A guide to mental health in the workplace

The essence of mental health in the workplace has never been to "eliminate negative emotions" or "force yourself to be positive", but to draw a clear line first emotional boundaries , and then create one that suits your personal situation emotional repair mechanism ——Any suggestion that makes you look for problems solely within yourself and requires you to fully adapt to the environment is a scam.

Last week, I was having hot pot with a friend who works in operations at an Internet company. She just threw the revised third edition of the weekly report on the keyboard. She turned around and sent a message to her leader, "Okay, I'll give you the adjusted version tomorrow morning." She put down her phone and searched "How to relieve emo at work." In fact, this is the norm for most people in the workplace: We always feel that having emotions is because we are not professional enough. We have read a lot of chicken soup that "emotional stability is the best for adults", and we have suppressed it until breast nodules are about to come out, but we still don't understand what the problem is.

Nowadays, there are actually two completely different directions for workplace psychological intervention in academia. No one is right or wrong, it just depends on which one suits you. One is the view of the positive psychology school, which believes that individuals' resilience can be improved through methods such as cognitive restructuring and mindfulness training. It is suitable for those who do not want to change jobs for the time being and who do have self-attribution bias - for example, fresh graduates who have just joined the job always equate criticism from their leaders with "I am not good at it." In fact, if you break it down and look at it, it may be that you are not familiar with the rules of the industry. Just change it a few times and you will not suffer from insomnia and self-denial every day. When I helped several companies with employee psychological assistance (EAP) projects in the past two years, I met a little girl who was working on products. She used to hide in the stairwell and cry every time she was criticized by the reviewers. Later, she made her own "emotional bill": every time she was unhappy, she would write down what I really believed in this matter. What she didn't consider was which ones were caused by the leader's sudden change of heart and which ones were caused by the cooperation department's meddling. After she made it clear, she immediately stopped feeling internally. She wrote down her own problems and corrected them. She either dumped other people's blame on the spot or turned around and forgot about it. After three months, her condition improved visibly.

The other school of thought is critical of organizational behavior. To put it bluntly, many workplace psychological problems are essentially conflicts between labor and management, and are not a problem of your mentality at all. Meaningless overtime, the need to change work day and night, and PUA-style performance appraisals, no matter how you adjust your mentality, it will be useless. Just like you can't ask a person who works in an office with excessive formaldehyde every day to drink more hot water to cure his cough, right? Last year's survey data from the Institute of Psychology, Chinese Academy of Sciences also showed that more than 60% of negative emotions in the workplace come from "work arrangements with unequal rights and responsibilities" and "meaningless internal collaboration", and less than 20% come from problems with personal ability matching. I met a girl who was doing e-commerce design before. She stayed with Party A for a year and was asked by the buyer every day to "make the logo larger and smaller at the same time" and "change it to that colorful black." She practiced mindfulness for two months but still felt nauseous at the thought of going to work. Later, she quit her job and opened a small studio to take independent design orders. Now she earns more in half a year than she did in the previous year. Last time I saw her, most of the dark circles under her eyes had disappeared.

Oh, by the way, someone also asked me if I want to give up emotions at work? There is really no need to listen to the nonsense on the Internet that "give up your emotions and you will win." You are not here to work as a robot. It is normal to have emotions. An internal survey last year by a major company showed that employees who deliberately suppressed their emotions had a burnout rate that was 37% higher than those who allowed themselves to occasionally complain. Many working people around me who are in good shape have their own "little quirks": some people have to take off their work badges when they leave the company after get off work every day, and they just have the four words "Do not disturb after get off work" carved on their foreheads. ； Someone puts a kneading device at the workstation. If you are angry, just hold it for two minutes. You don’t have to quarrel with anyone. Just let the anger go. ； There are also people who set aside two hours a week to not work at all and either play badminton or paint oil paintings. They will wait until these two hours have passed even if the sky falls. There is nothing fancy about these tips. You don’t have to learn other people’s time management methods. What suits you is the best.

Of course, I’m not encouraging everyone to resign whenever they feel unhappy. After all, everyone has to eat and pay rent. You can do the math yourself: Can the compensation given to you by this job cover the emotional cost you have to bear? If you have an annual salary of one million, there is no shame in putting up with weird leaders. If you have little money and many things to do but still get annoyed every day, there is really no need to waste it. Your salary may not be enough for you to see a psychiatrist or treat your nodules in the future.

After all, going to work is a transaction of exchanging time and energy for remuneration. There is no need to bet your entire life value on this three-thirds of an acre of land. There is no standard answer when it comes to mental health in the workplace. You don’t have to force yourself to conform to anyone’s expectations. Whatever you feel comfortable with will be more effective than any workplace success study.