. In order to avoid this situation when returning to work after Easter, it is important to draw a clear barrier between work and home. Ask your friends and family how their days went, show an interest in what’s going on in their lives, and most importantly, realise that whatever’s going on in your work life is not the most important thing in the world. That email, that task, and that letter will all still be there in the morning, as will that form. When speaking to work colleagues during breaks, talk about something positive. Nobody wants to be surrounded by negativity.
Getting healthy after Easter involves reflecting on your life, and taking advantage of all the happiness in it, regardless of what is going on at work. By focusing on your health, and particularly your mental health more than your emails, you will be able to breathe a new energy into all aspects of your life.
Everyone at Altruist Enterprises is passionate about improving your stress-management skills, so that you can get the most out of life. Obtain practical tools for managing your stress levels through our stress management course, or online stress management course.