In the minds of many, working from home is the apex of independence from the restrictions of the standard working environment. The majority of people do prefer to work outside of their usual office cubicle and give precedence to home-working more readily. Especially with recent events, remote jobs have become much more prevalent in the matter of a few months.

Different Perspectives Of Working From Home 

What is so alluring about working from home and how it differs from the basic office routine? First and foremost, it does allow you to breathe more freely. In means either avoiding a languid and demotivating look from your coworkers or an astute and strict backside glare from your boss.

For those people, working from home is the nirvana that they’ve been dreaming about reaching. Although, for other more outgoing and open personalities who seek to escape the dreariness of a home environment, remote work might be unbearable for them.

For some, this riddance of the dependence state and ability to plan your workday by your own accord is reassuring and reinvigorating. Being able to manage your time according to the deadlines, rather than being glued to your office chair 8 hours a day simply for an “end of workday” status is freeing. This prairie of freedom that opens up with working from home can give rise to a more creative outburst and increase your productivity output.

Oftentimes, introverts and people that are not really fond of working in spacious and shareable places find themselves confounded and distracted. This in turn lowers their productivity and focus drastically. Coincidentally, it also decreases the general merriness of going to work.

However, on the flip side of the coin, there is also the independence and self-reliance that comes with remote work. Although you are getting rid of pesky commutes and clogged traffic movement, there is a greater aspect of self-managing and planning in play. In such a familiar environment like your own home, it can prove to be quite challenging to shift gears and change from the leisure line to an attentive working line.

There is definitely a period of accommodating to the new rules of the old environment. For some people, it takes a couple of days to adapt. And for others, it might take an eternity to bloom again.

Albeit it still depends wholly on what your personality qualities are. The beauty of being a human is this constant realization of the grand scale of paradigmatic differences that we all possess. As such, all situations and circumstances are different. On this wavelength, today I want to bring up the topic that harbors a bristled but unrecognized relevancy.

What Does Burnout Mean and What Influences It?

The topic of burnout. Specifically the burnout because of working from home. First, let’s take apart what burnout means and then take a look at files of information on how to remedy it.

Burnout is a final state of continuous dissatisfaction with one’s job or its environment. There are a couple of major factors that negatively influence the work process and will likely lead to eventual burnout.

1. Workload: Evidently, the amount of burden and responsibility you shoulder every day has one of the most prominent impacts on your wellbeing. The term responsibility fatigue is a relatively new definition of the feeling that we all might have encountered in the past. The feeling of total exhaustion from the need for constant choice-making.
2. Imbalance: Imbalance of social and working time is a crucial contributor to burnout. Toiling away at your job for 10 hours a day with overtime and/or night shifts will eventually lead to unwanted repercussions. It becomes glaringly obvious if we look at medical staff and the mental health problems that they experience.
3. Lack of Creative Output / Monotony: Executing the same tasks everyday wears you out more than you probably think. It indiscreetly rends you from within, causing mental fatigue and demeaning your self-worth. It lowers your self-esteem and gradually degrades your ability to conjure up creativity as a whole.

The term “burnout” is still debated amongst medical professionals as there are pieces of evidence that suggest that job-related burnout is, in fact, depression in disguise. Excluding medical terminology, there is a definite link between being put on a hamster wheel every weekday for 10 hours and symptoms that come out of it.

So, what has changed with this unexpected shift to remote working? Does working from home eliminate burnout entirely or is it just a temporary poultice?

Although I haven’t done any research myself or handed out any questionnaires for people to fill out, there is an interesting study that's worth taking a look at. It becomes evident that working from home indeed eliminates some of the factors that contribute to burnout in the normal office space. However, at the same time, home-working does add new variables into the equation like lack of social interactions, anxiety, feeling of lagging behind, and unsupervised, unregulated directives.

How To Combat Burnout

The majority of those problems do stem from the current pandemic ravages. Lack of social contact and uncertainty about the future are perfect constituents for anxiety and frustration breeding grounds.

The question of how to combat this newly developed home-burnout is of high relevance today. We prepared some tips that you can employ to stave off this unbridled, novel disorder.

1. The first ground principle when working at home ought to be creating a separate "workspace".  This will help you better accustom your new environment to your needs. By laying out and segregating your working space from your leisure domain you will ensure that your attentiveness and focus will not deteriorate because of such a sudden shift.
2. DON’T hesitate to take a break and brew yourself a jasmine tea (or any tea you like, no discrimination here) to calm your nerves or spend some time outside the realm of your “workspace”, doing whatever activity that engrosses you the most. This will be helpful in not only taking a weight off your shoulders but also rebooting your mind a bit.
3. Set up a separate chatting room with the coworkers that you were normally spending time with. This will help you to not feel alienated and will keep your social anxiety at bay. Spending time talking about non-work-related stuff from time to time to divert your mind even fleetingly from the nerve-racking environment will also be of great aid in alleviating the lack of socialization.

Conclusion

Tectonic shifts in our working lives have been constantly on the go for the past decade. This new pandemic might finally bring clear definitions of how remote job and office working really affect us. With all the restrictions abolished, the anxiety and frustration about working from home will also see a significant decline. Nevertheless, the above-mentioned tips will still apply even after the outbreak recedes.

However, what needs more heightened attention is mental health and how your job is affecting it. Be ever-vigilant to any sudden mood swings and/or responsibility fatigue. They might not be as dangerous as binary happenstances. But they will quickly wear you out and bring you down. The core advice here can only be to take better care of yourself and your mental health!

About the Author: Marie Barnes is a Marketing Communication Manager at LinksManagement (http://www.linksmanagement.com/link-building-agency/)link building agency. She also does some photo retouching work at Photza(https://photza.com/). She is an enthusiastic blogger interested in writing about technology, social media, work, travel, lifestyle, and current affairs.