From the course: Supporting Your Mental Health While Working from Home

Alone and working from home

From the course: Supporting Your Mental Health While Working from Home

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Alone and working from home

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- When you're at work with others, you release a special chemical which does a host of fantastic things in your body and mind. So what happens if you're alone and working from home? In short, you might be missing out on this chemical. It's called oxytocin, and it's involved in what are termed pro-social behaviors in healthy individuals. These kinds of things include trust, generosity, helping others, volunteering, sharing, and displaying empathy. Oxytocin has been described as a social magnifier. Now we've all heard the advice to phone a friend to stay connected, but this is essentially why it's so important, because it will release a surge of oxytocin. There are lots of other ways that you can trigger the release of this chemical, which we'll come onto. So how does releasing oxytocin help to protect our mental health? Well oxytocin is great at reducing blood pressure, lowering cortisol levels, which is one of the stress chemicals, decreasing anxiety, increasing pain thresholds, and positively stimulating social interactions. So to keep mentally well, it can be helpful to find ways to get this chemical released, even if you're not in the same physical space as anyone else. You may now be wondering, what else you can do to trigger this fantastic chemical? Well you could share a meal with others virtually. You can meditate while thinking about others, a kind of meta-meditation. You can pet a dog. Obviously it's not a good plan if you don't like dogs or you're allergic. You could give someone a gift. You can look into someone's eyes when you're listening to them, or tell people that you love them. There are other things that you can do when you're with someone physically, but I think you can do all of these things virtually, which is fantastic. So if you are working from home and finding yourself on your own more, then make sure that you're strategically planning in your oxytocin hits. This can help to keep you sane over the weeks and months ahead.

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