As I work with clients and write letters to their doctors for investigations, there has been one common health theme during the pandemic. COVID kilos. Fortunately, I haven’t been seeing too much of a mental health fallout wth clients but everybody has an extra six to ten kilos they are keen to shift.
What I am hearing when checking in with people at the moment is that they are limping to the end of the year, or that they well and truly hit the wall weeks ago. There is no doubt about it, our need to mount and maintain a stress response was called upon this year. Prolonged stress does not come without it's problems, particularly as we get older.
Burnout is a real thing. The World Health Organisation revised it's definition of burnout mid last year stating that burnout is a “syndrome conceptualized as resulting from chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed”.
What you’re experiencing is the “let down effect” or post-stress illness. Dr Marc Schoen is a psychologist who first identified the “let down effect”. During a stressful period our body releases stress hormones called cortisol, adrenaline and noradrenaline. These hormones activate our immune system to fight against illness during that time. Who really wants to be sneezing their way through an important phase of your career or family life? What happens is our white blood cells are like soldiers patrolling the gates and stopping opportunistic infections taking us down.
It's crazy Christmas time and life is busy.
The usual routines that keep us in balance tend to fall away this time of year. We have end of year events to get to, gift shopping to do, Christmas lunch to contend with and holidays to prepare for.
You may find yourself ordering more take away dinners, having more late nights or not getting your exercise in as much as you would like to and it's okay.
As we head into the festive season, this can still feel like a challenging time. It’s not uncommon to be feeling overwhelmed right now. You may even be getting to the end of the year feeling tired, unmotivated, and a little traumatised even? Here are three things you can do to have a good end to 2020.
Simon Sinek talks about the importance of knowing what your WHY is. What is it that motivates and drives you? What are you passionate about? What I know coming out of the crazy year that 2020 has been is that moving forward my WHY, my passion is to save other women going through what I went through during those years. If I can help them fast track their way through it or avoid it entirely I think that is meaningful work. I am passionate about helping women live better lives by implementing smarter ways of living and working.
There is a silent 21st century epidemic that’s not being talked about. It’s the self neglect epidemic that afflicts many of us, but in particular women. You can choose any living generation of women and see gross self neglect present for most in some form or another. Whether it’s neglecting our health, our mental wellbeing or our emotional needs we consistently fail to put our own oxygen mask on first as we are so busy caring for others in our life.
Working from home for much of 2020 has really changed what the work landscape looks like and as organisations prepare for some form of return to work in 2021, they need to have their people ready to do so. However, the issue that arises for many is that not everybody is doing ok right now. Not all employees are working to their fullest potential. In fact, many are worn out, tired, over stretched (especially those in Melbourne that home schooled kids for six months) and some are burnt out.
How ready are your teams going to be for working the COVID normal going into in 2021? Will your teams be transitioning from working at home to returning to the workplace? Will you adopt a hybrid approach? There are so many things to consider including what state your people are in entering a new year after such a trying 2020.
When my kids were really young we had a playlist we played during car rides that featured a quirky band called the Dreyer Family band. One of my favourite songs they sang was called ‘Family Photograph’. In it the lovely sounding (presumably) Mrs Dreyer, sings ”What you think about gets bigger, what you think about grows wings, what you think about becomes you, so let’s think about love, love, love, love, peace and love…”.
Recently, I was speaking with a friend that’s a team leader in a fast growing tech company. We were talking about COVID-19 and working from home. Her team were desperate to get back in the office. Working from home had them feeling disconnected and overwhelmed. As a result, productivity was down. Completely changing our way of living has been disruptive and discombobulating for many, leaving people feeling anxious, lonely and stressed.
Loneliness and weak social connections are associated with a reduced lifespan similar to that caused by smoking 15 cigarettes a day and even greater than that associated with obesity. Loneliness is also associated with a greater risk of cardiovascular disease, dementia, depression, and anxiety. At work, loneliness reduces task performance, limits creativity, and impairs other aspects of executive function such as reasoning and decision making.
As the world slowly re-awakens many of us will find ourselves in more high pressure situations than we had been in for a while. With or without COVID-19 in our lives pressure is unavoidable. It is an everyday part of life that we all have to deal with. Quite often we are experiencing pressure on a daily basis and often multiple times a day. For a long time we have lived lives where pressure comes at you from everywhere. Internal and external pressures placed on us along with being time poor are a recipe for overwhelm and for many people the cracks show in the form of poor mental and physical health outcomes, regardless of age.
People are already wanting to know when the isolation period will be eased as Australia successfully flattens the curve of reported COVID-19 cases. With no cure, no vaccine in sight and no herd immunity strategy on the table it is highly likely we will be in isolation for some time. No doubt this situation calls for a positive attitude and looking at this is a marathon and not a sprint.
COVID-19 is everywhere we look, listen, and live. It feels like everybody is telling me via my email inbox, social media feed and in my conversations what I should be doing during my time in isolation. Be more productive, use this time to write that book, take up a new hobby, learn a new language while you have the time and on and on it goes.
We are now experiencing a period of what some are calling forced deglobalisation.
We can resist it, be stressed and overwhelmed by it, or we can choose to be in acceptance and work with, not against the circumstances.
The economic fallout is going to be enormous. Our governments are acting, whether you agree with those actions or not. Unlike the Great Depression, they are rolling out stimulus packages as this crisis unfolds. We can only hope they will soften the financial blow.
As a working mum with kids at home for the foreseeable future I think it’s fair to say we face challenging times ahead. Schools are closed. The government’s advice is to not have older relatives look after kids to avoid the spread of coronavirus. Child care options are quickly disappearing and so the support that we previously had leaned into to make our lives work are disappearing.
Everybody keeps saying it, we are living in unprecedented and challenging times. This COVID-19 pandemic has completely up ended so many of our lives. Many of us now find ourselves navigating the logistics of how our day to day lives will work in social isolation, where our livelihoods will come from and then also contemplating the bigger existential questions that come with this.
