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How To Avoid Taking Work Stress Home

Most of us have, at some point, come home from work irritated because we’ve had a bad day, we’re annoyed or worried, and we’re still thinking about what has happened, or what will happen when we next go to work.

You might have taken this stress out on your family, snapping, or struggling to enjoy family time because there’s too much on your mind.

Plenty of us have even gone on family vacations still stressing about work.

When you’ve got a family at home, the last thing that you want is to ruin your time with them by being upset and worried about your job.

You don’t want your children to build memories of days out with parents that aren’t really paying attention, or that are very easily annoyed.

More families than ever have two working parents and taking extended periods away from work while your children grow up isn’t always an option or something that we want to do.

How To Avoid Taking Work Stress Home

But, if you want to enjoy quality time with your family, it’s important that you can leave work stress at work, instead of taking it back home with you.

Why Should You Avoid Taking Work Stress Home?

There are many benefits to leaving work at work. These include:

  • Better relationships with your family
  • A chance to be a better role model for your children, offering a positive example of how to be a working parent
  • Less resentment of work, and a chance to enjoy your career
  • Improved mental health
  • Improved sleep
  • Better relationships at work
  • Better physical health
  • Greater enjoyment of vacations and weekends

Find Ways to Avoid Work Stress

Of course, the best thing that you can do to avoid bringing work stress home is to avoid work stress in the first place.

If your job has been stressing you out for a long time, you are no longer finding enjoyment in your role, and you only feel negative emotions towards it, it might be time for a change.

You should at least speak to your manager or superior to talk about ways in which you could improve your work life and reduce any stress that it is causing.

Most of the time though, it’s a case of changing our workplace routines, trying to be more positive, spending time with more helpful and positive people, and adjusting processes to make work easier and less stressful.

Recognize Burnout

We’re more likely to be overcome by work stress when we are burned out.

We’re less likely to be able to leave it behind when we have workplace burnout, and it’s having a negative effect on our mental health.

Unfortunately, the signs of burnout and genuine stress aren’t always easy to spot, especially if you work in a mentally challenging field like social work or health care, where switching off can be so much harder to do. 

This article about social work burnout can help you to recognize the signs of burnout, helping you to avoid it, deal with it, and stop it from interfering with your home life.

Develop a Better Work-Life Balance

One of the biggest problems when it comes to taking work home is that we don’t have our work-life balance right.

Even when we walk out of the door, our days aren’t finished, we still have things to sort out, and we feel like we have no choice but to check emails, reply to messages, write some notes, or prepare for the next day.

Or you might find that you spend that long in the office, that by the time you get home, you have no chance to switch off or practice relaxing hobbies before you are trying to sleep.

Which makes a restful night much harder to come by.  

Sometimes, to achieve a better balance you need to take a stand. To set boundaries and to make sure your superiors agree to them.

On other occasions, the ball is fully in your court. You need to set limits for yourself and take back some hours for a life.

How To Avoid Taking Work Stress Home

Make the Most of Your Commute

There aren’t many benefits to a long commute. But one of them is the chance that it gives you to unwind at the end of the day.

If you have a long commute, use the time to let go of your day. Perhaps to ring a friend to chat about work, or to write any concerns that you have in a journal to get them out of your head.

You could just use the time to read or to listen to music.

Giving yourself a chance to relax and let go of work and its stresses before you walk through your front door.

Give Yourself Time to Talk

As much as you might want to leave work stress at work, and avoid taking it home into your family life, it’s important that you do talk.

This is especially true after a hard day, or when there’s something that you are worried about.

Bottling your worries up won’t stop them from interfering with your home life.

It’ll just mean that you are more likely to take it out on your family or suffer from burnout and even depression.

Instead, give yourself time to talk before shrugging it off. Speak to a friend on the way home, talk to your partner when you first get in or even speak to a colleague before you leave. Then, let it go.

Burn it Off

Exercise is a fantastic way to let go of stress. High-impact exercises like HIIT, running, boxing and spinning are great ways to burn off negative energy and release your stresses.

Yoga, swimming, and walking are wonderful ways to relax and find peace.

A combination of these exercises can be a fantastic way to get rid of stress, and even a quick workout after work can mean that you don’t have to worry about taking the stresses of the day back to your family.

Optimize Distractions

Modern lives are busy. We work long hours, try to do our best for our families, we have side-hustles, and we’re keen to keep our homes tidy.

We have very little time to relax, and we’ve almost come to see distractions as a waste of time. A bad thing, that should be avoided.

But actually, distractions like games on our phones, books, podcasts, and the latest Netflix binge are an important part of a healthy and balanced lifestyle.

Sometimes, a good distraction is all that you need to ease worries and relax.

Make Sure You’ve Got Support at Work

Having a good support network in the workplace, whether it’s friends, approachable managers, members of a union or group, or anyone else that understands your work role and environment, can be helpful when it comes to leaving work at work and reducing any stress that you feel.

How To Avoid Taking Work Stress Home

If there’s no one you feel able to talk to at work, consider joining groups, or making friends with other people in your industry online.

Even if you never meet, it’ll mean that you have people who understand you in a way that perhaps your friends and family can’t.

Leave Work at Work

Work worries will always come home with you if work comes home with you. If you are always working, checking and replying to messages, and taking tasks home, you’ll never be able to leave work behind.

Taking work home is something that quickly becomes a habit. It starts with the odd email, and out of nowhere, you are spending hours at home working in your office.

Stop working at home, and if you work from home, start clocking off and closing your office door at a set time every day.

Get Plenty of Rest

Sleep is one of the best ways to care for your physical and mental health and reduce any stress that you might have.

Start turning devices off for 30 minutes before bed, enjoying restful hobbies like reading instead, to help you to get to sleep more easily.

Take Proper Vacations

Vacations should be time off, without any work worries or concerns.

They give you a chance to spend time with your family, but also to recharge your batteries and return ready to work.

It can help to take an extra day off before you go away, to get everything in order, and give yourself a chance to leave work behind fully.

Taking work stress home is something that becomes a habit.

It’s not something that anyone intends on doing. We all think that we’ll have a great work-life balance and leave work behind when we clock out.

Then, suddenly, we find that we’re thinking about work more and more often and that taking work, and work concerns, home has become a habit.

Out of nowhere, work has become the biggest thing in our lives, and our families are suffering.

Often, the best way to avoid this is to check ourselves. Ask yourself if you are checking work emails at home or thinking about work over dinner with your family.

If you are, it’s time to make some changes to reduce stress at work, to leave it behind at the end of the day, and in some cases, seek a new career, which allows for more flexibility and a greater balance.

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