Improving your mental health in the workplace is essential for success. Actively taking care of your mental health throughout the day helps increase engagement, performance, and productivity. Engaging in self-care also helps elevate job satisfaction, employee morale, and longevity within the company.
Trying different approaches helps determine the most effective ways to improve your mental health at work. These ideas can help.
Choose among these methods to improve your mental health in the workplace.
Promote a Positive Work Environment
Set the example for a pleasant work environment:
- Politely greet others.
- Respectfully interact with your manager, colleagues, and coworkers.
- Say “please” and “thank you.”
- Talk about issues as they arise.
- Support others in reaching their goals.
- Celebrate everyone’s accomplishments.
Talk About Your Mental Health Concerns
Model healthy discussions about the mental health issues you experience and how you are working through the problems. Examples include prioritizing self-care throughout the day, taking prescribed medication, and participating in therapy.
Discussing your mental health concerns helps normalize these conversations. Finding others who share similar issues can help you work through your problems for improved mental health.
Take Regular Breaks
Move away from your desk at regular intervals and engage in a relaxing activity that you enjoy. Examples include:
- Eating healthy foods
- Stretching
- Taking walks
- Practicing mindfulness
- Meditating
- Reading a book
- Listening to music
- Talking with others who are on break
Disengaging from work helps you clear your head and reduce stress. You can come back feeling refreshed and ready to produce.
Use Employee Mental Health Resources
Talk with HR about the employee mental health resources your company offers. These programs combine education and personalized activities to provide employee support with mental health concerns. These programs might include mental health assessments, counseling, and employee resource groups (ERGs) aimed at reducing stress, anxiety, depression, and burnout.
Request Reasonable Work Accommodations
Talk with your manager if work issues are impacting your mental health. Perhaps your workload is too great, you have a conflict with a coworker, or you need additional flexibility to handle personal responsibilities.
Include a specific request to help resolve the issue. Perhaps you need to offload some job duties or responsibilities, schedule time for a private conversation with your coworker, or work remotely one day per week.
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