What the stress of remote work tells us about our mind and how we can care for it.
If you are someone who always assumes the best of others and yourself, has strong boundaries, no problems reaching out for help and never take things personally, you are probably loving remote work. But how many people are like this? For the majority of us, it’s a real struggle. We feel stressed out, anxious and isolated much of the time.
As we grow in self-awareness, either through contemplative practices or other self-reflective therapies, we can gain insight into how our interpretation, or the meaning we give to our experience, shapes our life. We learn that our interpretation of a present experience as threatening is often due to negative experiences from the past or fears of the future. Our minds are habitually projecting.
How being alone activates our fear responses
When we are under stress, feel unsafe, and lack alternative information to counter our mind’s fearful projections, the human mind has the tendency to perceive threats where there are none. I think of camping in the wild; rationally I know I have a higher chance of dying in a car crash on the way home than I do of being mauled by a wild animal in the night, yet my mind will interpret every sound as a potential wolf or bear. This is a sure sign that the most human fear of death has been activated within me.
Although we might not be afraid of dying whilst sitting at home on our computers, we might fear being excluded, not accepted by the group, or not valued for our contributions (which from an evolutionary perspective is close to death).
We can easily be brought into this hyper-vigilant state when we are remote working because we are processing our experience and regulating our emotions, predominantly, alone.
Photo by energepic on Pexels.
It can feel as if we are in a vacuum.
How being around others helps us regulate fears
In the office, on the other hand, surrounded by our colleagues, we benefit from spontaneous interactions which can help us to regulate our feelings of stress and overwhelm. Often a friendly encounter with a colleague can nudge us from feeling stressed and alone to feeling capable and reassured. We also receive subliminal information all the time through other people’s behaviour and interactions around us, as well as in the nuances of body language, voice and gesture. This supports us, moment by moment, to interpret our surroundings, other people’s behaviour, and our sense of safety and acceptance.
A felt sense of the friendly presence of others counters the mind’s tendency to perceive threats.
The interpretation problem in remote work
We are often stressed because we are unconsciously reacting to perceived threats in remote work situations. Anyone who has given a talk or led a meeting over Zoom where the listeners are muted will know the uniquely uncomfortable feeling of talking into the void. For many of us, despite logically knowing that this is not what it means, our immediate interpretation of the audience’s silence is, “They don’t like what I am saying". When in reality we have no idea, and they might be thinking it was a very compelling talk.
We can get used to situations like the Zoom void and make sure to ask for explicit feedback, during or after the session, but what about more complex situations? It might be obvious, for example, that our boss is a micromanager when we see their interactions with others in the office or their tendency to control the lunch order. Online, if they are constantly checking in on us on Slack, reminding us of tasks we already agreed to, it’s easier to take it personally. We might be projecting our fears of failing, or not being good enough, onto our boss and interpreting their behaviour as a sign that we are not performing well.
This interpretation problem can also affect our relationship to work itself. Since there are no longer office hours and we work asynchronously, we can assume that someone is always working when we are not. A default response for many people when seeing the green dots on their colleagues’ profiles is “everyone else is working more than me, I am not doing enough.” This can then lead us to work too much and take on too much.
What can individuals and teams do?
Instead of seeing stress as a problem to be managed, we can view it as a symptom, as something to get curious about. It is a signal of internal work we can do, a sign that growth is possible. Both personally and at the organisational level.
I have already written about mindfulness practices to ground and take care of stress and anxiety in the moment. This is important for calming our immediate stress response.
When we are not in the moment and open to doing further inquiry, here are some reflections to try.
What story am I telling myself about this situation/person/relationship?
Using this simple prompt when feeling triggered by a situation or person at work can help us gain some perspective. It can be done alone, through journalling or in a conversation with someone else. This can help us see how we are interpreting the experience. And we can take it a step further to invent three other reasonable interpretations of the situation, other than what our mind is telling us.
This inquiry might also lead us to the insight that we would best be supported by a therapist to work through and resolve some of the past experiences and personal beliefs which are driving our reactions.
What do I need to feel supported as a remote worker?
When reflecting on our needs, we might find that they are very different to our colleagues, to what is modelled by our leaders, or what we think is expected by our organisations. Think about things like rest and movement during the day, decompression time, communication, transparency, and workflows. When we are aware of our needs, it’s easier to suggest ideas at work, which will most likely speak to others' unspoken needs too.
What needs do we have as a remote team?
There is a lot of literature about psychological safety in teams, how to create an environment where individuals feel safe to take risks. It can be an interesting exercise to develop the answer to this collaboratively. A guiding question can be: What kind of an environment do we want to create in order to have a safe, creative and productive environment? What do we need from each other to do that? This could be creating moments or connection, increased transparency about decision-making, better onboarding for new people, developing a healthy meeting culture where everyone contributes, and collaborative exercises in building shared agreements about how we work.
Remote work has changed our lives for the better in many ways. The stress we encounter does not have to be treated as an unfortunate by-product. It can provide an opportunity to grow our awareness and capacity to be vulnerable in our teams so that we can create more human-centred, caring work environments.