Sorry, Closed during Christmas ! — How to make the best out of the holidays
By: Boss At Home
Tags: Work From Home, Work Life Balance, Christmas, Covid 19, Holidays

Photo by Nicole Michalou

Who wants to talk about work during the holidays? We certainly don’t! In this week’s blog post, we bring you some tips on how to fully relax and de-stress during the holiday season. We know that as much as we admit that we need a break, dropping everything doesn’t come easy. Feelings of guilt, anxiety, and fear may arise from us “abandoning” our work. However, taking a vacation benefits our work in the long term, so winding down this Christmas may be the best choice after all.

We’re writing to help you achieve that work-life balance. Here are Boss at Home’s three suggestions for a relaxing holiday period.

1. Keep connections that count

Photo by Ekaterina Bolovtsova

While switching off is one of the best ways to restore some balance in your life, it’s not completely possible this year. We all saw it coming: the virtual Christmas party. In some ways, it serves as a lifeline for those of us who don’t want to spend the holidays completely alone. If you’re not excited by this thought, however, it’s completely rational. “Zoom fatigue” is a real!

Communication through video conferencing is much more draining because we are missing many useful cues that aid in a flowing conversation1. Humans function best when they get precise feedback from the person they’re talking to in real time. Video conferencing doesn’t always register subtle facial expressions, is deficient of gestures and body language, and muddles eye contact. No wonder we’re always worried if we’re understood or awkwardly talking over one another!

Despite the drawbacks, video calls are a valid way to feel less isolated. While we can’t smooth out every technological bump along the way, there are some methods we can easily implement in our online gatherings to make them more enjoyable for everyone. Dr. Nancy Darling on Psychology Today puts it best. Virtual parties can be more enjoyable if we:

Limit the participants to 3–6 people. That way we can ensure that everyone fits on the screen and can see each other and has enough time to talk and interact.

That way we can ensure that everyone fits on the screen and can see each other and has enough time to talk and interact. Determine the schedule in advance. To decrease risk of fatigue, it’s better to set a manageable length of how long your get-together will last.

To decrease risk of fatigue, it’s better to set a manageable length of how long your get-together will last. Have a host. Just like when you go to your friend’s house pre-COVID, there should be someone who is responsible for making sure everyone is having a good time.

Just like when you go to your friend’s house pre-COVID, there should be someone who is responsible for making sure everyone is having a good time. Agree on an activity. Prevent the awkward silence by having an agreed upon game or activity for everyone to bond over.

What ideas do you have for your next virtual get-together? Personally, we’ve tried board games and pub quizzes over Zoom and it was great fun. Maybe you can chat over a nice dinner with some traditional Christmas meals. We know our friends over at @chefinlockdown have some delicious and lockdown-friendly eats that you’ll definitely have fun making.

2. Work from home, but don’t live at work!

Photo by Taryn Elliott

Chances are you’ve spent quite some effort adjusting your home to have a space where you can concentrate and avoid distractions from the others you live with. This means that it’s now harder to push aside the thought of work when it literally resides with you. Is there really no escape? Perhaps redecorating your home or spending more time in parts of it where you don’t work is one way.

Researchers from the University of St. Andrews in the UK studied what a comfortable home means to people. Their findings reveal that people feel comfortable in homes that are “warm and cozy”, have large spaces to reconnect socially, but also have spaces that afford privacy and the option to go about one’s routines.

What does this mean in the time of a COVID Christmas? We think ditching the work desk for the couch already makes things more relaxing. We can sprawl out, take a break from the hunched posture of working on a computer, and do some guilt-free browsing. A change of scenery, especially with some plants, can also reduce stress. Try sitting at your dining table where we can welcome others to join you is already a contrast from the isolation of our home office. But when you need some space, you can still return your desk, but maybe swap out the calendar of deadlines and stacks of paperwork for things that make you happy or a new hobby that you’re working on.

These are some of our suggestions, but if you’re craving for more tips on how to spruce up your space you can follow our friends over at @lockdownhometransformation.

3. Let’s get physical

Photo by Jonathan Borba

Feeling stressed is not just a mental and emotional experience, but a physical one at that. Your shoulders are tense, have a back hunched like Quasimodo, and a jaw permanently clenched. The American Psychological Association estimates that millions of individuals are in pain due to the physical symptoms that arise from stress. This astounding number of individuals are also at risk for a host of other health problems, such as cardiovascular and respiratory issues.

Both the National Institute of Mental Health and Harvard Medical School recommend exercise as a way of reducing physical symptoms of stress and anxiety. We already know that exercise is good for our bodies, but this doesn’t mean incorporating it onto our daily lives is instant.

One tip that can help us is to reframe our motivations for exercising. A 2018 paper published in the Journal of Physical Activity and health suggests that when their participants exercised to reduce stress, rather than to manage their weight or their health, they were more likely to continue keep exercising into the future. What’s more interesting is that when we exercise, we not only reduce the symptoms of stress, but also make ourselves more resilient against experiencing the negative effects of stress in the first place.

It has been challenging to maintain our exercise routines with the closure of gyms and recreational areas. Fortunately, there are effective ways exercise at home. Our friends over at @lockdown_gym have some content specifically for exercising during COVID.

References:

1https://www.liebertpub.com/doi/pdfplus/10.1089/cyber.2020.29188.bkw