7 Ways to switch-off from ‘work’ when your mind won’t let you!

I talk a lot about being intentional about how you live life, by making sure that the things you do and the people you focus your emotional energy and headspace on are the things and people that enhance and enrich your life… yadda yadda.

And I know you know it makes sense, and that when you feel into how your life is when all the things in it are there because you want them there, it feels SO good.

And that you have really good intentions.

BUT I also know that there’s this other thing that happens.

The problem with good intentions is that things get in the way.

And I can almost guarantee you that the things that fall off, the things that are the last on the list to be given the intentional treatment in a way that actually works are the things that relate to your PERSONAL life, and especially ‘you time’.

Work is the thing that gets in the way

And I can pretty much guarantee that unless you have something particularly big happening in your life right now, the most likely culprit for sabotaging these good intentions is WORK.

Maybe you’re employed and you’re the one in charge - you a have a BIG a rolling programme of things to do, always unfinished business, so your mind keeps telling you that you want to make sure things are on track, that people who work for you have what they need, that that project deadline was met, that the meeting Freddie was at last week went well, that your targets for the month are going to be met - so you find yourself taking 5 mins to check your emails, just so that you are ready and prepared for Monday morning.

And that 5 minutes becomes an hour. And once becomes several times.

Maybe you’re not ultimately the boss, but your job sounds like this anyway and maybe too you work part-time and your week finished before everyone else’s so your mind keeps drifting to wondering what might be in your inbox waiting to bite you on Monday morning, and your thoughts keep telling you that you want to make sure you go into the next week ‘on top’ of things and ready to go, so you spend 5 mins checking your emails so you can mentally prepare yourself (maybe brace yourself) for the week ahead.

And that 5 minutes becomes an hour. And once becomes several times.

Your work might also be really emotionally and psychologically demanding, and things have happened during the day that you are reflecting on, and this reflecting is turning into rumination, with thoughts that keep plopping into your mind.

Or maybe you are self-employed and LOVE your work so much you can’t seem to stop, and there’s always a list of things to do - you find yourself ‘just’ doing ‘one more thing’ to move things forward or so you don’t lose that idea.

So when you fully intended to be fully present for the kids when you were baking muffins, you instead found your mind drifting off to your to-do list for Monday and you suddenly realised one of them had asked you a question that you completely missed.

Or when you fully intended to throw yourself into the bike ride by the sea with your partner, you realised that about half-way through your mind had drifted to something you think you might have forgotten to mention to someone at work, and 5 miles later you realise you’ve missed the most scenic bit of the ride.

Or maybe you intended to spend the morning digging out your paint brush to ‘have a go’ after years and years, but out of habit you went to check-in and before you knew it, the morning had gone.

Carrying out good intentions for yourself can be difficult!

This living with intention is all great in theory, right? Yet when it comes to implementing it in your personal life, it can be so splodging DIFFICULT.

You tell yourself every weekend, and every holiday that THIS weekend/holiday you will properly switch off.

THIS weekend and holiday you won’t do work or you won’t think about work when you are ‘supposed’ to be watching a film, baking with the kids, going for a walk in nature and connecting with the trees,

But how do you actually DO it when all the stuff is flooding in, and your mind is busy busy and keeps drifting away to other things even when you have told it not to, even when you have set the intention, even when you don’t WANT it to.

Or maybe your mind just does nothing and you suddenly find a day has gone by and you haven’t done ANY of the great things you said you’d do just for you and/or just for fun.

HOW, just tell me HOW to STOP all this MADNESS!!!!

SEVEN ways to success with good intentions

There is no magic formula, but there are ways of approaching it that will help and that will set you up for success. The fundamental thing to remember is that you are essentially trying to change a habit, which as we know, can take some work! Changing habits requires that we actively cue our brains that this is a NEW way of being and doing, and we need to set ourselves up for success by putting specific measures in place to help us make the shift. So here are SEVEN ways I have found that have helped me with this particular trickiness, sett:

1. Set Positive Intentions. Habits respond much better to ‘positive’ intentions and ‘positive’ focus. So simply telling yourself NOT to think about work or that you WON’T check your emails this weekend is unlikely to work. All this does is put your mind into ‘hyper vigilance’ mode where it will be constantly monitoring and checking that you’re avoiding the thing that you’ve said you won’t engage with.
   
   Which inadvertently makes it MORE likely that you will focus on the very thing you are trying to avoid. And this then makes it more likely that you’ll end up engaging with work, first by thinking about it, then by getting annoyed that you’re thinking about it, and then by giving in and ‘just’ taking 5 minutes to check your emails - you may as well, because you’re thinking about it anyway. Sound familiar?
   
   And if this doesn’t make sense to you, try this:

   Your task is NOT to think about a pink elephant.

   What has immediately popped into your head?! QED!

   So, rather than telling yourself NOT to think about work, or NOT to do work - identify what you WILL do, and focus on that. So this weekend I will be present with my kids, we will go for a walk, bake a cake, go for a bike ride, make something we’ve never made before for tea (and go shopping for the ingredients)… etc…
   
   
   

2. Create positive conversation at home:
   It can be all too easy to begin the conversation with those around you with “how was your day?” - I know this is something I ask ALL the time (and I think there is a time and a place for this, especially if someone is having a particularly difficult time at the moment) - But this can simply lead to everyone spewing forth all the things that were great, or not so great, about their day, and can suck you back into a ‘work’ frame of mind. There is a suggestion that if you instead ask more specific questions like “What was the best thing that happened today?” or “What was the weirdest thing that happened today?” or “What was your happy moment today?” or “what are you looking forward to at the weekend?” it can help to steer conversation in a more focused and positive way, allowing everyone to leave their ‘work’ or ‘school’ day behind and start focusing on personal time.
   
   
   

3. Have a plan for ‘nothing’ time:
   From my experience, it’s likely that there are certain points of the weekend/holiday, or certain times of day when it’s more likely that you will fall into a ‘thinking about and doing a ‘quick’ bit of work’ trap. Perhaps in those quiet moments when everyone else is doing their own thing, and don’t have anything that you ‘readily’ are minded to do in those moments, so it can be really useful to create a ‘fall-back’ list of things that you can do instead of checking your emails, or to distract you from thoughts about work, at these critical moments, and things that involve movement or using your hands (and that therefore get you out of your head, can be particularly helpful): read your book (but somewhere you might not normally think of), pick up your knitting, go for a walk, have a shower, clean (if you must!), dance around the garden, just shake yourself about a bit! These are things you WILL do when your mind feeds you ‘work’ thoughts.

4. Create a small ‘ritual’ that denotes the end of the working day or week for you. (I don’t mean chanting, candles or burning your notes from the week on a fire (although, could be!!)) - I just mean small things that you build into a conscious habit, that tells your brain that this is you done for the day/week.

• Turning off your computer and putting all your work away - intentionally. So rather than doing these things on automatic pilot, pay attention, be consciously aware that you are logging off, closing your note-pad, putting your pen away, pushing your chair under the desk, walking away from your work-space.

• Get changed out of your work clothes. This might feel strange if you’re working from home, but it’s worth a try! Maybe you have a uniform and you already do this before you leave work - but do you have ‘civvies’ that you tend to wear for getting to/from work? If so, change out of those too!!

• Have a shower to ‘rinse off’ your day. This can be particularly helpful if you have a lot emotionally demanding work and if you are highly sensitive or an empath. It has the double benefit of washing away the energy of work, as well as providing a physical signal to your mind and body that work is over.

• Have a cuppa in a specific place that you designate the ‘end of the working day’ place!

• Send a text telling your partner or your kids that you’re done for the day - that way you are also asking to be held accountable!

5. Give your mind a specific time to think about work and plan for the next day/next week.
Often our minds start drifting to work because on a sub-conscious level it is trying to make sure that we are ‘safe’. It wants to make sure that we don’t forget anything important, that we are prepared for what’s coming so we don’t feel overwhelmed or exposed. Or it’s trying to process things that went on, that we’ve not had chance to step back from and make sense of (especially if you are in a super reactive and highly emotionally demanding role). With this in mind:

• It can be helpful to journal about your day/week - even just for 5-10 minutes of dedicated time (in the bathroom with the door locked if you need to!) to get onto paper all of the things that are going round and round from the day. Be time limited - so put a timer on it. This will start to teach your brain that it does have the space to offload everything, and that it does it in this way, at a specific time, rather than willy-nilly at the most annoying moment! Aim to finish with one thing that went well, or one thing that feels positive about the day.

• At the end of the day spend 5 minutes jotting down all the outstanding things going through your mind and your ‘to do’ for tomorrow. Similarly at the end of the week, spend 10 minutes jotting down all the overflowing thoughts and writing your ‘to do’ for next week or after your holiday. This will help to reassure your mind that you have ‘recorded’ everything, so it doesn’t need to keep popping in to remind you. And if it does, you can tell it that “it’s OK, I’ve got it covered!”. This could form part of your end of work ritual.

• If you really feel you HAVE to do some work in non-work time, be really specific about when you will do it, where you will do it, and for how long - and put a timer on it! It’s too easy to ‘just’ do that ‘one more thing’ which makes your time boundary leaky.

• Switch off ALL work related notifications so that you don’t ‘invite’ work into your non-work time.

• And if the thoughts STILL keep popping up, even though you’ve done ALL of the things?

6. Be really clear about WHY it’s important to switch off properly and remind yourself regularly, especially when you are tempted to fall off the wagon! It could be:

• You never really feel fully rested, and you know it would be better for you (and everyone else) if you could return to work on Monday as the best version of you.

• You don’t fully ENJOY the time you have at evenings, weekends and holidays because you are tired and distracted, and then you feel guilty or frustrated or resentful.

• You want to feel better balance in your life, where you are devoting MOST of your time and energy to the things that matter the most to you - and you KNOW that the place to start is creating better boundaries between work and home. Not simply in terms of the time you dedicate to each area of your life, but more importantly in terms of the emotional energy and headspace you are able to give to each.

• In order to connect with the things you want to connect to, and be fully present, you need to disconnect from the things that distract you. You can’t be fully engaged with more than one thing at a time. Be true to your desires and needs.

7. Don’t make yourself WRONG!
Sometimes, despite all of the great things you are doing to switch off, be present and fully enjoy your non-work time, the thoughts of work stuff still keep popping up/you can reflexively fall into old habits and suddenly find yourself working when you didn’t mean to (super easy to do, especially if you work for yourself!!). Don’t make yourself wrong for it, don’t tell yourself you ‘shouldn’t’ be thinking about work or you ‘mustn’t’ keep doing this. Just notice. Tell yourself “I’m noticing that I’m thinking about work” or “a-ha, I seem to be working again!”. You may find that this alone is enough to allow that thought to drift off or for you to stop.

But if not, then know that you have a toolkit of things to use, and get intentional about deploying some of the tactics described above in your ‘things to do when I start thinking about work’, starting by simply getting up and moving about or jump around, to get you out of your head!

Let me know how you get on and what helps you the most, I’d love to hear!