Do This to Switch Off After Work
Whether you work from home or commute to an office, it can be difficult to switch off your brain after a busy day spent at a screen or in meetings. To allow yourself the best chance at switching off and giving you that all-important break from the busyness of work stresses, it’s crucial that you implement strict boundaries between work and play and remove yourself physically and mentally from your workspace. Here’s how.
Walk away
Easily done when you work in a separate designated office, less easily managed when you work from home. If you do work from the kitchen table or a spare room set up at home, it’s still really important to set physically boundaries between you and your laptop, in order to properly put the mental ones in place. That means not only shutting your laptop away if you can, wherever in a drawer or b a separate room and turning off any notifications you may have set on your phone for work emails. Removing all alerts will help you resist the temptation to quickly check in and allow you proper time to switch off.
Stretch it out
If you spend hours a day staring at a computer screen, the chances are that you walk away at the end of every day with shoulders u to your earlobes. If that’s the case, a quick 5-minute stretching routine can really help to signal the end of your working day and help you transition into a more relaxed state of mind. To start, try rolling your head and shoulders in circles, alternating directions, then, stretch your shoulders out by drawing your shoulder blades in towards each other. Finally, shake it off, shut down and prepare to destress.
Retrain your eyes
Staring at a screen all day doesn’t just heap strain on your eyes, it affects your mental wellbeing too, forcing your focus and energy onto one very small and intensive focal point. To address this and reset your vision to something less stress-inducing, you need to switch from this high-focus visual mode to panoramic or peripheral vision. To do it, all you need to do is consciously work on averting your gaze by keeping your eyes pointed at a fixed point a few feet in front of you. Working near a window helps with this as it offers something broader to look at. This increases your field of vision, allowing your brain to receive as much of your visual environment as possible. Do this at the end if your working day to help your brain make the connection between work and rest time, and set you on your way to switching off.
