Don't take your work home with you!

We’ve all heard that saying of avoid taking your work home with you.

Work can be incredibly stressful. In fact, work-related stress has been shown to have a significant impact on irritability, anxiety, and anger, that gets taken out on your family, friends, or partner.

For those of us who study and work, we are required to rapidly switch into full-time student mode, as soon as we shut our computer down at 5pm or clock out of our retail shift. Being a student is exhausting—albeit rewarding—but often it can be hard to get into study mode when we are still stress from our work day.

I have found recently that while my job has become busier right now, that I’ll be lying in bed thinking about an email I didn’t send, or trying to write a paragraph for class but feeling distracted by thinking about having to get up for work the next day. Though it seems irrational (especially when your job does not have the same pressure as a doctor or a lawyer) to let a work issue fester and affect your mental health, the reality is that it often does.

But again, we’ve all heard someone say, ‘don’t take your work home with you!’! How do we avoid it?

Some suggested tips that I am trying to implement are:

1. Make sure you turn off your work emails, Teams notifications, or other mobile updates when you leave work! Some things may be unavoidable (like a roster app that tells you your shifts) but any technology associated with work that can be avoided outside of work hours, should be avoided.
2. Develop a fun routine that makes you excited to transition from work to study, whether it’s the excitement of cooking for yourself before a study session, taking a walk home, or even a long bath.
3. Engage in activities (social or otherwise!) outside of work and study so that these aren’t taking up your brain power 24/7.
4. And of course, talk to your loved ones about your work stress, offload, offload, offload, and then take a break!