There was once a time when we might have romanticized the idea of working from home. After all, what sounds terrible about missing out on your commute, staying in comfortable clothes all day, and added flexibility to your schedule? The truth is, particularly for those of us still working from home almost a year after the advent of the coronavirus pandemic, working from home has lost its charm.
Besides being starved for real socialization and the added stress of the pandemic, there are certain habits we tend to fall into when working from home. These habits cause us harm — whether physically or in terms of work performance.
If you want to preserve your health and wellness in these stressful times, make sure you avoid these damaging work-from-home habits.
4 Work-From-Home Behaviors That Hurt Our Health
1) Blurring the Lines
While there has long been debate around work-life balance, working from home can certainly throw any balance you once had out the window. Because you have more freedom and flexibility in your schedule, there’s a temptation to turn your time into a free-for-all. It may not start that way, but you may slip into the mindset of “as long as what needs to get done gets done.”
While this might be true, it’s not necessarily healthy. For example, you need to make sure you take time for yourself in the morning before you jump straight into your inbox. Eat breakfast, shower, and get ready for the day as you would any “real” workday. The ritual helps us focus.
Then there’s the problem of procrastination. It’s easy to become distracted and disengaged from our work when we’re in a comfortable home environment. As a result, we end up procrastinating then “cramming” work into a few late, stressful hours.
While working-from-home naturally causes some hiccups in your schedule, do your best to safeguard personal and professional time. In the end, it will be a lot less stressful.
2) Staying in Bed
Perhaps the greatest temptation when working-from-home is to just stay in our pajamas and stay in bed all day. If you have a tablet or laptop, you can work from anywhere...so why not work from the most comfortable place in the house?
There are a lot of reasons not to work from bed.
First and foremost, it’s not good for us physically. While beds may provide support when we’re sleeping, they do not offer adequate back, hip, or neck support when sitting upright. It doesn’t matter how many pillows you stack! Over time, this can create pain and even curvature of the spine due to poor posture.
Staying in bed also mixes up our minds. Our brains should be trained to associate bed with sleep and rest. When we begin working from bed, our mind begins to associate bed with being awake and working. This can bring on insomnia and poor sleep quality because we have a harder time discerning environmental sleep-time signals.
3) Always On
Because the line between work and home becomes blurry when remote working, it is easy to fall into an “always-on” mode. Part of this is the aforementioned balance issue. However, this has more to do with setting up appropriate boundaries rather than balancing your time.
You might feel tempted to work at all hours or to answer any email no matter how late it comes in. Because we are not physically in an office and as able to “show our work” to our bosses, we might feel the need to overcompensate to “prove” that we’re doing our job. As a result, you may find yourself worrying over replies to late-night emails or neglecting healthy, appropriate breaks from work.
Treat working-from-home like you would any day at the office. When you clock out, you clock out!
4) Sitting Too Much
They say that sitting is the new smoking. A sedentary lifestyle hurts us, period. When we’re at home all day, the temptation to sit for hours, uninterrupted, is real. Between the risks of developing deep-vein thrombosis (DVT), increased heart health risks, diabetes risks, and mental deterioration...all of that sitting just isn’t worth it.
You may be used to sitting in an office all day and might wonder how sitting at home is any different. At home, you don’t have the small advantages of getting to and from work, going up the stairs, or walking far to get to the kitchen or bathroom. We have to make a conscious effort to get up and active while working from home!
What healthy habits are you incorporating into your work week? Share in the comments.