Alamy

Every one of us has mental health in the same way that every one of us has physical health.

Yet despite the prevalence of mental health struggles, there is still so much stigma around them. Worldwide the leading cause of disability is depression, according to the World Health Organization, and in the US alone, nearly 1 in 5 of adults lives with a mental illness.

As a mental health therapist-in-training and the founder of Brown Girl Therapy, the largest mental health community for children of immigrants living in the West, I regularly get asked this question: “How can I support a loved one who is struggling with their mental health?” With the multiple crises we’re currently living through, it can feel like more and more people we know are currently hurting.

Maybe you’ve noticed that a friend’s behavior or demeanor has changed and you’re concerned, or a family member is opening up to you for the first time about their anxiety. I know it’s challenging to know what to say or do. Here are eight things that you can do and eight things you should not do when you’re supporting someone who is struggling with their mental health.

First, the dos:

DO listen and validate

Be curious about what your friend is struggling with and how it’s impacting them. Instead of asking yes-or-no questions, ask open-ended questions to allow them to share their experience with you — questions like “What’s going on?” or “How long have you been experiencing this?” or “How are you coping?”

When they respond, use validating statements that will help them feel heard and accepted just as they are. Many people who struggle with their mental health may often blame or judge  themselves about what they’re going through; some may feel that their struggles aren’t valid because they’re all “in their head.”

Even if you can’t completely understand or relate to their feelings or experiences, you want to communicate to your loved one that they’re perfectly OK — this can be as simple as saying “That sounds really difficult”.

Support looks different for everyone, and what you may need when you’re struggling may not be what someone else needs.

DO ask what they need from you

Instead of making assumptions about what would be helpful to your loved one, ask them directly: “How can I support you?” or “What would be helpful to you right now?” Remember: Support looks different for everyone, and what you may need when you’re struggling may not be what someone else needs when they’re having a hard time.

DO offer to help with everyday tasks

A lot of people who struggle with their mental health may find it incredibly difficult to make basic decisions or perform even seemingly small chores. Instead of using the generic phrase “I’m here if you need me,” try to be specific about what you’re offering so your friend won’t have to bear the burden of reaching out or figuring out what they need in the first place.

If you visit them, take a look around and see what they could use assistance with — like doing the dishes, weeding, vacuuming or folding laundry. If you talk to them, offer to take them to a doctor’s appointment or do a grocery or drugstore run for them; you might also consider sending them a gift card for their meals.

DO celebrate their wins, including the small ones

When a person is struggling with their mental health, every day can be full of challenges. So cheer on their accomplishments and victories. This can help affirm their feelings of agency and efficacy. This could look like thanking them for being so honest and vulnerable with you or  congratulating them for going to work or for taking their dog out for regular walks.

Many people who struggle with their mental health already feel a baseline level of guilt for being a drag on other people’s time, energy and mental space.

DO read up on what they’re struggling with

There’s another important burden you can remove from their plate: Having to teach you about mental illness. Instead, take the time to educate yourself on what they’re going through — for example, learning more about depression, panic attacks or anxiety — so you can understand their lived experience and be aware of severe or risky behaviors or symptoms to look out for.

Today, there are so many places online to find informative, helpful content, from peer-reviewed journals and articles by mental health professionals to posts in digital communities and personal essays by people who share in your loved one’s mental-health challenges.

DO check in with them regularly

Many people who struggle with their mental health already feel a baseline level of guilt for being a drag on other people’s time, energy and mental space. Consistently check in (a quick text is fine) with them, keep them company when you can, and remind your friend that you love them and you’re on their side.

DO recognize that not all mental health struggles look the same

Not all mental health challenges or mental illnesses look the same. Some people might struggle as the result of a specific event or circumstance, while other people may be living with a chronic mental illness. If the latter is true for your loved one, don’t expect them to “get over” it as they would with a flu or broken bone.

Meet them where they are, reminding them you understand it’s something they are living with. This can take different forms depending on what they need — this could mean understanding when they cancel plans on you because they’re having a particularly tough day or adapting your plans with them to reflect what they’re able to do.

It’s important we remove the stigma from taking care of our mental health and talk about it just like we’d talk about going to a physician for a physical illness.

DO normalize talking about mental health

Don’t wait for them to bring up their struggles, or shy away from being direct with them. It’s important we remove the stigma from taking care of our mental health and talk about it in the same way we’d talk about going to a physician or taking medication for a physical illness. You might even consider opening up and being vulnerable when talking about your own mental health so instead of feeling judged, your loved one feels safe being honest with you.

Now, the don’ts:

DON’T compare their experience to others

I really want to drive one point home: Everyone experiences their mental health struggles and mental health illnesses differently. In the guise of trying to make a loved one feel better, you may be tempted to tell them “everyone deals with anxiety [or depression etc] sometimes” or bring up an acquaintance who had the same illness but benefited from a specific strategy, treatment or therapy.

Resist this temptation. Even though saying those things can be helpful in terms of normalizing their experience and making them feel less alone, they can also have the unintended effect of pressuring them to get over it or minimize what they’re feeling.

Another thing to avoid — reminding them of what they have or should be grateful for. Toxic positivity and comparison to others can reinforce the narrative that your loved one’s problems aren’t important.

Avoid using stigmatizing words like “crazy” or “cuckoo”, or saying things like “that’s so OCD” or “take a Xanax”

DON’T use stigmatizing language

Be careful how you talk about mental health around your friend (and in general!). Avoid using stigmatizing words  like “crazy” or “cuckoo”, or using clinical diagnoses or medications flippantly in conversation — like saying “that’s so OCD” when someone is very organized or telling someone to “take a Xanax” when you want them to calm down. Check your own assumptions surrounding mental health issues, professional mental health care and medication so you aren’t causing your loved one unnecessary pain.

DON’T take their behavior personally

People’s mental health struggles are often not linear or predictable. Maybe your friend is less talkative one day, and maybe your sister keeps rescheduling your phone dates. While you may feel hurt or offended by their actions, don’t automatically assume that they are reflections of how your loved one feels about you.

Instead, use their cues as moments to check in on them, ask what you can do to support them, and remind them that you’re here for them when and if they need.

You want to be with your loved one while they’re navigating their own struggles, not steering them or pushing them.

DON’T be confrontational or try to control the situation

When you’re faced with a loved one in pain or distress, it can be really difficult not to get in the metaphorical driver’s seat and forcefully do what you think will relieve their suffering. But in doing this, you’re diminishing their sense of agency. You want to be with your loved one while they’re navigating their own struggles, not steering them or pushing them. So don’t be aggressive about what they should or shouldn’t do, and don’t give them ultimatums.

DON’T get discouraged

You may feel helpless when you’re helping and supporting a loved one who is struggling, and you don’t see them making progress. Just because you feel helpless doesn’t mean you can’t be helpful. Your loved one does not expect you to find them the magic solution or to be perfect; instead, they just need you to be present.

DON’T burn yourself out trying to support your loved one

The better you take care of yourself, the better you can be of support to your loved one. Make sure to keep taking care of yourself, doing the things you love and recharging your own batteries while being there for your loved one. Be clear and direct about your boundaries, and find ways to honor what you need to do in order to be able to show up for them.

People who are struggling with their mental health are not broken, and they do not need to be fixed.

DON’T try to fix them

People who are struggling with their mental health are not broken, and they do not need to be fixed. By jumping in with solutions and advice when they don’t explicitly ask for it, you’re sending them the message that what they’re going through is wrong or bad when in fact you are projecting your own discomfort with what they’re going through. Realize that your impulse to dive into a fix-it mode can actually be a coping mechanism to ease and absolve your own discomfort or anxiety. Which brings me to my next point …

DON’T avoid the feelings that come up for you

When we see our loved ones grappling with something difficult, chronic or hard to comprehend, it can often bring up our own difficult feelings and our own discomfort or anxiety. When this happens, it’s important not to shove that stuff under the rug. Spend time reflecting on what’s coming up for you.

Here are some questions you can ask yourself: Are you anxious because you’re scared of what’s going to happen to your loved one? Are you avoiding them because you feel helpless? Are you carrying around your own biases or stigmas around mental illness? Are you on edge because you’re resentful, burned out or just plain confused?

It’s important to get clarity on what’s coming up for you and why, so you can take care of yourself and still be there for your friend. Don’t be ashamed if you find that you could use some support or professional care. One great US-based resource is the National Alliance on Mental Illness, which hosts free support groups for people who love someone that’s struggling with their mental health.

Watch Sahaj Kaur Kohli’s TED Conversation now:

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Sahaj Kaur Kohli is the founder of Brown Girl Therapy, the first and largest mental health and wellness community of its kind for children of immigrants living in the West, where she works to promote bicultural identity and destigmatize therapy. She is also currently pursuing her master’s in clinical mental health counseling. Kohli’s passion lies at the intersection of narrative storytelling and mental health advocacy. A former journalist, she is currently working on a book to be published by Penguin Life.

This piece was adapted for TED-Ed from this Ideas article.

Stocksy

How would you describe your feelings about social media?

Do words like “entertaining” and “connecting” come to mind — but also words like “exhausting” and “polarized”?

You’re not alone if you find social media to be both a space for staying informed and a space full of a lot of venom and disagreement. These days, that’s the landscape we log into and live in.

Here, Dylan Marron — author, podcast host and instructor of the TED Course “How to connect in a divided world” — explains the challenges that complicate our online conversations and how we can overcome them:

Challenge #1: A constant stream of information demands all our attention

Marron calls this the “Everything Storm.” There’s simply too much information being constantly shared for us to be able to absorb and respond to everything — and yet we’re often compelled to try. As a result, “we end up not knowing what to focus on and ultimately just exhaust ourselves,” Marron says in a lesson from his TED Course. And that’s how we may chime in on topics or  issues that we don’t really care about (or know much about) and say something that’s uninformed, inaccurate or just insensitive.

The solution: Realize that you don’t have to have an opinion about everything

It’s OK — and normal — that there are some topics you know more about and others you know absolutely nothing about, and limit your comments to the former. “By focusing on just one or two topics, by leaning on our own personal experience and not vague references to news stories we only half know, we can escape the storm or at the very least grab an umbrella as it wails around us,” says Marron.

Challenge #2: We have little space on social media to fully express ourselves

On many social platforms, conciseness is key. Some enforce strict character limits, while others tend to give more visibility to messages with fewer words. That’s conducive for speed and efficiency, but nuance and complexity end up falling by the wayside. As Marron puts it, “some of our thoughts are too messy, too complicated, too unformed to whittle them down into a bite-size package.”

The solution: Head to a space where there’s room for you to share complete thoughts

Talking on the phone or in person is ideal, but that’s not always possible. So rather than condensing your opinion into a short reply that’s ripe for misinterpretation, try taking a conversation to someone’s DMs. “Move to platforms and modes of communication that allow us to fully express ourselves without limitation,” Marron says.

Challenge #3: Social media has become a spectacle where we all compete for “likes”

Many parts of the internet have become a battleground, turning all — whether we like it or not — into spectators. We use emojis to cheer and boo, and often the supposed winner of a debate is  the one who gets the most “likes.” While this can sometimes be entertaining, it can interfere with forming genuine connections with other people.

The solution: Exit the arena

Again, this is where direct messages can come in handy. “Find a place far from the audience, where clapbacks and disses aren’t rewarded with instant points, and set up your conversation there,” suggests Marron.

You could start a private message with something like “I wanted to take this conversation here because it’s important to me.”

Challenge #4: We see anyone who disagrees with us as a troll

The above challenges are just a few of the structural hurdles that social media presents. But one of its biggest challenges is its impact on how we interact with — and view — other people. It’s sad but true: Many of us act differently online than we would in real life, often in more hurtful ways.

Internet harassers often see the people they harass as less than human, but “we also have to contend with the fact that our coping mechanism is to regard these harassers as inhuman entities themselves,” says Marron.

When both sides see each other this way, it leaves us all dangerously close-minded, each believing that we are inherently better than the other.

The solution: Remove “troll” from your vocabulary

If you truly want to have a meaningful exchange with someone else, you’ll need to have some empathy for them. In this case, that means “an active refusal to dehumanize even the people who dehumanize others,” says Marron. Remember this: You’re speaking with someone who has a depth of feelings and experiences that have shaped their opinions.

Yes, it can be hard to see haters as human, especially if you’ve never met them in real life. But when you make it a point to approach people online with compassion, you’re on your way to having a conversation that may change perspectives and open doors to new understanding.

Love learning from TED speakers? Get a deeper, more interactive experience with them with TED Courses. Each four-week course is led by experts who will teach you skills for improving your life — whether it’s expanding your imagination and revamping your career to strengthening your memory and building healthy relationships as an adult.

Sign up for Dylan Marron’s TED Course and learn more about bridging gaps and forming meaningful connections. Or, check out our other TED Courses to learn more important skills, from “How to take a life-changing journey” with celebrated travel writer Pico Iyer, to “How to become your best adult self” with educator and author Julie Lythcott-Haims.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Hayley Caldwell is a copywriter on the Audience Development team at TED.

This piece was adapted for TED-Ed from this Ideas article.

Priya Mistry

Tough times are inevitable. Wellbeing and resilience expert Lucy Hone shares the three straightforward tactics that she used to get through her darkest days.

I’d like to start by asking you some questions.

Have you ever lost someone you loved? Had your heart broken? Struggled through an acrimonious divorce or been the victim of infidelity?

Have you ever lived through a natural disaster? Been bullied? Or made redundant from a job?

Ever had a miscarriage or an abortion, or struggled through infertility?

Finally, have you or anyone you loved had to cope with mental illness, dementia, some form of physical impairment, or suicide?

Chances are, you answered “yes” to one or more of these questions, and that’s true for most people. Adversity doesn’t discriminate.

If you are alive, you are going to have to deal with some tough times.

I started studying resilience a decade ago at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. It was an amazing time to be there, because the professors who trained me had just picked up a contract to train 1.1 million American soldiers to be mentally fit as a complement to their physical fitness. You don’t get a much more skeptical, discerning audience than American drill sergeants returning from Afghanistan. For someone like me whose main quest in life is trying to work out how we take the best of scientific findings out of academia and bring them to people in their everyday lives, it was a pretty inspiring place to be.

I finished my studies there and returned home to Christchurch, New Zealand, to start my doctoral research. I had just begun that study when the Christchurch earthquakes hit, so I put my research on hold and I started working with my community to help them through that terrible post-quake period. I worked with all sorts of organizations — from government departments to building companies and all sorts of community groups — teaching them the ways of thinking and acting that we know can boost resilience. I thought that was my calling, my moment to put all of that research to good use.

Sadly, I was wrong. My own true test came in 2014 on Queen’s Birthday weekend. We and two other families had decided to go down to Lake Ohau. At the last minute my beautiful 12-year-old daughter, Abi, decided to hop in the car with her best friend Ella, also 12, and Ella’s mom, Sally, a dear friend of mine.

On the way down, a car sped through a stop sign, crashed into them, and instantly killed all three of them. In the blink of an eye, I found myself flung to the other side of the equation, waking up with a whole new identity. Instead of being the resilience expert, I became the grieving mother, trying to wrap my head around unthinkable news with my world smashed to smithereens.

Suddenly, I was the one on the receiving end of all the expert advice — and I didn’t like what I heard one little bit. In the days after Abi died, my husband, Trevor, and I were told we were now prime candidates for family estrangement, we were likely to get divorced, and we were at high risk of mental illness. “Wow,” I remember thinking, “Thanks for that.”

Leaflets described the five stages of grief: anger, bargaining, denial, depression, and acceptance. Victim support services arrived at our doorstep and told us we could expect to write off the next five years to grief. I know the leaflets and the resources meant well but in all of that advice, they left us feeling like victims, totally overwhelmed by the journey ahead and powerless to exert any influence over our grieving whatsoever.

I didn’t need to be told how bad things were; I already knew things were truly terrible. What I needed most was hope. I needed a journey through all that anguish, pain and longing. Most of all, I wanted to be an active participant in my grief process.

I decided to turn my back on their advice and instead to conduct something of a self-experiment. I’d done the research, I had the tools, and I wanted to know how useful they were now in the face of such an enormous mountain to climb. But I have to confess: At this point I didn’t really know any of this was going to work. Parental bereavement is, after all, widely acknowledged as the hardest of losses to bear. But, five years on, I can tell you that you can rise up from adversity — that it is utterly possible to make yourself think and act in certain ways that help you navigate tough times.

The following are my go-to strategies that I relied upon and saved me in my darkest days. These three tactics underpin all of my work, and they’re readily available to all of us.

1. Know that suffering is part of life.

This doesn’t mean resilient people go so far as to welcome it in — they are not delusional. However, when the tough times come, they seem to know that suffering is part of every human existence. Knowing this stops you from feeling discriminated against when challenges arrive.

After Abi died, never once did I find myself thinking, “Why me?” In fact, I remember thinking, “Why not me? Terrible things happen to you just like they do everybody else. This is your life now — time to sink or swim.”

The real tragedy is that not enough of us seem to know this any longer. We live in an age where many of us feel entitled to perfect lives. Shiny, happy photos on Instagram are the norm when, as all of us know, the very opposite is true.

2. Carefully choose where you’re directing your attention.

I’ve found that resilient people have a habit of realistically appraising situations, and typically they manage to focus on the things they can change and learn to accept the things they can’t. This is a vital and learnable skill.

As humans, we are good at noticing threats and weaknesses. Being wired in this way is important for us and has served us well from an evolutionary perspective. When we were cave people, our ability to ignore a beautiful rainbow and to concentrate on an approaching tiger instead ensured our survival.

The problem is we now live in an era where we are bombarded by different kinds of threats — from unrealistic deadlines and toxic colleagues to mounting bills or just someone stealing a parking lot from us — all day long and our brains treat every single one of those as though they were a tiger. Our stress response is permanently dialed up.

Resilient people have worked out a way of tuning in to the good around them. One day, when doubts were threatening to overwhelm me, I distinctly remember thinking, “You cannot get swallowed up by this — you’ve got so much to live for. Don’t lose what you have to what you have lost.”

In psychology, we call this “benefit-finding.” In my new world, it involved trying to find things to be grateful for. At least, our dear girl hadn’t died from a terrible, long, drawn-out illness. She died suddenly, instantly, sparing us and her that pain. We also had a huge amount of social support from our family and friends to help us through. Most of all, we still had two beautiful boys who needed us and deserved to have as normal a life as we could possibly give them.

When you’re going through a difficult time, you might need a reminder or permission to feel grateful. In our kitchen, we’ve got a neon-pink poster that says “Accept the good.”

In their work with the US Army, psychologists framed it a little bit differently — they phrased it as “hunting the good stuff.” Find the language that best works for you. Whatever you do, make an intentional, deliberate, ongoing effort to tune in to what’s good in your world.

3. Ask yourself: “Is what I’m doing helping me or harming me?”

This immensely powerful question is used a lot in therapy, and it was my go-to question in the days after the girls died. I’d ask it again and again.

For example, I asked myself: “Should I go to the trial and see the driver? Would that help me, or would it harm me?” For me, the answer was a no-brainer; I chose to stay away. However, Trevor eventually decided to meet with the driver at a later time.

Late at night, I’d often find myself sometimes poring over old photos of Abi and getting more and more upset. At a certain point, I’d ask myself: “Is this helping you, or is it harming you?” I realized it was far kinder to myself to put away the photos and go to bed.

This question can be applied to so many different contexts. For example, you might ask yourself: “Is the way I’m thinking and acting helping me or harming me in my bid to get that promotion? To pass that exam? To recover from a heart attack?”

I write a lot about resilience, and this one strategy has prompted more positive feedback than any other. I’ve gotten scores of letters and emails from people saying what a huge impact it’s had on their lives. By asking yourself whether you really need to drink that extra glass of wine, spend another hour on social media, or rehash the same old argument with a family member, you’re putting yourself back in the driver’s seat. It gives you control over your decision making.

Contrary to what many of us think, resilience isn’t a fixed or elusive trait that some people have and some people don’t. In reality, it requires the willingness to try basic strategies like these.

We all have moments in life — when the path we thought we were taking veers off into some terrible direction that we never anticipated and certainly didn’t want. It happened to me, and it was awful beyond imagining.

If you ever find yourself in a situation where you think “There’s no way out I’m coming back from this,” I urge you to lean into these strategies. Know that struggle is part of life, don’t let your attention get fixated exclusively on the negative, and consider if the way you are thinking and acting is helping you or harming you.

I won’t pretend that thinking like this is always easy and it also doesn’t remove all the pain. However, during the last five years, I’ve learned that thinking this way really does help. More than anything, it’s shown me that it is possible to live and grieve at the same time.

This piece was adapted from a TEDxChristchurch Talk. Watch it now:

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Lucy Hone is a codirector at the New Zealand Institute of Wellbeing & Resilience and a research associate at AUT University in Auckland. She is also the author of the book Resilient Grieving.

This post was originally published on TED Ideas. It’s part of the “How to Be a Better Human” series, each of which contains a piece of helpful advice from someone in the TED community; browse through all the posts here.

Nata Schepy

Our working situations have changed dramatically since early 2020.

The COVID-19 pandemic caused many people to lose their jobs, and companies around the world made the move to remote work. For example, by June 2020, 42 percent of the US labor force were working from home, and 46 percent of employees in London reported working from home at some point in 2020. Over the past year, we’ve nailed the bed-to-Zoom commute: We can be up, presentably dressed (our top half at least), hydrated, caffeinated and in front of the screen in minutes.

Despite the challenges of making our living space into our working space, we’ve gotten used to the comforts of working from home, and surveys show that employees are feeling anxious about returning to the office. As vaccination rates rise and COVID cases drop, more of us are being asked to go back to in-person workplaces. So how can we make this transition easier?

Here are 6 tips for returning:

1. Be compassionate with yourself, and others

The shift to home working was sudden, and that kind of change was psychologically jarring and therefore negative for most people, according to Meag-gan O’Reilly PhD, a psychologist at Stanford, cofounder of Inherent Value Psychology Inc. What’s more, this shift was combined with uncertainty about the future; the loss of autonomy, freedom and connection that came with lockdown; and a level of loss and grief that was unprecedented for many of us.

Being at home all the time and losing familiar structures and routines led some of us to overwork — which might have included taking up new hobbies with overly high expectations — while others struggled to focus. “If you pride yourself on having a good work ethic, that may have hit your sense of self and self-esteem,” O’Reilly says. “I think people were unfairly blaming themselves for struggling. When you’re going through something unprecedented, there’s no bar for this.”

The pandemic also highlighted existing inequalities. O’Reilly asks: “Who was getting the virus more? Black and brown communities, because they’re more likely to be essential workers that deal with people. So for people who are Black and brown, we had to sit and hold and deal with this history and this very present racism, sexism and classism.” At the same time, the murder of George Floyd and continued episodes of police brutality brought grief and trauma to the fore for so many and contributed to feelings of discomfort or othering at work, based upon how employers responded to the movement for Black lives.

Consider the things that have changed for you this year and decide what elements you want to keep.

Besides these huge societal issues were the minutiae — the cancelled holidays, birthdays over Zoom instead of in person, not being able to hug loved ones or even stop by a coworker’s desk to say “hello” in the morning.  We lost or had to adjust the little daily routines that make up our lives, and as many of us are exiting crisis mode, it’s time to take stock of both what your life is like now and what it used to be like.

O’Reilly says it’s important to acknowledge the journey you’ve been on in the past 20 months and give yourself compassion and empathy. Consider the things that have changed for you this year, and decide what elements you want to keep.

“One of the elements I hope all of us keep as we return to work is this idea of shared humanity,” she says. “When we were all Zooming in, we had kids running in the background, our pets jumping up on our laps. People got to see us as more fully human, and that allowed everyone else to give more grace.”

2. Be intentional with your time and energy, and set realistic expectations

If a commute is part of your return to the office, your time is likely to be squeezed during this transition. “We need to accept that we can’t show up everywhere,” O’Reilly says. “Stretching and hustling and trying to be everywhere is not only futile, but it’s exhausting. And it’s trying to solve the wrong problem.”

Instead, she encourages people to think about what projects, teams, activities and individuals they want to be more connected with. How can you show up where you want to be? How are you going to distribute your finite energy and time intentionally? Are there certain things you’ve invested time or energy in that you want to continue? Or leave behind?

If you’re preparing to return to in-person work, you need to understand what it will look like. Companies are taking different approaches, but one thing’s certain, says US-based Rebecca Henderson, CEO of Randstad Global Businesses, which provides HR services. “We’re not going back to what it was pre-pandemic. There are going to be limitations on how people will be getting together.” This could mean that lunch break spaces, meeting rooms and even restrooms may look very different than before.

Another important consideration is vaccination. Not everyone will choose to be vaccinated, and companies will need to decide how to approach this. Get to know the reality you’re heading back into. What are the rules where you work? Are you comfortable with the safety measures your employer has established? Ask questions, and read the information provided by your workplace. Then imagine the situation and give yourself time to adjust to it mentally.

3. Establish a new routine (and wake up early enough to do it!)

Working from home, you’ve probably mastered the art of hopping on Zoom at the last minute. The thought of a morning routine might seem like a distant memory.

Think about how you can bridge your current routine with the one you need. Figure out what time you need to wake up and what support you might need at home. “Start thinking about building in small pieces of the routine into your current schedule, so you can scaffold up to what you’re going to need to do,” explains O’Reilly.

Reawaken old habits. Give yourself time to prepare meals if you need to bring lunch to work, or to pick out and iron the work clothes that haven’t left your closet in so long.

This shift back to the office gives you the chance to set your boundaries in terms of availability, communication, and when and where you work.

There could also be new layers of routine during your working day. Perhaps you have to book a particular time slot or day to work in the office, take an extra few minutes to sign in to your building in the morning or undertake a health screening.

And if your workplace is taking a staggered approach to staffing, you might need to plan ahead to make sure you get the benefits of socializing again. Try to coordinate with someone you usually work with, Henderson says. “I really encourage folks to have a routine – a well-defined schedule that you potentially match up with your colleagues. Otherwise, you run the risk of going back to the office but still feeling alone.”

4. Set your boundaries

Working from home blurred a lot of boundaries. When you’re sitting at a makeshift desk in your bedroom or kitchen, it can be almost impossible to separate work from home. “You could be having dinner with your family, yet you’re still working,” says O’Reilly. “You’re more accessible – people can email you anytime, so the boundary gets lost.”

This shift back to the office gives you the chance to set your boundaries in terms of availability, communication and when and where you work. Do you want to turn off your emails at certain times? Do you prefer to communicate by Slack or video call? Are weekly check-in meetings most effective? Think about what works best for your productivity and your mental health, and share these findings with your employer and colleagues.

Suddenly being around a lot of people again could come as a shock to the system.

You may feel that you work better from home. Employers are open to different approaches, and this can make it easier for you to establish new boundaries. According to a report by the Welsh Government, working from home is a trend that has been increasing since 1981 in the UK, reaching a maximum of 43.1 percent of employees in April 2020. The Work After Lockdown research project suggests it won’t be entirely reversed.

“For sure, employers have changed their attitude about productivity at home,” Henderson says. “For many years, a lot of employers didn’t like the work from home scenario because they didn’t feel like they could get their hands on productivity metrics. I don’t believe there are any employers who believe that any longer.”

You might also want to think about your sensory boundaries as you return to a crowded office. Suddenly being around a lot of people again could come as a shock to the system. If it’s not possible to return to work in phases, O’Reilly recommends getting away from the screen regularly. “Inject some ‘admin time’ into the day, and instead of catching up on paperwork, have a sensory break,” says O’Reilly. “Step outside, and close your eyes. Do some breathing or stretching, or engage in some meditation.”

5. When you reconnect with people, remember they’ve also been through a lot

Socializing is an important aspect of work, but it’s a big source of anxiety for many. After more than a year conversing with colleagues through screens, you may be worried about being socially awkward. Practice can help here: Go out, talk to people at the store or in the street, and start brushing up on your small talk. Treat yourself with kindness, and take it slowly.

Your colleagues may have lost someone, or seen a family member become disabled because of long COVID.

Then there’s the physical aspect: We need to think about hugs versus elbow bumps, and consider people’s differing levels of comfort with contact. “There need to be conversations around how people want to reconnect, how much or how little, and all that can be daunting for people,” O’Reilly says.

Everyone has experienced the pandemic differently, and some are excited to return to work. So how can you handle this when you’re anxious? In O’Reilly’s opinion, someone who is already struggling shouldn’t have to constantly advocate for themselves, and this is why a compassionate workplace is essential. But sometimes it may be necessary to make yourself heard and speak up for what you require. Those who are excited should be mindful, ask questions and make space for people who are anxious.

No matter where you are on the excitement spectrum, keep in mind what people have been through. Your colleagues may have lost someone or seen a family member become disabled because of long COVID, or they themselves may be struggling with recovery in ways that are invisible. “Take some time to check in and calibrate with people, because that’s going to show up in their work life in some way,” O’Reilly says. “Some people aren’t going to be happy, some people are still grieving, and some people are still losing people. Let’s not forget that.”

Plus: Be mindful of wider issues that have come to the fore during the pandemic. Many of O’Reilly’s private practice clients are Black, Indigenous and people of color (BIPOC), and some of them experienced a reprieve by not being in the office. “They dealt with fewer microaggressions and less toxic culture, especially as police violence, Black Lives Matter and the loss of Black lives was in the news. They didn’t have to go to work and answer questions in person. They had that digital distance that gave them a little privacy.”

There are things you can do to be more aware and compassionate about the experience of your BIPOC colleagues, O’Reilly says. “First, remember Black Lives Still Matter. Second, check in but do not demand or expect to be let into someone’s process. Just leave them an open invitation. And third, continue doing your work as an ally. Be on the lookout for microaggressions, emotional labor and when your BIPOC peers are being dismissed or treated inequitably.”

When we ask our peers and coworkers how the pandemic was, we should include racial trauma.

She also urges people to remember that during the COVID-19 pandemic, there was also many incidences of police violence that traumatized people in the Black community. “When we ask our peers and coworkers how the pandemic was, we should include racial trauma. You could say something like ‘COVID is hard. When you’re ready or want to share, I also want to know how all the loss and racial trauma is for you.’”

6. Prepare to take care of your mental health

It’s totally normal to plan for anxiety — after all, we do this all the time for big, anxiety-provoking events like weddings and births. O’Reilly recommends following three steps: Pin down a date to return to the office, have an internal conversation about how you’re feeling, and talk to people about it. “Free-floating anxiety is worse than specific worries,” O’Reilly says. “Having an anchor date is grounding, so it’s not sudden or unknown. Asking yourself questions helps you attend to your feelings and adapt to the stressors.”

For example, if you identify that you’re anxious about attending a meeting, this might mean planning to sit at the back of the room. Talking to others — gathering a community — will give you support for managing your anxiety. But O’Reilly says it can go much further. “I think mental health got a big spotlight during this pandemic, finally, in a way that wasn’t as stigmatized, because we were all going through it,” she says. “I want people to know they’re not the only ones. We always do better when we don’t feel alone.”

Watch Dr. Meag-gan O’Reilly’s TEDxSJSU Talk here: 

Angus Greig

Overwhelm.

That word doesn’t feel very pleasant hanging there, does it? It brings up feelings of failure and isolation. I’m a professional organizer, and it’s the word that I hear the most from new clients.

I have a friend and client who runs a successful business, is very active in the community, and is the most positive person you will ever meet. Yet at our first consultation, she told me that not only did she feel overwhelmed, she felt paralyzed. When I asked her to elaborate, she brought up words like shame, failure, fear and isolation.

I assured her that she is not alone.

In fact, in our homes, businesses and relationships, “overwhelm” is our society’s dirty little secret. We fill everything. We fill our houses, our cars, our storage units, our offices, our phones, our minds and our hearts with more than we can manage.

We think that more will lead us to happiness, but all it does is perpetuate the overwhelm. Because of this, the word “clutter” is everywhere.  But what people don’t realize is clutter is not just our stuff. Yes, it can be the physical things that clog up our homes, but it can also be digital, mental, emotional or even spiritual.

I define clutter as anything that keeps you from living the life that you were meant to lead, anything that keeps you from living the life that you want to lead and anything that stops you from accomplishing your work and enjoying your life.

Physical clutter is the typical stuff we think of — the closets that are overflowing, the garages that can’t hold cars, the storage units that have become a billion-dollar industry in the US alone.

Digital clutter are things like the 10 or 200 or 50,000 emails in inboxes — something I see on a very regular basis. It’s also all the files saved on your computer without naming conventions so you don’t know what they are and you spend a lot of time looking for the ones you want.

Mental clutter could be your fears, your to-do list, what’s going on in the news or anything else that’s filling your head at night.

Emotional clutter can be the negative patterns and beliefs you don’t even realize that you’re carrying around. It can be all those “I can statements that run through your head like “I can’t lose weight” or “I can’t quit my job and own my own business”.

Spiritual clutter can be a lack of forgiveness or a lack of peace.

Those last two — emotional and spiritual clutter — can be very subtle, and they can also be the most paralyzing.

While it may not seem possible, I believe that all the different types of clutter I’ve listed here have one main cause. My wonderful friend, mentor and business coach Barbara Hemphill has trademarked a phrase that sums it up: “Clutter is postponed decisions.”

Think about that for a minute.

Take physical clutter, for example. When you look at your closet, perhaps there’s a whole section of clothes that we don’t wear and the postponed decision there is: “Am I really going to put in the effort or time to lose that last 10 pounds and fit into this whole stuff?” Or maybe the postponed decision is: “Am I going to clean out my storage area so I can take these things, put them into bins, and rotate them in and out every season?”

Paper is a huge source of the clutter I deal with. We pick up a piece of paper; we put it back down and one pile becomes 10 piles. Then when you have family coming over for dinner, you push them all in a bag and put them in the closet.

And we do the same thing with email that we do with paper. We open it but we’re not making any decisions about it. Sometimes our decisions are easy — we just delete, reply or put it in a folder, but quite often we postpone making a decision until we get to the point where we don’t even want to open up our computer.

I always had a very good handle on the first two: physical and digital clutter. And I understood how the other ones worked with my clients, but I didn’t truly understand how those could affect me in my own life until I got stuck.

In 2012, I had heart surgery. My whole life I’d had a valve defect, and I’d always been told: “You’ll live into your 80s with no medical intervention; you’re fine.”

Well, that year, my father was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and given a very short time to live, and my oldest son was hospitalized for suicidal thoughts. My heart figuratively and then literally broke.

By April 2012, I was in heart failure so I had to have surgery.

I flew through it, and I was the model patient. I was only in the hospital for 48 hours. Afterwards, I was up walking and doing things in record time. I completed a half marathon 11 months after heart surgery.

My life looked great and I was getting a lot of compliments, but I felt stuck. Why? I had massive amounts of emotional clutter. It consisted of fears, questions like:
“What if the surgery didn’t work?”
“What if my heart breaks again?”
“Why am I having these dizziness spells?”
“Why do I still need a nap every single day a year later?”

And also guilt. I asked myself: “Why am I still here while other people aren’t?”

And — let me tell you — those two combine to make some pretty big spiritual clutter.

You probably won’t be surprised to learn that my house is very, very neat and clean almost all the time. At the time, I had a client who was the opposite. She was depressed by her townhouse and hadn’t had people over in years — except for me, to try to work on it. We became very close very quickly.

One day, I was commenting to her that besides this stuff that was dragging her down, she had a vibrant life, was doing fun things, continuing her education, going on trips. I tried to prompt her a bit by saying: “Imagine what you could do without all this stuff weighing you down!”

She zinged me and said, “Look who’s talking. You keep telling me about ideas that you have for your business and things you want to do, and you’re not doing any of them. You are also stuck.”

So we challenged each other, and we both started facing our issues. I stopped postponing my decision to look at my fear and postponing the need to deal with my guilt.

Now I don’t know what your postponed decisions are. Do you have a fear you’re not facing?  Or is there someone you need to give forgiveness to?

To move forward, you need to make a decision.  Some are easy — for instance, you could say, “Two weeks from today and I will clean out this garage!” Some are grand — “I’m going to drop out of school, move to California, and write a novel!” And some are minuscule — “Every week I’m going to unsubscribe from two store emails.” Having clutter does not make you a bad person; it is not a moral sentence. And feeling guilty about your clutter is not going to help you, whether it’s guilt from someone else or from yourself.

There’s a saying I like that goes: “Change is a result of action, and action is the result of a decision.” You have the power — even in the midst of feeling horrible overwhelm to the point of being paralyzed — to create change by making a decision. It all starts with an action.

With the physical clutter, you’ve got to box it up, bag it up, take it to the donation center or the curb or wherever it goes. For the other kinds of clutter, you also need to take an action — it might be talking to a good friend, getting out in nature, meditating or journaling. In other words, do something, move forward, make a decision and take an action, even if it’s tiny. The universe will reward you with momentum.

And yes, some clutter is going to come back; that’s just life. But if you keep making decisions and don’t postpone them, you’ll ultimately move from overwhelm towards something that all of us want — peace.

This post was adapted from Kerry Thomas‘s TEDxAshburn Talk. Watch it here:

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Kerry Thomas is a professional organizer and the owner and founder of Conquer the Chaos. She is passionate about helping business owners and leaders with ADHD organize their environments and clear all forms of clutter from their lives, so they can experience productivity and peace of mind. Thomas is also the author of the soon to be released book Less Clutter, More Peace: A Dog’s Teachings. She is based in Leesburg, Virginia.

This post was originally published on TED Ideas. It’s part of the “How to Be a Better Human” series, each of which contains a piece of helpful advice from someone in the TED community; browse through all the posts here.

Ori Toor

Have you ever woken up in the morning — or even in the middle of the night — only to find that your body is already in full-blown, heart-racing fight-or-flight mode?

Panic attacks are surprisingly common; at least one-third of us will experience one at some point in our lives, according to Cindy Aaronson PhD, a clinical psychiatrist at Mount Sinai Health System in New York City. While symptoms vary from person to person,  they can include a pounding heart, shortness of breath, light-headedness, sweating, trembling, nausea, tingling or numbness in the fingers and toes, and an overwhelming sense of impending doom.

Despite how terrifying and memorable panic attacks can be, they are not inherently dangerous.

For many people, these alarming sensations — which can mimic those of a heart attack or other serious medical condition — are accompanied by a conviction that they are about to die. For others, says Aaronson, there’s a sensation of “unreality,” where time and perception become scrambled. “Sounds sound different — you feel like you’re in a tunnel and things are far away; colors seem different. People sometimes describe it as an out-of-body experience,” she says. “They feel like they’re going to lose control and go crazy.”

It’s no surprise, then, that many people in the grips of a panic attack show up at the emergency room believing that they are having a heart attack or suffocating. But despite how terrifying and memorable these episodes can be, they are not inherently dangerous, says Justin Feinstein PhD, a clinical neuropsychologist and director of the Float Clinic and Research Center at the Laureate Institute for Brain Research in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

Instead, panic attacks are a manifestation of the brain and body being out of sync, he explains.“It’s a normal physiological fear response happening at a totally inappropriate time.”

Here’s what happens in your body during a panic attack

Even though psychiatrists have been investigating just what panic is since the mid-to-late 1800s, the term “panic disorder” didn’t appear in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders until 1980. Experts still aren’t sure precisely what underlies this disordered brain-body connection.

“Sometimes panic might start in your body itself, and then create processes within your brain. Other times, your brain could initiate the entire onset of a panic attack, which then manifests itself in your body,” says Feinstein. In some cases, genetics or changes in brain function may be at play. In others, stress is a factor.

Panic attacks begin with something that causes your heart to race — it could even be caused by something as innocuous as a jolt of caffeine.

But once an attack is triggered, the cascade of physiological responses in the body is fairly universal. Typically, it begins with something that causes your heart to race. This might be a stimulus in the environment — perhaps a sound or a scent that you associate with a traumatic event — or even something as innocuous as a jolt of caffeine. In a panic attack, the racing heart sets off a danger alarm in your brain and sends your body’s fear response into overdrive.

Your amygdala — a pair of almond-sized nerve bundles buried in the deep brain that plays a key role in processing emotions — sends a distress signal to your hypothalamus — a tiny command center that sits atop the brainstem and coordinates involuntary bodily functions such as breathing, blood pressure and heartbeat. Your hypothalamus fires messages via the autonomic nervous system to the adrenal glands, prompting them to flood your bloodstream with hormones including adrenaline and cortisol. These chemical messengers engage your body’s survival reflexes and ready it to take defensive action.

Your pupils dilate, and your mind becomes laser focused. Your breathing rate increases, allowing your body to take in extra oxygen. Cellular metabolism shifts to maximize the amount of glucose available to the brain and muscles. Your blood is diverted away from non-essential regions like your fingers, toes and stomach and towards the major muscles of the arms and legs — steeling them to either fight off a threat or flee the scene.

Panic attacks typically peak and subside within 10 or 15 minutes, and there are a handful of solid techniques that can help you ride them out.

That, in a nutshell, captures the traditional scientific thinking about panic attack. “The amygdala has always sort of been viewed as the fear epicenter,” says Feinstein.

However, recent work from his lab suggests that other structures in the deep brain may also be involved. Specifically, the insular cortex and a part of the brain stem called the “nucleus of the solitary tract” — regions that together receive and map signals from the heart, lungs and bloodstream. Feinstein’s team found that these areas generate fear impulses even in people who have been missing an amygdala due to a rare brain injury, suggesting that panic may often begin here in other people, too.

So, how can we hit the brakes?

To be classed as a panic attack, symptoms must come on rapidly, or within a few minutes, says Aaronson. And there’s good news: Attacks typically peak and subside within 10 or 15 minutes, and there are a handful of solid techniques that can help you ride them out.

Chief among those is recognizing your experience as a panic attack and not a more serious medical crisis, and gently reminding yourself that there’s nothing physically unsafe about it. “Just knowing what it is helps people,” says Aaronson. Just to be sure, double-check that you’re not experiencing any heart-attack specific symptoms such as pressure in the chest or pain that builds or radiates into the arm or jaw.

Once you’ve ruled those out, remember: Panic always passes, and focusing on that belief can send it on its way.

Of course, this is easier said than done when you feel like you’re suffocating or losing control. “It takes practice,” says Aaronson. “But the more you do it, the better you get at doing it.”

You might tell yourself: “Everything my body is doing right now is designed to keep me safe and protect me.”

If you can, find a quiet spot where you can talk yourself through why you’re feeling what you’re feeling.

For example, you might tell yourself: “I’m feeling light-headed because my blood is being redirected to my limbs. I’m breathing hard because my body is responding in an evolutionarily honed way to adrenaline. Everything my body is doing right now is designed to keep me safe and protect me.”

When you do this, you’re inviting another region of the brain into the conversation — the frontal cortex. This area is positioned just behind the forehead, which is responsible for conscious thought, judgement and problem solving. Bringing a sense of curiosity and analysis to the way you observe these sensations can help you to underline that they are just transient physical processes moving through you.

The other major tool in your toolbox is your breath. “Most people breathe on average from 12 to 20 breaths a minute. And when you’re hyperventilating, you’re easily doubling that,” says Feinstein.

He recommends trying to gradually slow your breathing to between five and 10 breaths per minute, and aiming to make your exhales longer than your inhales. This simple technique engages a parasympathetic response — fight-or-flight’s calming cousin, also referred to as “rest-and-digest.” Try doing this simple exercise from Judson Brewer, psychiatrist, neuroscientist and director of research and innovation at Brown University’s Mindfulness Center in Providence, Rhode Island.

This kind of deep breathing stimulates the vagus nerve — the longest nerve in the body, which runs through regions including the digestive system and diaphragm, and feeds directly into the brainstem’s nucleus of the solitary tract. It carries signals and sensory information from and to the brain, and regulates functions including heart rate, breathing rate and digestion.

“Ultimately, panic attacks are just fear of fear,” says clinical psychiatrist Cindy Aaronson, PhD.

Interestingly, your vagus nerve is a two-way street. By breathing in a slow, controlled manner, you send a powerful signal to your brain that you are relaxed and there is nothing to fear. In turn, this stimulates certain parts of the heart muscle and helps to steady the pulse.

When practiced regularly, longer-term practices such as mindfulness meditation, which are usually built around a core of breathing techniques, can help people quash attacks before they take hold, says Feinstein. “[Mindfulness] teaches people a new association with their visceral experiences,” he explains. Focusing intently on your breath and heartbeat in a relaxed setting can help you shake off any reflexive jump to panic when they speed up in everyday life.

Therapy can help too. Aaronson’s group found that cognitive behavioral therapy, which is designed to gradually help you modify your behavioral responses to life events, can strengthen the neural connections between the frontal cortex and the amygdala. This makes panic sufferers more adept at talking themselves down off the ledge.

“Ultimately, panic attacks are just fear of fear,” says Aaronson. In the US alone, at least 1 in 10 Americans experiences a panic attack in any given year — the same number as fall ill during a bad flu season — so if you find yourself having one, know that you have plenty of company.

And just as your body responds to the flu virus by igniting a fever, it can sometimes respond to fear by firing up a panic attack. But with a little help and a few key techniques in your arsenal, you can take the wind out of panic’s sails. “If [you’re] not afraid of it, then who cares if it happens?” says Aaronson. “It passes.”

Watch Dr. Aaronson’s TED-Ed Animation on panic attacks now: 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Ceri Perkins is an NYC-based writer and editor who covers the environment, science, nature and human behavior. Her work appears in BBC Earth, Physics World, The Guardian, How it Works and more. Find her on Twitter @pepperjayperk.

This piece was adapted for TED-Ed from this Ideas article.

Angus Greig

The loss of a friendship can be devastating.

Whether it’s the slow drifting apart from a childhood friend, the sudden, sharp distance created by a disagreement, or one of the many relationships that have quietly fallen away during the pandemic, losing someone that you thought would always be in your life is profoundly jarring.

But friendship breakups will happen over the course of our lives, and we need to start learning how to deal with them in healthy ways, says friendship coach Danielle Bayard Jackson.

The most significant thing we need to do, says Jackson, is normalize the fact that sometimes friendships do end and that can actually be healthy. However, we haven’t been taught to carry this expectation into our friend relationships.

“We’re not looking at our friends through a lens of ‘Gosh, I hope this works out’, but we’ll do that with a romantic partner for sure,” says Jackson. “With a partner, we wonder if they’re going to be the one. But with friends, we assume they’re the one from the minute we establish that we like each other.”

And because we don’t view the loss of a friendship as a normal occurrence, it feels like a personal failing when it happens and something we should be ashamed of. Or, as Jackson puts it, “If friendship is supposed to be easy and yours ended, what did you do wrong?”

But that isn’t the case.

Friendships, like any relationship, sometimes aren’t meant to be — and even if they are, maintaining them takes real work. Kristen Newton has been interested in this work for years and founded HEARTConvos, which aims to help people who feel stuck in unsatisfying friendships have the kind of open and honest communication that keeps a friendship healthy.

“[Otherwise] I think we feel blindsided because we belittle the value and significance of our social connections and friendship. Yet we recognize the weight that they carry when they don’t work out, and we experience that hurt and disappointment,” she says.

So, how do you get over a friendship that has ended?  Here, she and Jackson share their advice:

1. Give yourself space to grieve the loss

This is the most important place to start. Be honest with other people in your life about what you’re going through, and try using the same language and self-care that you would during a breakup with a partner.

“Definitely get the ice cream!” says Jackson. “I think some of us try to be tough, and it feels a little juvenile — maybe a little vulnerable — to say ‘My feelings are hurt and I am sad over a friendship’. Feel the feelings the same way you would grieve over a romantic breakup.”

Newton agrees. “To the brain, a breakup is a breakup,” she says. “Sometimes people are wrestling through stages of grief. Then you start asking yourself: ‘Was I unhealthily attached to this person in a romantic way?’ [Because] I’ve only ever associated this type of pain in a romantic connection or with an egregious hurt in my family.”

But friendships are just as important and the feelings tied up in them just as profound — more even, because we expect them to last much longer. When Jackson posted a TikTok about this emotional significance of friendship early in 2021, the comments took an unexpected turn. “I was surprised by how much pain there was surrounding lost friendships. That wasn’t even what the video was about, but that’s where the conversation went. So I think a lot of us are still hurt by those things and looking for a space to process how to move on.”

2. Get closure, if you can

With a romantic partner, there’s usually a breakup conversation and you know that you’re either in the relationship or you’re not, says Jackson. “But the very blurry nature of starting and ending friendships makes it hard to navigate to the end — because when is it the end?”

Newton recommends “diagnosing” what has gotten you to where you are — this means asking yourself a lot of questions. What exactly happened? How is it affecting me? No, how is it really affecting me?

Then, you can do your best to get clarity from your friend at this stage. “You can think about why everything is settling the way that it is. That is not in an effort to change the other person’s mind, but just so that you have a sense of closure as you’re going into that loss,” Newton says.

If a friendship has ended badly, this may mean accepting that you won’t get to have a final conversation with them, says Jackson. “Try your best to stop replaying and rehearsing what you should have said. But if a part of your healing process might be to say your piece, or to apologize if you are the one who did something wrong, then you need to apologize whether they write you back or not.”

3. Identify what you need to do to move on

“Once you have a proper diagnosis of the impact of the breakup on your life and on your mental and emotional state, then you can treat it properly,” says Newton.

This might mean talking through things with someone you trust, creating space for yourself to grieve some more, or removing things from your life that trigger memories you’re not quite ready to process yet.

Jackson recommends moving towards using the language of gratitude. “Once you can start to put the relationship in the language of the past tense and say, ‘You know what, I’m so thankful they were in my life during this season,’ you can have gratitude for it and not feel bitter.”

4. Assess the health and boundaries of your other friendships

One of the biggest worries that comes with a friendship breakup can be how it will impact your wider group of friends. Trust these other connections, says Newton, and don’t try to hide what’s happening. “If I cut off my hand, the rest of the body is going to notice that I don’t have a hand anymore. But when friend groups don’t have healthy boundaries as a part of their friend culture, if one person falls out with another person within the group, the whole group is going to fall away.”

Great, you’re thinking — even more loss! But if that’s what ends up happening, it means those friendships weren’t healthy to begin with, and they are not well set up to support you. A huge part of maintaining healthy boundaries, says Newton, is realizing that it’s OK to have different levels of connection with each other within a group. You can feel very close to some people; others only enter your life because they are friends with your friends.

Make it a habit to take the pulse of your most important friendships regularly. “Be in the habit of debriefing your relationships, keeping tabs on one another and saying ‘Hey, how are we doing?’,” says Newton.

It’s easy to assume our friends will always be there, but close relationships require maintenance. This involves having very real conversations, and regularly checking in with each other in a meaningful way that can flag problems before they become problems.

5. Remember that you still deserve friendship

It’s not always easy to meet new people, especially once you get past your 20s, but it’s important not to let the loss of one friend make you feel unworthy.

“I see it become a barrier sometimes to making new friends,” says Jackson, “because we find so much of our identity in our friends. So when a friendship is over, what does that mean for me and who I am?” Losing that sense of belonging and acceptance is hard and all the more reason to work on developing an unconditional sense of self-worth that is innate and can support you through difficult times.

Lastly, Newton says, it is important to understand that “the overwhelming sense of emotion that we feel amidst a breakup sometimes can feel paralyzing.” It can be very difficult to cope with. “Give yourself the freedom and permission to feel what you feel, remind yourself of what is true, and act on what you believe.”

Watch Kristen Newton’s TEDxIUPUI talk here:

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Mary Halton is Assistant Ideas Editor at TED, and a science journalist based in the Pacific Northwest.

This post was originally published on TED Ideas. It’s part of the “How to Be a Better Human” series, each of which contains a piece of helpful advice from someone in the TED community; browse through all the posts here.

Krystal Quiles

When I first began working at home, I couldn’t believe I was getting away with such a racket.

No one told me what to do or where to be! I could work in my bed, go to the grocery store in the middle of the day, and my clients were none the wiser. Even though I was a freelancer, I was constantly looking over my shoulder and expecting to be reprimanded by someone.

But my elation wore away when I realized I wasn’t quite alone at home: my anxiety was there, too.

Now, I’m an anxious person, even in the best of times. But these days, it seems like we’re all anxious. And anxiety is another ingredient — like Zoom calls, overloaded wifi or howling children or pets — that needs to be factored into your days, your productivity and your time management.

Some days my anxiety drives me to perform at an Olympic level, with no task undone and no email unanswered even if I have to work until midnight. That is overwork — a common way that many of us anxious people deal with our feelings — and I’ll return to it later.

Other days, anxiety creates a background buzz in the form of intrusive thoughts and fears about the future. It can also make us distracted and unable to focus, so another common way of dealing with anxiety is avoidance (more later on this one too). For example, while I was writing this piece, I baked banana bread, made a half-hearted attempt at the exercise bike, fed the cats their pre-lunch snack, and wandered around my house looking for things that needed my attention.

Working from home can be wonderful, but when you’re anxious, it can be difficult to concentrate and stay on task. How do you stay accountable to yourself and get work done without driving yourself to exhaustion?

Here are some tips based on what I have learned from 15 years of managing my anxiety while also working from home:

1. Call off the mental fire drill that occurs whenever you get a Slack or email notification

I know I’m not the only one whose heart rate accelerates when I see a new email in my inbox (or a Slack message). It could be a client, a staffer, my accountant or my mother. My anxiety drives me to want to quickly fix what they’re writing me about so I’ll feel better. But before I do, I often spend time worrying and trying to suss out the “true” meaning of their message (a fool’s errand, since emotional nuance is lost in almost any digital communication). Then I’ll force myself to respond no matter what — even if I’m finally eating lunch at 3PM or doing time-sensitive work.

Don’t blame yourself for leaping to reply to every message — much of modern knowledge work is built on this Pavlovian system of instant feedback and urgent response. With so many of us working from home and without the normal in-person interaction, this past year we’ve gotten trained to crave the feedback of a “ping” or a visual notification.

To start to de-program ourselves from the need to always be on, we need to practice being disconnected for small amounts of time. Begin with a time limit. Pick an after-hours moment when you don’t need to be online, and then turn off or hide your devices for an hour. Gradually work towards doing this during a workday. For that, select an hour when you can purposefully avoid checking updates (set up an “away” or “in a meeting” notification so people won’t wonder why you’re not getting back to them).

See how you feel when you can take a break from checking. When I avoid my phone for an hour, I notice that my neck is looser and so are my shoulders! Immediate benefit.

2. Stop waiting to get permission to log off

When work isn’t a place you leave at the end of the day, it can be incredibly difficult to stop. And let’s face it, when the option is to keep working and feel in control or spend more time on the sofa doom-scrolling or with whining kids, overworking might seem even more attractive. But learning to stop work is a discipline that creates good habits and a necessary step to keeping your energy tank filled.

I am an accomplished professional, but unconsciously I still want someone to tell me, “You did a good job today — you’re done.” Well, you need to learn to give yourself that permission.

Psychologist Alice Boyes changed my life when she suggested setting concrete limits around the amount of time I spend on the tasks that make me anxious and tend to overdo. Such shortcuts and hacks that help calm anxiety are called heuristics.

Here’s how you could come up with a heuristic to set boundaries on your work hours. At the beginning of your day (or the day before), create a reasonable to-do list. The key word is reasonable — no writing up a list based upon an imaginary 240-hour day — and based on experience, you’ll probably know how long most of your tasks will take. And if you have to guess time for any, guess upwards. Structure your day based around this list, and when you’re finished, close your computer. You did good.

3. When you get stuck in a worry spiral, ask: “What’s making me anxious right now?”

The flip side of overwork is avoidance — avoiding deadlines and tasks because you’re anxious. Everyone has their greatest hits of coping mechanisms, from trying to worry the fear away to working it away to diving into a bag of cheese doodles. Our brain does this because it’s trying to help us avoid our bad feelings. To understand the motivations and causes behind your anxiety, it helps to take a pause to feel your feelings and monitor how you react to those feelings.

Start by looking at what’s making you anxious right now and how the anxiety is making you react. Here’s an example from my life. Thinking about money makes me anxious. When the economic news is frightening, I might act out when I’m faced with a work task that has anything to do with money. So if I need to prepare a financial report for my small business, I assume it’s going to reveal negative results, which sends me into a spiral of fear. Cognitive behavioral therapists call this kind of reaction an anxious automatic thought. Consequently, instead of facing the spreadsheet and doing my work, I might avoid it entirely. I might eat that bag of cheese doodles or buy something online that makes me feel good. I’m reacting to my anxiety.

It’s better if I can learn to move from reacting on auto-pilot to knowing what sets me off and then managing how I will respond. I can say to myself: “Looking at my company’s finances is going to set me off right now. Maybe I should ask my business partner to do it. Or maybe I should build in a reward if I face the challenge head on? I could let myself have an extra hour of Netflix if I complete the spreadsheet.” I find that most of the time, doing the work doesn’t feel nearly as bad as what my anxiety anticipates.

4. Follow it up by finding a super-achievable work task and doing it

As you can see from my example above, when you feel anxious, it’s easy to turn a relatively straightforward task into an overwhelming thought exercise that sends your brain into catastrophe mode. When you are mired in anxiety and avoiding your work, the important thing is to do something. Jonathan Baxter, a family therapist, gave me this advice:

“The experience of stress has to do with your body wanting to take action. If there are actions you can take — whether getting some exercise or cleaning the bathroom or teaching your kids something — go ahead and take them. When you take action, give yourself a moment to let yourself feel good about taking a step. Use your mind to give your body the signal that you have agency and are doing what you can. (“There, I did it!”) The goal is to feel active and effective rather than scrambling from one thing to the next.”

I like to take a page from positive psychology and choose a small, meaningful action that will build my motivation for work and to tackle bigger tasks ahead. Have you ever organized a messy spreadsheet and just felt so good? Pick an activity that connects you to your larger purpose and allows you to see yourself as an effective and competent individual, which will ultimately help you move towards doing the thing you’re avoiding.

5. If that seems impossible, pick a non-work task

If tackling work just feels like too much when you’re toiling from home and staring at a messy house or out-of-control kids, pick a non-work action that’s physical and helpful. Since I hunch and clench in my desk chair when I’m stuck, I like to pick a task that gets my body moving and my shoulders open. I might pick a household chore (I like to scrub the bathtub because it’s quick but physically demanding), cook, do some yard work or even run up my stairs a few times. I find that it helps me to get off my screen and into motion.

Notice how you feel after you do your tiny non-work task and whether you’re able to begin the thing you have been avoiding. Then notice: How long can you continue until anxiety hits again? Is there a specific activity that almost always gets you in the mood to tackle a task?

6. Keep adding to your anxiety-taming bag of tricks

Anxiety feels different for everyone. We all have different triggers, and we all react differently. Money, as I mentioned before, is a big anxiety trap for me. When I get unwelcome financial news, my brain immediately goes to a gloomy place: My business will fail, we will go broke, we will lose everything.

As you continue in your career, it’s crucial that you understand specifically what sets you off and how it affects your workday. Once you understand that, you can try to avoid these triggers and — when you can’t avoid them — use specific strategies or tools that can help you move out of anxiety.

Many people I talk to for my podcast “The Anxious Achiever” tell me that they find making to-do lists and detailed schedules helpful, because they help them cut down on ruminating and overwork. Others know that they need to sweat, get outside or run around with their dog to dissolve that knot of anxiety. I like to cook. When I’m anxious and unfocused, I make giant stockpots of broth or chili. Hey … it works for me.

It’s possible for you to create a remote workday that minimizes your anxiety, creates real connection and engagement with your coworkers, allows you to get your work done, and lets you feel OK about unplugging at night. But like all skills, learning how to manage your workday anxiety takes practice, time, and above all compassion for yourself. We all succumb to the cheese doodles at times, and that’s OK too.

Watch her The Way We Work video here: 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Morra Aarons-Mele is a (mostly) happy, successful person. She also identifies as an extremely anxious overachiever. To normalize anxiety and help others manage theirs, Aarons-Mele launched and hosts The Anxious Achiever podcast for HBR Presents, which was a 2020 Webby Awards Honoree and is a top 10 management podcast. She’s passionate about helping people rethink the relationship between their mental health and their leadership. Aarons-Mele is also the founder of the award-winning social impact agency Women Online, which created a database of female influencers, the Mission List. She was named 2020 Entrepreneur of the Year at the Iris Awards, recognizing excellence in digital parenting media. Aarons-Mele is also a prolific writer. Since 2004 she has covered the campaign trail, the White House, the lactation room and the office cubicle. Her book, Hiding in the Bathroom: How To Get Out There (When You’d Rather Stay Home), was published in 2017, and she has written for the New York Times, Entrepreneur, Fast Company, Slate, InStyle, O, the Wall Street Journal, Forbes and the Guardian.

This piece was adapted for TED-Ed from this Ideas article.

Pete Ryan

Motivation is not in high supply these days — but ensuring that we move a little bit every day is more important for us than ever, according to Wendy Suzuki PhD, a neuroscientist at New York University.

Dr. Suzuki studies the neurological impacts of exercise, and she says that just a walk around the block or a 10-minute online workout will not only improve your day but also benefit your brain in a lasting way.

“Exercising to increase your fitness literally builds brand new brain cells. It changes your brain’s anatomy, physiology and function,” she explains. “Every time you work out, you are giving your brain a neurochemical bubble bath, and these regular bubble baths can also help protect your brain in the long term from conditions like Alzheimer’s and dementia.”

This sounds great. But it’s hard to turn those long-term benefits into motivation to get up and do something every day.

Start by thinking of exercise — or any movement — as part of your daily routine for caring for your body, like brushing your teeth.

Since most of us are currently in staying-alive-and-keeping-other-people-alive mode, getting toned, losing weight or looking different might not be such useful goals to have right now. Instead, says Dr. Suzuki, the immediate benefits of exercise can serve as more relevant motivators: “It’s really the new way to bring wellness to your brain.” A single workout increases neurotransmitters like dopamine, serotonin and noradrenaline, and these mood boosters can also improve your memory and focus for up to three hours afterwards.

Not only can this help us in our work but it’s also incredibly good for our mental health. In August 2020, Dr. Suzuki informally tested this out with a group of students in one of her NYU classes over Zoom. Participants took a quick five-minute anxiety assessment, and then she surprised them with a 10-minute IntenSati workout. After they exercised, the students took the assessment again.

“What we found is the first time they took that assessment, they were scoring at close to clinical anxiety levels,” she recalls. “After a 10-minute workout, their anxiety scores decreased to normal levels. That is why you need to incorporate these bursts of activity in your day; it helps your mental health and it also helps your cognition.”

So, how much do you need to exercise in order to feel those benefits?

That, says Dr. Suzuki, is the billion-dollar question. Unfortunately, there’s no simple answer: 5 pushups or 10 burpees don’t automatically release a set amount of dopamine. In her 2017 TED Talk, she recommends trying to fit in 30-minute sessions of exercise 3 to 4 times a week.

But the real answer — especially now — is to exercise for as long as you can, ideally doing a little bit every day. “Even a walk can start to give you those neurotransmitter and mood benefits,” she adds.

Many of the positive effects she mentions come from doing cardiovascular exercise — that is, any workout that gets your heart rate up. But even this can be more accessible than it feels. A vigorous session of power vacuuming will get your heart pumping, even if you can’t go for a run. If your building has stairs, take them instead of an elevator.

Even if you start with just a few minutes a day, it’s likely that you will end up increasing what you’re doing over time. That’s what research in Dr. Suzuki’s lab has shown. “The more exercise you do — if you are successful at regularly exercising — the more motivation you gain,” she says. “I don’t want to do it some mornings, but then I remember how good it really feels at the end.”

When is the best time to work out? Similarly, there’s no need to be too prescriptive with timing, according to Dr. Suzuki. As she puts it, “Anytime you feel like working out? Work out. That will be beneficial to you. So whenever you find time, just do it, especially if you’re a parent with young children.”

Her personal approach is to exercise in the mornings, so she can bring those cognitive benefits into her work day. But if you find you’re most productive in the evenings, it might be a good time for you. “Try to enhance the natural tendency you know you have,” advises Dr. Suzuki.

What if you live in a small apartment with two kids and your neighbors will complain if you do burpees at 10PM?

That’s where online fitness comes in. Embrace all the available options, and find the ones that work best for your situation, both in length and type of exercise. “It’s not weird to work out in your living room,” she says. “It’s great. It’s so convenient. I love it!”

One of the most prolific areas of online fitness is on TikTok, where many coaches and personal trainers are sharing workouts for all body types and living situations. Justin Agustin, a personal trainer based in Montreal, Canada, has been offering short workouts that don’t require special equipment or choreography.

Here are three great exercises to do at home. They’re perfect for people working out in small indoor spaces who want a short fitness break (and you can find dozens more on his TikTok):

1. Looking for an alternative to running? Try this cardio workout

2. Need a routine that doesn’t make too much noise? Try this low-impact workout

3. Don’t have exercise equipment — but have a couch? Try this couch potato workout

Watch Wendy Suzuki’s TED Talk here: 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Mary Halton is Assistant Ideas Editor at TED, and a science journalist based in the Pacific Northwest.

This post was originally published on TED Ideas. It’s part of the “How to Be a Better Human” series, each of which contains a piece of helpful advice from someone in the TED community; browse through all the posts here.

Avalon Nuovo

Have you ever tried to fix an ongoing lack of energy by getting more sleep — only to do so and still feel exhausted?

If that’s you, here’s the secret: Sleep and rest are not the same thing, although many of us incorrectly confuse the two.

We go through life thinking we’ve rested because we have gotten enough sleep — but in reality we are missing out on the other types of rest we desperately need. The result is a culture of high-achieving, high-producing, chronically tired and chronically burned-out individuals. We’re suffering from a rest deficit because we don’t understand the true power of rest.

Rest should equal restoration in seven key areas of your life:

#1 Physical rest

The first type of rest we need is physical rest, which can be passive or active. Passive physical rest includes sleeping and napping, while active physical rest means restorative activities such as yoga, stretching and massage therapy that help improve the body’s circulation and flexibility.

#2 Mental rest

The second type of rest is mental rest. Do you know that coworker who starts work every day with a huge cup of coffee? He’s often irritable and forgetful, and he has a difficult time concentrating on his work. When he lies down at night to sleep, he frequently struggles to turn off his brain as conversations from the day fill his thoughts. And despite sleeping seven to eight hours, he wakes up feeling as if he never went to bed. He has a mental rest deficit.

The good news is you don’t have to quit your job or go on vacation to fix this. Schedule short breaks to occur every two hours throughout your workday; these breaks can remind you to slow down. You might also keep a notepad by the bed to jot down any nagging thoughts that would keep you awake.

#3 Sensory rest

The third type of rest we need is sensory rest. Bright lights, computer screens, background noise and multiple conversations — whether they’re in an office or on Zoom calls — can cause our senses to feel overwhelmed. This can be countered by doing something as simple as closing your eyes for a minute in the middle of the day, as well as by  intentionally unplugging from electronics at the end of every day. Intentional moments of sensory deprivation can begin to undo the damage inflicted by the over-stimulating world.

#4 Creative rest

The fourth type of rest is creative rest. This type of rest is especially important for anyone who must solve problems or brainstorm new ideas. Creative rest reawakens the awe and wonder inside each of us. Do you recall the first time you saw the Grand Canyon, the ocean or a waterfall? Allowing yourself to take in the beauty of the outdoors — even if it’s at a local park or in your backyard — provides you with creative rest.

But creative rest isn’t simply about appreciating nature; it also includes enjoying the arts. Turn your workspace into a place of inspiration by displaying images of places you love and works of art that speak to you. You can’t spend 40 hours a week staring at blank or jumbled surroundings and expect to feel passionate about anything, much less come up with innovative ideas.

#5 Emotional rest

Now let’s take a look at another individual — the friend whom everyone thinks is the nicest person they’ve ever met. It’s the person everyone depends on, the one you’d call if you needed a favor because even if they don’t want to do it, you know they’ll give you a reluctant “yes” rather than a truthful “no”. But when this person is alone, they feel unappreciated and like others are taking advantage of them.

This person requires emotional rest, which means having the time and space to freely express your feelings and cut back on people pleasing. Emotional rest also requires the courage to be authentic. An emotionally rested person can answer the question “How are you today?” with a truthful “I’m not okay” — and then go on to share some hard things that otherwise go unsaid.

#6 Social rest

If you’re in need of emotional rest, you probably have a social rest deficit too. This occurs when we fail to differentiate between those relationships that revive us from those relationships that exhaust us. To experience more social rest, surround yourself with positive and supportive people. Even if your interactions have to occur virtually, you can choose to engage more fully in them by turning on your camera and focusing on who you’re speaking to.

#7 Spiritual rest

The final type of rest is spiritual rest, which is the ability to connect beyond the physical and mental and feel a deep sense of belonging, love, acceptance and purpose. To receive this, engage in something greater than yourself and add prayer, meditation or community involvement to your daily routine.

As you can see, sleep alone can’t restore us to the point we feel rested. So it’s time for us to begin focusing on getting the right type of rest we need.

Editor’s note: Fatigue can also be associated with numerous health problems, so please get checked out by your physician if it persists.

To learn more about Dr. Saundra Dalton-Smith and her work, visit her website. 

This post was adapted from her TEDxAtlanta Talk. Watch it here: 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Saundra Dalton-Smith MD is a physician, researcher and the author of the book “Sacred Rest: Recover Your Life, Renew Your Energy, Restore Your Sanity.” Her work has been featured by Fast Company, FOX, MSNBC and Psychology Today. Learn more at DrDaltonSmith.com or by following her on Instagram (@DrDaltonSmith) or LinkedIn (Linkedin.com/in/drdaltonsmith).

This post was originally published on TED Ideas. It’s part of the “How to Be a Better Human” series, each of which contains a piece of helpful advice from someone in the TED community; browse through all the posts here.