Workplace Mental Health Lecture

Friends who came to listen to the lecture today, I know that most of them came with real problems: either they have been feeling unmotivated recently, going to work feels like torture, and they are not happy even fishing.； Or you can't help but bring your work emotions home and get a little angry when talking to your family. ； Some people have even taken the test and said they have mild anxiety and want to know how to "get back to normal." Let me give you the core answer directly: The core of mental health in the workplace is never to require oneself to "remain positive at all times and have no negative emotions", but to first establish a set of one's own and flexible "problem response framework" - allowing oneself to collapse occasionally, and knowing how to quickly recover after the collapse is enough.

To be honest, I was interviewing an operation team of an Internet company last week, and a girl who was in 1995 who was working on events told me that last Wednesday, when she was eating braised chicken for lunch in preparation for the 618 big promotion plan, she suddenly burst into tears without warning. The tears fell into the rice. She wiped her face, and ten minutes later she went into the conference room with her computer to discuss the plan with her boss. No one in the whole department noticed that she had cried just now. I guess many people here have had similar experiences, and may even think that "this is a profession for adults" - but the data from the workplace mental health survey released by Stanford in 2023 is here: workplace people who deliberately suppress negative emotions have a 37% higher risk of burnout than people who allow themselves to occasionally collapse for 10 minutes.

In fact, academic circles have always had different views on this point. A few years ago, the mainstream school of positive psychology was still advocating that "workers should take the initiative to do positive psychological construction" and think of the good when encountering pressure. Now many cutting-edge researchers have overturned this statement: when you force yourself to smile in front of stupid customers, "positive construction" is essentially increasing your "emotional labor" - that kind of energy consumption of forcing yourself to be polite and enthusiastic when you have rolled your eyes a hundred times, which is more energy-consuming than writing a three-page plan. The clinical psychology school's view is more direct: there is no need to rush to "digest" small emotions that arise in the workplace. In many cases, they are signals, not problems. For example, if you have a headache when you think about interacting with a certain colleague, it may not necessarily be because you are afraid of society. It is most likely because the other person's authority and responsibility are unclear. You have silently helped him with tasks that are not yours several times before, and your emotions have noticed something is wrong before your rationality.

Oh, by the way, don’t think that only ordinary employees have emotional problems. I have met a technical director with an annual salary of one million before. The whole company used to think that he was invincible. Even when his subordinates crashed the online system, he could save the situation without expression and then hold him responsible. Last year, he was diagnosed with grade three hypertension. He had insomnia for three months in a row until three in the morning, and he lost ten pounds. Later, he himself established an unwritten rule in the department: every Wednesday afternoon from 2:00 to 2:20, he would cut all communication software offline and sit in a small conference room for 20 minutes, either watching cat videos or being in a daze, and no one was allowed to look for him. For such a small change that seemed completely "unprofessional", he said that he now sleeps much better, and the department's project promotion efficiency has increased by 20%. In the past, everyone was always afraid of him and did not dare to speak up in advance if there were problems. Now that they know that he has such a "buffer time", they dare to take the initiative to raise risks.

Nowadays, many companies also provide psychological training to employees. I have seen a lot of them go astray, either by setting up brainwashing sessions to express gratitude to the corporate culture, or by shouting the slogan "Pressure is motivation." In fact, there are difficulties on both sides: the company believes that a unified mentality can reduce internal friction and reduce management costs. However, our colleagues who do psychological counseling on the front line basically feel that this kind of slogan-style training will increase the psychological burden of employees. Originally, you were just tired recently, but now you have to force yourself to "be grateful to the company for giving me the opportunity to grow." It would be strange if you are not tired. There are even companies that create "anonymous emotional tree holes", which eventually become a gathering place for employees to complain, and administrators have to delete posts, which only makes them more resentful.

Talking about "how to adjust" that everyone is most concerned about, there is really no universal standard answer. I have seen too many strange but very easy to use methods: There is a girl who does To B sales. She specially prepares a small notebook. Every time she is scolded by a customer, she writes down the scolding words intact. When she walks out of the company after get off work, she tears up the page and throws it into the trash can. This is equivalent to leaving all her work emotions in the company and taking home only her salary.； There is an administrative lady who takes a 10-minute detour after get off work every day to buy an ice cream on the way. She said that these 10 minutes are her "identity switching period." After eating the ice cream, she is no longer an administrator who wants to coordinate various departments to make trouble, but a mother who wants to go home and cook for her son. ； There is also a young man who works in design. He has created a WeChat group of his own. Every time he gets irritated by the revision of a draft, he sends a bunch of emoticons to complain to the group. After sending it, he goes back to make corrections. It is much more efficient than asking friends to complain, and he does not have to worry about offending others if he talks too much.

Regarding the question of "whether to expose emotions at work", everyone has different opinions: Some people think that professional workplace people should be emotionally stable and not bring personal emotions to work. There are also many researchers in the field of communication who believe that appropriately exposing some negative emotions can actually reduce communication. Communication cost - For example, when you communicate with your colleagues and say directly, "I have three plans to submit today, it's a bit urgent, let's try to focus on the key points." The other party will not randomly add extra work to you, which is much better than if you insist on saying "Okay, I can do it" and end up being frustrated.

After talking so much today, there are actually no rules that you must abide by. If you feel that what you listened to today is useless, it doesn’t matter if you forget it when you go out. Yesterday I saw a young man in a plaid shirt at the subway entrance. He punched the air twice, muttered "silly needs", and then jumped to buy sausages. Maybe that was his emotional antidote today. After all, we go to work to live a good life, not to become an emotionless work machine, right?