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Whether you’re heading back to work after a weekend, or you’ve been away for a vacation, a maternity leave, an illness or family crisis, because you were let go by a previous job, or for any other reason, going back to work can stir up any number of feelings. Whether you are excited, nervous, pleased, worried, fearful, stressed, or any combination of these and other emotions, you should know that these feelings, while not always comfortable, are completely normal.
So how do you cope with the feelings? How can you make the transition in the least painful, perhaps even most positive way possible?
Here are some suggestions.
1 – We all are made up of different selves (I’ve written about this in my post on our many selves. I've listed it and some other posts at the bottom, for your convenience), so when you’ve been living with one self – say, your happy-go-lucky, relaxed weekend self – it’s hard to pull up your serious, focused work self, even if you love your job and are (mostly) happy to go back to it on Monday morning. To make your re-entry easier, it can be useful to think yourself back into your work self, even if it’s just for a few minutes. Take this tip from Sally*, a high placed executive with three children. Weekends, she says, are for her family. She doesn’t bring work home and she tries not to even think about it for thirty-six hours. But on Sunday morning, before everyone else gets up, she sits down for a half hour to look at emails (not to answer them) and to think through what she will be facing when she walks into her office the next morning. She makes a list of tasks she will want to deal with that day. And then she leaves the list and her emails and returns to family time.
This is also a useful technique to introduce to your children. After sports and other activities on Sunday, before the family sits down to dinner, Sally has her children tell her what they will be facing the next day. Is there an assignment someone has forgotten? A test they are worried about? A problem with a classmate that they have been able to put out of their mind for the weekend?
Briefly addressing how they will deal with any challenge on the next day helps children bring their weekend and weekday selves together. The same works for you. Just a brief survey of what you will be facing, and a quick thought about how you will manage, will help you prepare for the week and will help you with the transition.
2 – Take a look at the expectations you brought into your time off. Most of us expect ourselves to accomplish much more in our breaks from work than we can possibly actually execute, so we head back to work feeling frustrated, irritated or critical of what we didn’t do. Sunday nights are hard for lots of us. For one thing, they stir up old feelings from schooldays - long after we leave the education system, our bodies and psyches bring up childhood fears about unfinished homework and tests we're not prepared for. For another, as I say in my post about what makes Sunday nights so hard, we often can't figure out where the time went and what happened to all our good intentions - the paperwork we were going to catch up on, the errands we were going to run, the book we were going to read, the friends we were going to see? Oh yes, and what about all of the fun and relaxing we were going to do? Obviously, FOMO plays a role here as well – you may be worried about what you missed out on while you were doing whatever you were doing…
Gary*, for example, always feels low on Sunday nights. “It doesn’t matter how much fun I had or what I did or even if I accomplished something important on the weekend,” he says. “I always know there’s something I didn’t do or somewhere I didn’t go.” Gary, like many, many people these days, is always busy. He is involved in many different community projects, like coaching soccer and tutoring at-risk kids. He also has a busy social life. But he never feels like he has accomplished everything on his weekend to-do list. “Maybe it’s because I just have so much to do,” he says.
Gary was joking, but he also put his finger on the problem. Whether you’re a super busy or a laid back kind of person, you may well never accomplish everything you want to do on a given weekend, vacation, or break from work. If this is regularly the case for you, you probably need to learn to evaluate your expectations and to allow yourself lots of space for not accomplishing everything you want to do. That’s a hard task for most of us these days; but if you can prioritize your tasks and limit your expectations, even letting some less important tasks slide for another week, you may find it much more pleasant to transition back to work!! But don’t forget to make space for some downtime. For most of us, time to relax needs to be a priority every weekend, every vacation, and every time we take off – but it often gets shoved to the bottom of the list, and we end our away time as exhausted as we started it.
3 – Try to understand what is really making you so uncomfortable. For instance, if you are worrying about fitting into a new environment, is this a new feeling, or an old familiar one. Do you always get nervous about new experiences? Is change always a little difficult for you? Or is there something in particular about this change that’s unsettling you? For instance, Cindy* was starting a new job. She had taken two weeks off after leaving her previous position and was anticipating new opportunities and a better work environment. But the weekend before her first day, she was, as she put it, “a nervous wreck.” “I’ve been trying to figure out what to wear. I’ve pulled almost everything out of my closet. I can’t decide whether to go casual, dressy, dark, light…I know first impressions are all-important, and I want to make the right one on my new co-workers and my boss. But what’s the right impression?” Cindy’s worries made sense on one level. She was worried about starting off on this job on the right foot, on the one hand, and she had always been anxious about change on the other. But when she started to think about it, she realized that there was something else going on as well. “This job is going to take me into the field in a new way,” she said. She was very excited about the shift, and at the same time secretly worried that it would not be everything she was hoping it would be. She realized that she had turned her fear that the job would not live up to her expectations into a fear that she would not live up to her new employer’s expectations. Once she put this additional complication into words, she was able to choose an outfit and get ready for the day. “I know there’s nothing I can do about it. I think it will be good, but if I’ve made a mistake and it’s not the right place for me after all, I’ll just figure that out and move forward in a different direction.”
4 – Do something that will calm you down and help you squeeze the last bit of pleasure from your time, whether it’s the end of the weekend or the end of an extended time off. Although it may feel like extra work, taking yourself out to a yoga or exercise class or going for a walk, a run or a bike ride can help you manage your feelings and give you a sense of accomplishment. Listening to music, cooking a fun meal, talking to a friend, watching a favorite television program are all good activities as well. What’s important is that you are doing something you enjoy (so don’t go for a run if you hate running!!!), that distracts you and that calms you. If you don’t have energy to do anything other than sit in front of the tv, make sure you remind yourself that this is restorative and necessary. You’ll be working hard enough tomorrow. Tonight you’re simply resting, so that your mind and body will be prepared for whatever comes your way tomorrow.
These are, of course, just some ideas. I’d love to hear what you have found helpful dealing with the transition from home to work.
* names and identifying information disguised to protect privacy
Some of my other PT posts that deal with these issuesl:
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-couch/201111/what-makes-sunday-nights-so-hard
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-couch/201104/our-many-selves
Teaser image: istockphoto 000041354686
