Staying Mentally Healthy at Work: Transforming Behaviors for a Better Work Environment

Many workplace factors—toxic culture, lack of purpose, not getting adequate support, long work hours, or a micromanager boss—can contribute to poor mental health.

Increasing awareness of the negative effects of mental health, like high attrition, low job satisfaction, and work performance, has alerted organizations to take initiatives to address it. Many organizations now promote mental health days, workshops, counseling, a four-day workweek, extra time off, and other such activities.

While there are definite benefits of being part of an organization that promotes employee well-being and works towards building a mentally healthy culture, they’re not enough.

What if it’s not the work culture but your own behavior that gets in the way? What if the real reason you feel overwhelmed and stressed at work is not because of the excessive workload but the way you communicate, collaborate, and work with others?

Most people look outward when it comes to addressing mental health challenges without paying attention to their own behaviors and actions. But any effort you put to address these issues will be futile unless you practice the right shifts in your behavior.

Master these four behaviors to stay mentally healthy at work.

You cannot defeat darkness by running from it, nor can you conquer your inner demons by hiding them from the world. In order to defeat the darkness, you must bring it into the light — Caroline Leaf

Instead of proving yourself, improve yourself.

When you’re worried about self-esteem, every discussion and every disagreement turns personal. You want to prove that you’re smart and intelligent. You want to establish your worth. When proving yourself is the goal, you’re less focused on making the right decision and more on being right.

You don’t realize it, but constantly trying to seek external validation is not good for your mental health. Leaving others to determine your worth creates a negative cycle of overthinking and rumination.

Getting that applause may feel good at the moment, but its harmful effects are long-lived, while happiness from being validated is only momentary. For your own sanity and mental peace, try to achieve self-mastery instead of trying to raise self-esteem.

When you’re focused on improving yourself:

1. You pay more attention to learning.
2. You embrace disagreements.
3. You treat others' ideas as worthy of consideration.
4. You’re less judgmental and opinionated.

Shifting behavior from proving to improving not only leads to less stress and anxiety but also builds better relationships at work.

Reframe negative experiences into positive learnings.

Work experiences can’t be all pretty. Irrespective of how hard you try, some things will always go awry. The problem is not with the negative experience itself but how you handle it.

Do you connect with your emotions and learn from them, or do you ignore them and try to avoid how you feel?

Ignoring your emotions spirals your mind into all sad things. It’s like someone dimmed the light around you, and everything appears dark and gloomy.

You’re more likely to lose your nerve or react poorly to even minor inconveniences. It may appear that others are out to get you or point out your flaws and inconsistencies. Healthy disagreements turn into personal attacks. Minor conflicts into major issues. Defeatist behavior kicks in, which magnifies those feelings as your mind drifts to all things negative while positivity takes a back seat.

You are just one mistake, one irregularity, one expectation mismatch away from feeling like your whole life is falling apart. You start questioning all your life choices—even though they may be disconnected.

The more you think about how unfair or bad your situation is, the worse you feel. Left unhandled, these feelings can overwhelm your mind and body.

You can prevent negative experiences from taking a toll on your mental health by reframing them into learning opportunities.

• What caused it to happen?
• What can you learn from it?
• What steps can you take next time to prevent it from happening again?

Shifting behavior to seek positivity opens your mind to seek solutions as opposed to being stuck in a state of negativity.

Everything worthwhile in life is won through surmounting the associated negative experience. Any attempt to escape the negative, to avoid it or quash it or silence it, only backfires. The avoidance of suffering is a form of suffering. The avoidance of struggle is a struggle. The denial of failure is a failure. Hiding what is shameful is itself a form of shame. Pain is an inextricable thread in the fabric of life, and to tear it out is not only impossible, but destructive: attempting to tear it out unravels everything else with it — Mark Manson

Take responsibility for your growth. Don’t blame, complain, or sob

You want to do well at work, but when it comes to your growth, do you believe others are responsible for giving you the right opportunities and helping you shine and succeed?

What if they don’t meet your expectations?

What if they don’t care about your growth as much as you do?

Do you blame, complain, and sob? Considering others as the source of your misery makes you feel powerless and helpless. You feel out of control. It hits you mentally.

Letting others decide your fate or where you end up not only makes them more powerful but also takes away your power to drive your own growth at work. Blaming absolves you of responsibility and makes you want to give up and accept defeat.

Behaving this way does not quieten your mind; it makes it hyperactive. Your mind refuses to leave you alone. It keeps reminding you of the terrible state of things. Neither do you grow nor do you get any mental peace.

To achieve mental stability, take responsibility for your own growth at work. Commit to doing what it takes to learn and succeed.

To do this:

1. Be clear about what success means to you.
2. Seek opportunities in the organization that align with your goals.
3. Practice high agency to turn obstacles into opportunities.
4. Take tiny steps in the direction of your goals. Celebrate small wins.
5. Get feedback and ask for help. Promote yourself. Make your work seen.

Shifting behavior from blame to ownership is good for your mental health as it empowers you to learn and succeed.

If you’re looking for someone or something to blame, you’ll never run out of options, as there are infinite errors, inefficiencies, biases, and accidents to account for. It comes down to what you choose to do, rather than what you can prove, and if you choose bitterness, you don’t choose to grow, adapt, learn, or improve — Evan Thomsen

Stay away from politics or anything that brings you down

The office environment can be brutal for the uninitiated and the unprepared, especially when employees engage in behaviors that aren’t productive.

What if they’re mean?

What if they talk behind your back?

What if they manipulate you?

What if they engage in other toxic behaviors?

Personal motives at work can make people act in undesirable ways. When others around you spend a large part of their time advancing their careers or boosting their self-esteem, their toxic behavior can take a toll on your personal well-being. All that drama can deplete your energy and hit you mentally.

What should you do then?

Show anger and frustration? Anger and frustration won’t make the problem disappear.

Take the high road and ignore it all together? The more you tell yourself that it doesn’t bother you, the more it can harm you.

Instead of ignoring the problem, look at your own unique situation and find ways to deal with it.

• Practice the art of war. Disarm them by refusing to react to their negativity.
• Identify what’s under your control and take small steps in its direction.
• Pick the right battles to fight. Let go of small issues that don’t matter as much.
• Take a one-year perspective to determine how harmful is others' behavior to your future. Should you stay, or is it time to walk away?

You choose to let things bother you. You can just as easily choose not to notice the irritating offender, to consider the matter trivial and unworthy of your interest. That is the powerful move. What you do not react to cannot drag you down in a futile engagement. Your pride is not involved. The best lesson you can teach an irritating gnat is to consign it to oblivion by ignoring it - Robert Greene

Summary

1. Mental health at work should be everyone’s utmost priority.
2. Instead of relying on organizations to offer a perfect work environment that caters to your well-being, stay mentally healthy by looking inward at your own behaviors and actions.
3. Trying to raise self-esteem makes you adopt destructive behaviors. You seek external validation instead of becoming the best version of yourself. To be mentally healthy, focus on learning and improving instead of proving.
4. Bad days at work can’t be avoided. Instead of spiraling into negativity, prevent a bad day from turning into a bad week by reframing your experience.
5. Holding others responsible for not getting the growth you desire locks you up in a mental battle—you want to grow but don’t know how. Taking responsibility empowers you to shift from blaming to solutions.
6. Letting yourself be bothered by other people’s behaviors—especially when they’re toxic—can take a toll on your mental health. Identify what matters to you, identify what’s under your control, and then take small steps in its direction.

Also published here.