With the massive move to work from home in light of the current pandemic, learning to detox from work is more important than ever before. When the line which demarcates working becomes as fine as “being in a given room” or “using a specific computer”, the whole world can get a little blurry. Where does work end and life begin?
The primary way I inoculate myself against work following me home too much is by following a detox ritual. The actual ritual itself is unimportant, but what matters is that you draw a distinct line between what you do when working, and what you do when not.
But how exactly do you even begin creating said ritual? Decompress and break up the day, mentally shift gears, and then take a few minutes to relax. While these sound simple, especially something like “relaxing”, there’s more to it than just sitting on the couch (unless you’re truly blessed). We’re trying to get a change in our mental state so that our own time isn’t haunted by the specter of our jobs.
Why Detox?
While the general concept of detox from a health standpoint may be about on par with homeopathy or other reptilian oils, the concept is a bit different from a mental perspective. Our goal is to reframe our day to insulate our lives from work and vice versa. By creating a post-work ritual and following it, we create a time where we allow ourselves to fully decompress without getting the bends.
The ritual you create doesn’t need to be fancy, and there really aren’t any rules for it either, aside from it being something notably different than what you do for work. You don’t even need to specifically follow one set of actions each time either. The ideas here are just ways to find the right things to make this practical and applicable for you.
Decompressing and Breaking Up the Day
Work from home is both a blessing and a curse. The curse is that it tends to follow you. When you work in an office and leave, you have a commute of some sorts which is a natural end to what you’re doing. What happens when your commute is from your desk in the living room to the couch? You’re still in the same environment you’ve been in working.
It’s easy to go sit back down and continue to type away at an email or some urgent issue (that isn’t really urgent in the grand scheme of things). It’s easy to check your phone which isn’t just a personal phone anymore; it’s for personal and work use now. Your electronic leash follows you everywhere you go.
By decompressing, you’re giving yourself time to let the last bits of thoughts about work out of your mind. Use this time to let yourself think about whatever needs doing and plan for later (if you have to). Wrap up your thoughts and put them in the bin for tomorrow, not now. Dedicate a fixed amount of time to this, or a limited range (like 10 to 20 minutes).
Force yourself to adhere to this. In the beginning, it’s easy to allow yourself to keep going and going and going, but by setting a range, you rush yourself to “finish”. This may make the thoughts more intrusive in the beginning, but after a short while, you will find that the less important details don’t come up at all in your decompression session. Once you decompress and the work part ends, you want to sever yourself from work entirely.
Break up your day by doing something passive which completely detaches you from the computer and from any kind of work influence while allowing your mind to adjust. Take a quick nap if you can, or meditate. This specific act allows you to force your mind to begin the process of shifting gears, but also marks the end of your decompression.
Mentally Shifting Gears
Even when you break up the day, it’s easy for the worries of work to come back as time goes on. It’s easy to stay up at night worrying about what’s happened or is happening. There’s a thin line between a short break and a long one. When you break up your day like we did before, are you stopping until you’re done with the task at hand or done for the day? You have to mentally shift gears to cement this as being more permanent.
Go for a walk, read a book, play an instrument. This can be a great time to exercise. Do something which taxes your mind without requiring a huge amount of thought. Take some time to learn a language or something else best done in small doses regularly.
You want to keep your mind engaged in the beginning. As you get used to the decompression process, this can get to be less and less necessary though. As you learn to quiet the thoughts about work, this mental shifting of gears gets to be less rigid and falls in line with how you act at home naturally. That being said, if it’s been a really bad day, I still find myself following more structured activities. I try to find a specific activity which I only do when I’m done with work.
Make sure this is something you look forward to and enjoy. It makes the process of shifting gears much easier when you want to. You want something which you will get absorbed in without feeling stressed. The goal is to spend some time with this activity so that when you’re done, you’ve forgotten about your previous concerns from work.
Relaxing
Hopefully, by now you’ve completely moved past work, or at least enough that it’s not a big deal. Take time to just plain relax. This should ideally be a more mindless activity which you enjoy or which will help you out. Find something slower paced than what you normally like to do if possible. We’ve been forcing ourselves to focus on shifting focus, but that gets tiring quick.
I like to use this time to do mindnumbing chores. If you worked out, go take a relaxing shower. What happens when your mind is at rest? Are thoughts of work creeping in or have they disappeared? If you find your mind wandering again, you may want to go back and try and shift gears again with something taxing.
Usually by this point, I’m thinking about my workout or what I read, not work. If work creeps in, it’s a trickle compared to when I get off of work. The point of relaxing is to let our minds bounce back and see where we are mentally.
What at work is concerning you enough that it’s creeping into your relaxation? If you’re really concerned with work, are you not concerned with how your lack of relaxation and stress is going to impact your job? If you obsess over things you can’t control at work, or in life, you’re just going to be stressed. I can’t do anything about someone screwing up and causing a bunch of work (except do it). I’m not going to do it on my time though.
Applying It
Once you come back down from mentally detoxing, how do you feel? Are your thoughts of work louder or quieter? Ideally, your mind is more at ease or has otherwise shifted gears. Be mindful of what you’re thinking about when you get to gaming, family time, or whatever you do when you’re done with work. What activities help you and which don’t do much for you?
Is your mind wandering again? If it is, why? What is eating at you so much that even with all of these specific actions you’re still thinking about work? More importantly, what if anything can you do about it? A lot of the problems which eat at people are things outside their control, so worrying doesn’t do much of anything.
It’s more important now than ever to detox from work. The world has gotten stressful enough, let yourself have one less worry. Decompress and break up your day, then shift gears, take a breather and relax, then move on with your day.
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