Guest post by Emily Johnson
Motherhood has a lot of advantages, and it’s a big happiness to have children, bring them up, and be a witness of their growth. However, every medal has two sides, and being a mom means having a lot of responsibilities and duties. If you’re a working mom, it goes twice harder, and you might even face the work depression which negatively affects your well-being.
Although there are different reasons why you might have the work depression, you need to know them in order to cure the depression.
1. The need to balance work and family. The number one point that leads to the work depression is the imbalance between work and family. Many working moms can burst out crying when they think about the idea that their lovely child is spending time with a nanny whom their child might love even more. Thinking about your child, family, and home responsibilities distracts from the working process and reduces your productivity. It means you can do less, and it affects your work performance. Therefore, you feel stressed and depressed at work.
2. Bad relations with the boss and colleagues. Most moms know what maternity leave is. You spend a considerable amount of time taking care of your baby, and it’s a period of approved absence from work. However, it affects your relations with colleagues as you don’t have enough time to keep in touch with them. Once you come back to work, you might notice that you’ve lost your coworkers friends. Obviously, everyone should have positive social relations in order not to feel depressed.
3. Negative work environment. Having good work conditions is a must. If you have a bad workplace (poor lighting, bad air conditioning, a messy table, etc.), it’s nearly impossible to stay focused on the work process. Furthermore, it’s important to pay much attention to team building as it’s a part of the work environment as well.
4. An overwhelming workload. No matter how you work, whether part time or full time, you might have a big workload, you need to complete different tasks at the same time, meeting tough deadlines. As a good employee, you might try to put quality over quantity, but it takes some time to accomplish a task, and the number of duties is growing. Sure, it’s hard to work with an overwhelming workload, and it can cause stress.
5. Unclear job expectations. It goes without saying that it’s hard to build a career when you have a baby to take care about. Moreover, it’s getting even harder when you don’t know what are your responsibilities and what you have to do in order to get a promotion. Working all day in, day out, you might have a big number of thoughts about your career prospects, and it’s unclear whether you can combine career success with family responsibilities.
No matter what the reason for your depression is, you should understand how to cope with it in order not to harm your career success. The best way for working moms is to prevent the work depression the natural way, so you’d better use the following methods:
1. Adapt your biorhythms to day length. It gives you additional time to do tasks, so you can balance work and family. Moreover, if you have good lighting at the workplace, you boost productivity.
2. Take care of yourself. Most moms don’t pay much attention to their appearance as they are pressed for time. However, if you love your look, you feel more confident and, therefore, it’s harder to face depression or stress.
3. Do sports activities. It’s not just about growing healthy habits; it’s about distracting from work and family duties. Spend some time taking care of yourself, and you would find energy to do more!
Having the work depression is bad, but there are some actionable ways how to prevent or cope with it. Don’t let your work affect your well-being, and remember that it’s you who is in charge of your happiness!
Images source: OmniPapers