how to get rid of it? Tips from our coach

On a daily basis, it is difficult to juggle between meetings, last-minute files or even customers to retain… In short, your head is overwhelmed with information and you may feel overwhelmed, or even feel on the edge of the abyss. This feeling of suffocation and stress upon arrival at work can sometimes lead to burnout. “It is said that our brain has a hard disk, it has a memory card and that when it is full, there is an overload“, Explain Maud Lefebvreprofessional coach and expert in well-being and performance at work at Kalea coaching.

Especially since this mental load at work can interfere with his personal life, even accumulate the mental load of the household. In 2019, an Ifop-Mooncard study revealed that 95% of executives thought about their work in the evening at home and almost as many on weekends, “cwhich can lead to exhaustion”. So how do you succeed in partitioning your mental workload? There are many techniques to achieve this.

What are the signs of mental workload at work?

Many signs reflect work-related mental overload:

• a memory decline
• of the difficulties in sorting and prioritize
• of the difficulty concentrating
• a bigger irritability
• constant stress
• a feeling of discouragement, helplessness
• the impression of losing efficiency
• of anger towards colleagues and his relatives
• insomnia
• disturbance of the menstrual cycle

Both visible and hidden signs of mental overload. However, our well-being and work performance coach assures us that there are techniques to get out of this spiral and come to terms with their working environment.

Four tricks to get rid of the mental burden

According to Maud Lefebvre, “to partition” its overload, there are 4 techniques. The first, and “certainly the most important“, it’s from separate personal life from professional life. “To partition the two and prevent one encroaching on the other, you have to create a well-being airlock. In the morning between the end of personal life and the start of professional life and vice versa in the evening” and to explain: “What is an airlock? This is a ritual that belongs to you and that gives you the feeling of closing one door and opening another. In fact, it could be after dropping the kids off at school, back in the car, you close the door. Closing this door is like telling yourself that the personal space is behind you, the work space is waiting for you.“. A technique that she accompanies with sensory aids: “We use one of our 5 senses such as hearing with a playlist, touch by self-massaging, smell by putting on perfume, etc. Important, the morning ritual must differ from the evening ritual“.

The second technique is tostop multi-tasking. “We favor ‘time blocking’, that is to say blocking work slots by evaluating the time you need. Thus, instead of multiplying tasks such as answering emails at the same time as canvassing a client for example, we take two hours in our day for a task and nothing else.“, she assures. “To succeed in doing this, you must block all your professional and personal notifications. Like when you’re at home, you turn off your work phone, at work, you put everything related to the house on silent, except in an emergency of course. This is what pollutes the most and increases the mental load. To limit the mental load, the idea is to reduce the quantity and also the complexity of the information.“

The third technique is that of prioritization. We must no longer hesitate to choose what is important and urgent and leave aside what is not. “If it’s neither urgent nor important, we let go. What also makes us end up with mental load is that our ideas fly in our brain“. But then how to let go and choose the right information. Simply according to the coach: “Writing down these famous ideas and organizing them allows the brain to concentrate and focus its energy on what is important. It allows a second wind in your brain and in your day“.

The fourth technique”it’s from focus on the present“. Easier said than done? Not if you focus on a simple action.”Just go wash your hands and feel the water on your skin. By doing this, we bring the pressure down. It’s good to reconnect with what you’re doing now without thinking about what you’ll be doing in a few minutes back at your desk.“, reveals the creator of Kalea coaching.

“The mental load is also knowing how to say ‘No’. This means, for example, saying no to a meal to be prepared from A to Z for the same evening. Instead of imploding, burdening ourselves unnecessarily, we listen to each other and say ‘No’“, concluded our expert.

Marion Mancho

As a social journalist, I work on all subjects related to feminism, news items and the fight against discrimination. Equally affected by the crises that follow…