Archives for category: Happiness & Well-being

The Importance of Taking Time Out

31 October 2011 //
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My wife and I took a week off work recently. Nothing too fancy. We toured Shropshire, Herefordshire and Worcestershire, including the Malvern Hills. We spent most of our time sight-seeing, walking, chatting over meals, reading and sleeping. Bliss! In a nutshell, we took some well-earned time out to de-stress, relax and re-charge our batteries.

When I returned to work, a colleague asked if I’d had an enjoyable break, and mentioned in passing that he had taken just 3 days of his annual holiday allowance so far this year! Just 3 days in 8 months! How can anyone possibly decompress and rest up properly in such a short space of time?

It got me thinking. Sadly, it strikes me that my colleague’s experience is becoming an all too familiar feature of the modern UK workplace. An unwelcome transatlantic import from our overworked and stressed out American cousins.

In contemporary workplace culture, not taking holidays and working long hours is often seen as a ‘badge of honour’. Rather than encouraging their staff to take time out, most corporations are complicit in encouraging such macho working practices, or at least tacitly consent to them by turning a blind eye.

‘More widgets’ is seen as an inherently good thing, even if productivity is close to zero, and it takes a disproportionately high amount of time and effort to create those extra widgets. Most corporations take the simplistic view that more of something is always better. Is it really? Read the rest of this entry »

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Categories Happiness & Well-being, Work & Career

Walking Saved My Life

6 August 2011 //
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“All truly great thoughts are conceived by walking” ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

When I left my previous job in the Autumn of 2007, I was exhausted, overweight, unfit and thoroughly miserable.

My life was completely out of balance. I’d been working long hours in a recruitment sales role, doing a 2-hour commute several times a week. Neglecting my wife, neglecting my family & friends, and neglecting myself. In short, I was burnt out and depressed.

Work (or worries about work), had become my entire existence. I use the word ‘existence’ intentionally. I wasn’t living life, I was simply going through the motions. Surviving. Chalking up the days, weeks and months like a prisoner.

It got to the stage where I started to get ‘that Sunday feeling’ on Saturday mornings. I couldn’t even enjoy the weekends anymore. My entire day-to-day life had become a maelstrom of apprehensions and anxieties. My mind contaminated and preoccupied by toxic work thoughts.

As you can imagine, I wasn’t a huge amount of fun to be around at this time. I had started to withdraw from friends and family. I avoided social situations and even began finding them intimidating. I was also becoming increasingly irascible and distant towards my lovely wife. I was becoming a misanthrope.

I had no choice. I had to change my life. I had to leave my job, or risk divorce, chronic depression or worse. I was 33 years old. Read the rest of this entry »

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Categories Diet & Exercise, Happiness & Well-being

The Dangers of Meta-think

20 July 2011 //
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Anxious? Moi?

“Worry often gives a small thing a big shadow” ~ Swedish Proverb

In George Orwell’s distopian masterpiece ’1984′, one of the tools used by the totalitarian regime to manipulate and control it’s citizens is the concept of ‘Double Think’: the state of holding two contradictory thoughts simultaneously.

In the real world of 2011, it appears that the greater danger is arguably ‘meta-think’: our increasing tendency to over-think and over-analyze. Piling worry, upon worry, upon worry, in a runaway downward spiral.

Meta-think can all too easily multiply one problem into many, as the brain follows the potential implications of one worry, thereby generating 2nd, 3rd and 4th order worries, making these ‘meta-worries’ as real and vivid as the original thought that prompted them.

Before you can say ‘raised blood pressure’, meta-think has converted one worry into a vast universe of 2nd, 3rd & 4th order anxieties, all spawned from the original. The thinking becomes self-referential and locked into a perpertual negative feedback loop.

Unfortunately, the body can’t really tell the difference between a ‘real’ or ‘imagined’ threat, so it naturally engages the fight or flight stress response, leading to anxiety, fear, apprehension, irritabilty; even triggering depression if sustained over time. Read the rest of this entry »

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Categories Happiness & Well-being
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