deshab71-blog

[deshab71-blog]

Boundaries with Work

As a full-time safety patrol and a part-time football referee, I like to ensure that everything is running safely, on-time, and rules are followed. I noticed that these work habits sometimes bleed into my personal life. For example, during COVID, I felt the urge to tell people to stand six feet away from others in the Post Office. Or feeling the need to tell people to remove their headphones in the grocery store. Or, worst of all, going to a friend's house for the first time and pointing out the missing links in their chandelier. These are non-invasive ways that work begins to pour into our personal lives. They can often be laughed off when it is noticed that the action was not appropriate for the setting. But what about the more invasive ways that work effects your personal life? What about when the work checklist that you created for the ride home to ensure that you have finished everything for the day causes anxiety? Or the waking from your sleep to jot down an idea that you have to improve the job but not being able to fall back asleep because now your brain is in "work mode"? Or what about when your interpersonal work relationships make you feel a bit of social anxiety, making it that much harder to get out of bed? What is the coping mechanism for that when laughing it off does not work? I ask because I have been working on creating boundaries with work. There has been a bit of trial and error but the things that has begun to work are mediation, routine, and a handy dandy notebook (thank you Blues Clues).

I have started to set my alarm 30 minutes before my first alarm. This gives me enough time to wake up, remove the crust from my eyes, say good morning to my plants, mediate, and have a quick yoga session, to set my intentions for the day. This is all before I even touch my phone (I use an old school alarm clock). I found that if I grab my phone and see a message that I was not expecting, it can and will reshape my day. Then I listen to either affirmations or my morning mix on shuffle, filled with songs that I feel affirm me. These songs or affirmations tend to give me something that I can use as my mantra to recenter myself during the workday.

BREAKS. BREAKS. BREAKS. I used to be a person that worked through every single break because I did not want to interrupt my work flow. At work, I become a robot with no desire for food or rest. I noticed that I became addicted to it. The productivity, the chaos, being the subject matter expert, it fueled me. There were days that I would have wobbly legs when I walked in my apartment because I have not eaten all day. Or having to sprint, doing the pee pee dance as I searched for my keys because I forgot to use the bathroom for about 12 hours. I noticed my addiction and wanted to be free from it. I now set an alarm to make sure that I am taking time to break every day. I have noticed the improvement in my workday that the disconnection for the work environment has created.

The final step has become the most difficult for me to master. The return home. This stage is hard because my brain was not ready to quiet itself. The day was just getting good. The want for more was causing me to come home, turn on the TV, and scroll through Reddit for anything juicy. Recently, the juice has been coming in the form of politics. Oh boy, has it been good. It is like another season of Game of Thrones and I can't get enough. I would read political articles and watch YouTube videos with political information until it was time for bed. Then because my brain never received a proper cooldown period, I am up at 2:30am writing in my bedside notebook, to brain dump. I finally got tired of waking up everyday, in the middle of the night, and searched for a root cause. I found it to be the lack of the cooldown. My new cooldown routine, which works about 85% of the time, has been to do a post-work guided mediation to unwind, get home, put my phone on DND and put it in the cabinet until after my yoga session the next morning.

These methods are some time tedious but I am in full pursuit of my peace and I am done letting anything get in the way of that. I also never punish myself if something is missed, I just learn to readjust. I am learning that self-punishment is only counter-productive to achieving peace because I was creating my biggest critic within myself.