How to forget about working at home. I'm scared that time goes by so fast

Imagine a warm sea, golden sand, blue sky ... Or a gentle river, green Forest, the aroma of herbs ... and his own pale body, finally given to the rays of the sun. Or just your cozy apartment, a sunny balcony or the roof of the house - and you don’t have to wake up early or rush anywhere. It would seem, what could be more beautiful? And so, the body is relaxed, a panama is pulled over the forehead, and a lonely thought runs into the brain: “I wonder how it is at work now? Have you signed a contract? Have you looked at all the conditions? What if they don't find necessary documents?" A lonely thought turns into a wasp, then the same one flies, and a heavy, gloomy, stinging cloud begins to circle overhead. And that's it: the sky is no longer so blue, the aroma is not so pleasant, and I want to pack my things and rush back to work.

How not to think about work, So what's this? Psychologists call this phenomenon the weekend syndrome. It was first noticed at the end of the twentieth century, and now this term is known to all post-industrial powers, where they have ever heard of existentialism or the question of existence and the meaning of life. Why? Because the weekend syndrome is very closely related to the simple question "what am I living for?"

Where does it come from? The question is simple and complex at the same time. However, the answer to it is easy to deduce from our lifestyle. How much time does a normal person spend at work? The standard yuppie (the so-called young professionals working in the office, however, now almost all employees of various institutions who spend most of the weekday in the company) works on a nine-to-six schedule. Options can be very different - and from eleven in the morning to eight in the evening and from five in the morning to two in the afternoon. The only problem is that rarely anyone goes home exactly at the time indicated in the job advertisement. And this is not only Russian specificity. If we add to this the cost of the road, it turns out that work takes two-thirds of life. And at the same time it acquires incredible importance. There is another subtlety.

It is known that married people achieve less in their professional activities than single people (if you look at the statistics as a whole). Why? This is easy to explain: imagine that a free person wakes up on a day off. It's good if he has friends with whom he can go somewhere. But this is in the evening. And from morning to evening he sits, watches TV, which is unlikely to cheer you up - it will rather bore you, read books or ... think about work or even do it. Gradually, week after week, he accumulates a phobia before the weekend, before the terrible “doing nothing”, and he passionately desires only one thing: for “Monday to start on Saturday”, so that he again finds himself in a circle of people, if not close, but not indifferent to him, to be needed again, necessary and important. And in the presence of the second half, the person is busy at least (this is in the worst case) swearing with his spouse. On the other hand, if personal life fails, where does a person seek solace? Of course, at work, and then the fear of the day off is associated with returning home, to quarrels, problems and a showdown. But a day off is one day. A vacation is a lot of days off. And gradually it turns out that you really don’t feel like relaxing at all - you want to go where everything is clear and clear, where you are definitely needed. And the vacation turns out to be some kind of rehearsal for dismissal and mental trauma, which is not so easy to survive. It is especially difficult at such moments to feel the leadership team: after all, it is impossible to do without them. And if possible, why not replace them or fire them altogether?

How to deal with it?

There are several solutions to this problem, how not to think about work:The first method was suggested in one capacious phrase by Captain Jack Sparrow in "Pirates of the Caribbean": "Boy, find yourself a girl". Of course, it sounds like a quote from a men's magazine, but love (or at least resort love) is a very powerful therapeutic tool, it allows you to switch to more everyday topics, and also contributes to evening meetings (that is, it gives you the opportunity to breathe fresh air), long walks (physical activity), writing poetry, or at least diaries and romantic letters (relieving intellectual stress, developing humanitarian thinking in technical specialists) and good mood (tonic).

Method two: cross-stitch (repair an old falling apart motorcycle, tidy up the roof in the house of your beloved grandmother, pick mushrooms, solve an eighth grade math textbook taken from a younger relative)- that is, a couple of days to work out handmade, which will relieve emotional stress gradually - on vacation this load disappears too quickly, causing a kind of decompression sickness. After that, you can safely draw up a plan of action for the remaining time, or simply do nothing. The main thing is that the activity is enjoyable.

Method three: read several light books in a row. You just need to clearly understand that a light book is a very individual concept. For some, these are detectives ( different levels language and talent of the author), for some - Russian fantasy, and for some, love stories are to their liking. Light books, as a rule, do not leave a lasting mark, but at the same time erase the heavy information that has been stuck in the head since the pre-holiday period. You can, of course, watch TV, but this is fraught with depression from serials and irritation from TV shows, because on vacation you usually find out that, in addition to news and films after nine, during the day a huge amount of meaningless information is broadcast on a huge number of channels, which causes melancholy and does not give any work to the brain.

The fourth way came from logotherapy (meaning therapy), it is a paradoxical intention. Its essence lies in the presence of a basic sense of humor (at least at the level of an amoeba): if you suddenly want to work on vacation, you need to strive to want it as much as possible: "I really want to work! I will show everyone how I want to work! Here you are in the last row you can see how I want to work? As a result, this thought will only cause a smile. The main thing then, nevertheless, after the vacation, is to return to a normal state and not laugh to the point of hysteria at the thought that you need to go to work. However, the paradoxical intention always has a reverse course: you can force yourself to not want to work as much as possible, and the dangerous effect will gradually disappear.

Method five: extreme. Even if you don’t lie flat on the beach on the warm sea, but go diving, surfing, sailing or going to the mountains, then such a variety and great physical activity will allow you to completely escape from office affairs, and then easily return to the team to work. Such hobbies, as a rule, stimulate the motive for achievement and the desire to grow above oneself, and this (at least in work) is for the better.

In conclusion, answering the question: how not to think about work, I would like to note: that if there is nothing in a person’s life other than his profession, then sooner or later this can lead to a loss of the meaning of life: either the job will be lost, or the position will be the same for too long. And if there is nothing else in the world to cling to, this blow will be tantamount to a global catastrophe, leading to depression and despair. Therefore, in addition to work (even the most beloved), there should always be something else very important and expensive - as a second support in life, allowing you to move through it more confidently and get more pleasure from the simple joys of life, without which it turns into a permanent deadline, for who never rest.

Let's be clear right now. If you're one of those lucky people doing what you love, you don't need these recommendations. Think about your work whenever and wherever you want. The main thing is to avoid overeating. After all, even the most beloved thing can get boring if you do not pause to recharge the batteries or let off steam.

Men are unlikely to be interested in these tips. As folk wisdom says, men at work think about women, and with women - about work. Of course, this is a joke, and everyone needs to turn off such thoughts. After all, when we are in our free time we spend energy thinking about work, we have less energy left to actually work. Thus, a vicious circle is formed. There is no strength for anything, including work. The question is how to switch profitably.

So, if you feel that it is vital for you to free your brain from thoughts about work matters, use our recommendations.

1. Sign up for courses foreign language, floristry, landscape design. Any intellectual or creative activity will allow you to focus on business and stop the flow of thoughts about work. No wonder smart people say that best holiday is a change in activity.

2. Go to the gym, workout, swim, ride a bike, work in the country:. Give yourself such a physical load that your only thought was how to twist, walk, sit down and stand up ... Inhale - exhale, inhale - exhale, one, two, three ... Work? What job?

3. Schedule your evenings and organize meetings with friends (but first swear that not a word about work will be said), trips to theaters, movies, concerts, romantic evenings with your loved one. Even if in the evening there is no strength, it would seem, for nothing but TV, make an effort - and you will be grateful to yourself. A second wind will open, and communication will help get rid of obsessive thoughts about business, calls, letters. Communicate with nature: walk in the forest, listen to the birds, contemplate this beautiful picture. At some point, you will feel that the head has disconnected from the bustle of work, and the body has been filled with energy.

4. If you have children, give your free time to them, not to the computer. Children already know exactly what to do with your head while you are with them. Organize children's holiday for your children and their friends. Believe me, if twenty kids are running around you, you will not have time to think about work - a lot of trouble.

5. Expand your network of contacts, make acquaintances at various events. We can often meet people with a completely different philosophy of life, not like ours, different from our dreams, deeds, happiness. Such communication helps to discover new qualities in oneself and new motivation for work. Who knows - maybe soon something will change in your outlook, and work will become not something you get tired of, but something you cannot live without.

Psychologists believe that only a life in which there is a certain balance between work and personal can be considered happy and fulfilling. If all that a person sees day after day is the office and colleagues, he will very soon experience professional burnout. Do you know how I realized that I was too close to such a state? I stopped switching from working moments to home ones and for the last 2 weeks I only think about our company and tax accounting. I even began to write less because I can’t “catch the Muse”.

Where did the handy ability go?

I used to forget about work the very moment I left the office doors and lived by the principle: everything that happens at work stays outside her door. Now I constantly keep in mind the rules for filling out this or that report, I worry about the unfinished certificate and so on. Everything would be fine, you might think that I'm just a workaholic, but now even the long-awaited vacation has ceased to be joyful, because thoughts are far from friends and walks ...

Even on weekends, I'm just haunted by thoughts of work. I constantly think about what I will do, starting from Monday, I remember where I made a mistake, I worry that I could “screw up” somewhere else. As a result, I myself poison my day off with not the most pleasant thoughts. What to do?

How to stop thinking about working moments at least at home and start enjoying your life again? If you don’t learn to separate your work space from your personal space, you can ruin your relationship with your family, undermine the health of your nervous system, and incur depression and apathy. So it's time to find a balance between professional activity and home.

Switching thoughts

Let's start with the simplest: if you have noticed the above problem in yourself - this is already good, now you need to learn how to switch your thoughts to the “new wave” as soon as the office door closes. You can turn on your favorite music on your phone, you can start an interesting audiobook. It is only very important to turn your attention completely to the book and music, and not to use them as a background for your work-oriented thoughts.

If you like to enjoy the world around you without the interference of extraneous sounds, you can simply pay attention to nature, to people passing by. Believe me, even with such seemingly strange things, you will occupy your tired brain and wean it from constantly thinking about work, completing things in your mind that you didn’t have time to do.

Apparently, the time has come for me to download another book to my phone, otherwise the same music no longer switches my attention and, going home, I think in what order and what exactly I will do tomorrow.

Get help from loved ones

Ask your family to stop you every time you talk about work. Your family is the first people to suffer from inability to switch. In addition, people who live near us are usually quite attentive and they will be able to understand by our appearance alone that we are again thinking about another project or problem.

Today I already told my sister not to let me tell anything about my work, otherwise even at the last visit of my girlfriend, I painted in all colors to her what solution I came up with for our accounting program. I can imagine how interesting and fun it was for her ... But I can’t help myself.

No work at home!

Tell me, do you also regularly check your work email, even when you are at home? Do colleagues call you after the end of the working day? If not, then you happy people, because I stop returning thoughts to work only when I fall asleep.

In order not to suffer other aspects of our life, we need to consciously limit ourselves: stop checking mail, learn not to discuss work issues with colleagues in work time. I generally think about turning off the phone after 18.00. I'm not sure that the authorities will appreciate my impulse, but you can try.

The only thing I'm afraid is that they will blame me for not taking my work seriously, because our director is used to the fact that we are ready to answer any of his questions at any time of the day. Recently, he asked the chief engineer to create something there, and to the quite reasonable remark of the latter that he simply did not have time for this, he replied that this “something” could be created at home. And the director does not care at all that his employee has a wife and two small children who need the attention of their father.

Work on your relationship

No matter how skeptical I am about this, I think that many women in modern world they get much more pleasure from relationships, and not from solving work issues and moving up the career ladder.

Psychologists even argue that when a girl has a beloved man next to her, her thoughts, as a rule, revolve around him. If you constantly think about work, it is quite possible that something does not quite suit you in personal relationships. It is better not to turn away from the problem, but to think about what can be changed in order to happily return home and mentally stay in the family all your free time.

A week ago, my sister and I had a very serious fight and for the first time I felt what it was like not wanting to leave work. And this is just a sister ... Conflicts with a loved one are experienced an order of magnitude more difficult.

If a woman is single, it's time to think about her personal life. Perhaps start working on your appearance, think about what exactly prevents you from finding a man. I know for sure that going headlong into work really saves, but, unfortunately, not for long. And then the obsessive thoughts about the office are mixed with no less obsessive thoughts about their own loneliness.

I think that if we change our priorities a little, thinking about work will leave us. Here it is important not to go to the other extreme - the lack of professional thoughts even during working hours. I know, I passed, I made a bunch of serious mistakes because of which I received a reprimand ...

Don't Forget Legal Rest

At the moment I have accumulated more than 40 days annual leave, but you think I use them? No, because I just do not understand how I can leave the enterprise to its fate.

For those who, like me, cannot switch from work to home, you need to try to accept the idea that nothing in the office will fall apart without you and me. Of course, it is insanely nice to feel like an indispensable specialist, but I know for sure that there are no such people! This means that it is possible to clear conscience ask for your legal leave and enjoy the company of family, friends and family.

Organize interesting leisure

Why do you think people think about work even at home? Maybe one of the reasons is banal boredom, when it’s simply not interesting in a homely atmosphere? If this is the case, then it's time to find a hobby, organize an interesting pastime with loved ones and friends. Try to find something so pleasant and exciting that it will completely absorb your thoughts and beat the work out of them.

Only personally, I advise you to choose some kind of "live" and by no means monotonous activity. For example, I recently tried to embroider with beads - it's beautiful, but elementary mechanical movements do not help to switch. Rather the opposite.

Almost everyone has two days off, which means that at least one of them can be spent the way you want. Spit on all things and draw positive emotions in what was so lacking during working week. One is perfectly helped by nature, another is an interesting book, the third is going to a club. For example, I decided to spend the next Saturday entirely on the beach without a phone, Internet access and all alone.

By the way, you can even just lie on the couch, the main thing is that it brings you pleasure.

It is very important to relax not only on weekends, but also after a hard labor day. You should not grab a rag and a vacuum cleaner with huge eyes, start preparing a complicated dinner. No, of course, you can do it, but only if such activity brings you pleasure. It doesn’t bring me, so I clean only on Saturdays, and cook only 2 times a week, but a lot at once. If you spend the whole weekend doing household chores, you will not only not rest, but you will hardly get up on Monday for a boring job.

Rational use of working time

Very often, thoughts about work torment us even at home due to the fact that we did not have time to cope with piled-up cases in an 8-hour day. Why it happens? One of the reasons is the irrational use of time, when the morning does not start with the most important thing, but with coffee and a conversation with a colleague.

For me, such gatherings often dragged on for 30-60 minutes (when the director was not at the workplace). Yet social media... They are so addictive: it seems that I went in for only 5 minutes, and spent best case half an hour. Because of all this, recently the peak of my work fell on 2 hours and lasted only up to 5. Honestly, I don’t have time for anything during these hours, but it’s my own fault!

It is very important to start “doing things” in the morning. It is even more important to make plans for the day, laying in them the real number of cases. When every minute is occupied in your schedule, you will be able to do much more, which means there will be no problems that you will think about after hours.

In general, thinking a lot about work is even unhealthy, because damaged nerves and Bad mood has never made anyone happier. So, it's time to eradicate this problem from your life.

I know that the majority of those present here are freelancers, who, most likely, do not have a clear line between work and personal time. But I think that you definitely have something to advise those who do not know how to switch. How do you do it and do you do it at all? Or are you ready to respond to customers at any time of the day, without thinking that your family and friends also require attention?

“If you don’t know how to switch off from problems at work in time, then it will not lead to anything good for you - problems will only multiply,” says Peter Schallard, a psychologist and consultant on productivity and work organization. publishes 4 of his tips that will help you learn to really relax and save you from emotional and professional burnout.

First, decide whether you are ready to solve problems or just think about them.

You should always try to make good use of your time. Thinking is good, but constant thinking without any result is a waste of time. If you come home after work with your head full of thoughts and you need half an hour or an hour to think about them and decide on them, after which you can relax, then this is good. But if your thoughts lead nowhere, and this only makes your head hurt even more, then it's time to do something. You can't stay in this state all the time.

Start a hobby

Immerse yourself in something that will take your mind from useless reflections. It can even help you find a solution to a problem you never thought of before. Constantly focusing on the problem itself, we sometimes begin to think too narrowly, analyze the problem piece by piece, but completely forget about finding a solution. And relaxing the brain, it may turn out that the solution was right under our noses, we simply could not see it.

Schallard calls this "divergent thinking" and claims that one of his clients, who had a stressful job, used it successfully. He began to go to the pool and paid great attention to his form and training results, thinking at that time exclusively about them. Being distracted in this way, he found solutions to problems faster and more efficiently, and also got rid of constant stress.

Shallard says that's why people build small ships inside glass bottles. Because when you can engage your brain with intuitive and creative tasks, it allows you to relax, which leads to solving other problematic tasks.

Change your emotional state

Thoughts are directly related to your emotional state. Therefore, if you leave work angry, depressed or exhausted, then in the same state you will spend the evening if you do nothing to change your mood.

You can buy antidepressants, but in the long run - it's definitely not the best way. Schallard recommends exercise, healthy food, good music, or another way that is pleasant for you to put your mood on the right track. Frowning thoughts on the couch will certainly not help in any way - neither solve the problem nor improve the mood.

With a different mood, the problem may simply disappear, even if temporarily, but this will give a good respite. At the same time, we will free up recently occupied psychological resources that were not available in a stressful state, and which will now help to find a way out of difficult situations.

Don't talk about problems

Some people have a habit of discussing work issues at home. Perhaps you should make rules about this. Discussing a work day over dinner is fine, but plunging back into the abyss of problems and turmoil is not. You will simply again fall into the same whirlpool of bad mood as during the day.