Stop Obsessing About Work All the Time

It’s one thing to work long hours. It’s another to surrender your free time to swirling thoughts of office predicaments and projects hanging over your head.

Many of us can’t let work go. It’s sinking our mental health and damaging our relationships. We need to shift the approach in our heads.

Joe Mellin thought maybe a week alone in the woods would do it. He journeyed by plane, bus and minivan to a remote pocket of Colorado for a program that coordinates solo wilderness excursions. Armed with a toothbrush, a journal and some dried split peas, the 41-year-old hunkered down to meditate and find out who he was.

Turned out, he was someone who really liked obsessing about his job.

“I was literally saying, Joe, you’re in Colorado, you’re off work, you’re in the middle of a forest, stop thinking about work,” the Washington-based tech worker recalls. By hour 36, in the quiet of his sleeping bag under the moon, he gave in. Soon he was sketching PowerPoint presentations in his journal, filling 20 pages with notes before he was finally able to let go.

Whether you’re on a spiritual quest in Colorado or at the playground with your kids, internally troubleshooting next week’s client pitch or entertaining revenge fantasies about a colleague, there’s a cost.

“You’re getting aggravated anew each time,” says Guy Winch, a psychologist and author who fashioned a TED Talk on the subject.

We often think we have to fix our jobs to relieve our work stress. “You might,” he says. “But fix you first.”

Break the cycle

Start by tracking how much time you’re spending ruminating about work, Winch says. For many of his patients, that’s 10 to 20 hours a week—after-hours. (At the office, we’re generally too busy doing the job to perseverate about it, he says.)

To stop the cycle, tax your mental capacity with something more complex than Netflix or a walk. Try a memory task like naming all 50 state capitals or recalling the items in your fridge, Winch suggests. Two to three minutes is often enough for a reset.

Then, channel what you had been obsessing about into something useful. Ask yourself: What’s the actual problem to be solved? If you’re worried about workload, can you delegate to teammates or decline meetings?

If there’s nothing to be done about the situation—some co-workers are just annoying—try to find the silver lining, Winch adds. Maybe this is the spark you finally need to find a new, better job. Maybe you’re building skills that will help you in the future.

When you are your job

We’re bombarded with emails, Slack messages and back-to-back Zoom calls during the day, so it’s no wonder we can’t turn off our brains when we shut the laptop. We mentally brace for pings of all kinds, even when they’re not coming.

And some of this is on us. So many employees have tied their identities to their jobs.

“They’ve defined their whole value this way, so it makes it that much harder to let go of things,” Rebecca Zucker, an executive coach, observes of some of her clients. “Something that goes badly at work can feel annihilating.”

Lauren Orcutt, a 36-year-old in Sacramento, Calif., loves being a copywriter. Some of her friends and family don’t love constantly hearing about it, she says.

“I think about it so much, it just comes out,” she explains.

She’s often up at 3 a.m., galvanised by an idea for a new blog post or needled by the realisation she messed up an email. “I kind of felt like I was working all night” for months, she says. Her sleep suffered.

To reclaim her brain space, Orcutt started jotting down her thoughts in a lavender notebook she now keeps on the nightstand. Mistakes that are plaguing her get their own page, which she rips out in the morning.

“I am going to throw it away and move on with my life,” she says. Even capturing the good ideas calms her, helping her drift back to sleep.

Reprioritise your life

Ruminating about work can make it hard to fall and stay asleep, and damage our mood and mental health, says Verena C. Haun, a professor at the Julius Maximilian University in Würzburg, Germany, who studies psychological detachment from work. Depleted, we often perform worse at work the next day.

She suggests marking the transition from work with a simple ritual, like washing out your coffee cup or changing clothes. Find a hobby, or three, that make you truly forget about work while you’re doing them. Set a goal, say, an hour spent gardening, especially on stressful work days.

You can’t think about work when you’re trying not to crash a boat, Jackie Hermes, the chief executive of a marketing firm, says she discovered. When the onset of the pandemic caused her business’s revenue to drop 40%, she rethought her relationship, once all-consuming, with her job.

“Is this really what I’m dedicating my entire life to?” she asked herself.

She doesn’t work less hours now, but she has changed how she thinks about work, allowing herself more flexibility and trying new things in her personal life. During the day, she’ll sometimes pop into the boating club she recently joined or catch a Milwaukee Brewers game at the ballpark.

“Work isn’t the only priority anymore,” she says, noting that so much about our jobs is out of our control anyway.

Now she tells herself, “I’m not behind. It’s always going to get done.”