Looking After Your Well-being and Resilience
When you’re busy with work, it can be easy to overlook your own well-being and resilience to retain mental health.
Stress can seriously affect your ability to function. You can’t consistently make good decisions and lead your team if you’re under a weight of pressure or struggling with poor mental or physical health.
So let’s take a look at being resilient in the face of challenges and effective ways to support your own well-being.
Dealing with pressure
There are two key steps to handling a challenging situation:
- Recognise – take a step back to work out what’s causing the issue. Is the situation exceptional or something that regularly causes problems?
- Respond – try to respond when you are calm. Triage the situation, decide if you can handle things with extra effort or assistance. Do you need more help to navigate a solution? Sometimes, If a situation is toxic or unsustainable, walking away may be the best option.
Developing resilience
Research shows there are many things you can do to build resilience, both physical and mental. Get regular exercise, ensuring you eat and sleep well. Make sure your work practices are safe will help minimise stress and your ability to deal with it. Mental resilience involves learning behaviors, thoughts, and actions that enable you to change the narrative, face fears, and seek help when you need it.
Try doing one thing differently
Building positive habits is the key to effective, sustainable change, but rather than making an impossibly long list of changes, try just changing one thing in your regular routine every month, such as getting more exercise, eating more fruit or vegetables, meditating, practicing gratitude, or volunteering at a cause you care about.
This article takes a deeper look at the effects of stress, challenging and toxic work environments, and strategies for supporting your physical and mental health so you can be at your best.
For more information on well-being and resilience in the workplace see this article.