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Ask HN: How to not bring emotion from work back home?

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Re: Ask HN: How to not bring emotion from work back home?

#91

Post by tomekowal »

jypepin wrote: post #85
tomashertus wrote: post #78

The thread is full of great answers and advices, but I haven't came across this one: I was dealing with similar situation like you. I had a hard time to find peace after work at home. I was looking for advices around and once came across an article(I can't find the article) which recommended that you should not stop doing activities which you liked as a child when you are an adult. When I was thinking about it, that…

this resonates a lot. I recently moved and now I have the space for a desk at home which allows me to play video games again, which I loved doing at a kid (starcraft, etc) and had to stop doing due to space for 4-5 years. Now that I picked up video games again, I feel better and it's the best way for me to get my mind off work!

I feel like StarCraft and RTSes in general work really well in this scenario, because they occupy every brain cell available. Concentrating really hard on something non work related totally resets the brain.

Re: Ask HN: How to not bring emotion from work back home?

#92

Post by mrweasel »

I'm rarely emotional after work, but it does happen that I've had a bad day or a customer is being annoying.

My wife have annoying co-workers and customers that piss her off too sometimes. So when we get home we ask each other how the day has been. It usually takes 30 - 45 min to cover everything while we're cooking dinner. We aren't trying to solve problems for each other, unless asked to, we just listen.

It really helps to be allow to be vocal about the emotions of work, and it helps the other person to understand where any anger is coming from and where it's directed. If we didn't talk about our day, my wife could easily assume that I'm mad at her and vice versa.

At a point where I was having a rather bad period at work, my wife insisted that I listed three good things that happened at work that day, that remove the focus from the negative things.

Re: Ask HN: How to not bring emotion from work back home?

#93

Post by thinkMOAR »

tomashertus wrote: post #78

The thread is full of great answers and advices, but I haven't came across this one: I was dealing with similar situation like you. I had a hard time to find peace after work at home. I was looking for advices around and once came across an article(I can't find the article) which recommended that you should not stop doing activities which you liked as a child when you are an adult. When I was thinking about it, that…

hear hear to all of the above.

However, i suggest to swap talking with people and then go swimming, biking and running. Else the during the first 'part' you will only have your thoughts and opinion resonate in your own head, i think its better to have some more points of views floating around there first.

Re: Ask HN: How to not bring emotion from work back home?

#95

Post by hkmurakami »

I've struggled with this for years until I realized that I'm the same person at home and at work and actively sought to be this way.

This is in contrast to some peers who have a professional personality (which is still gemslwves, but with restricted access to core identity) and a at-home personality.

Separating the two and turning one on/off at will is the approach I am striving towards.

Re: Ask HN: How to not bring emotion from work back home?

#99

Post by cientifico »

Workout, meditation, distraction, talking with people didn't work for me. They were ways to silent the emotions and postpone the problem.

What worked for me was a lot of self reflexion. Understanding way I was angry in the first place.

I found out that happiness is just the way of approaching things. That the world is just a projection on your head. An interpretation of the five senses + state (learned experience mostly).

Changing the input, just mades you an slave of the environment. Changing the state, gives you back control over your feelings.

If you reflect about why the feelings appear in your mind that generates stress, anger, you can start accepting them, welcoming them, until the point you no longer get anger, or stress...

For me, it become a routine. A) a way to trigger the self reflexion, or consciousness while stress happens B) find the reason for the feelings.

Example: People don't understand what I say, and then do other things. It bring up fear, rejection, mostly coming from childhood. Ok. I converted an unknown unknown into a know unknown. I excuse my self and decide if better communication skills is a task that I am willing to commit learning, on that case I do, or I just acknowledge that I often going to have mistakes and laugh about it.

Time over time, I was able to have happier live. Even enjoying the sadness that sometimes generates things not going the way I wanted at work.

Re: Ask HN: How to not bring emotion from work back home?

#100

Post by Morendil »

It's normal to experience emotions related to what happens at work. It's called "being human". And dealing with emotions - putting words on them, accepting them and moving on - is a key skill and a part of growing up.

What varies, in my experience, is whether and how much it is acceptable to discuss (and thus process) these emotions in the workplace itself. Being able to say "I'm sad / angry / joyful about X" makes a world of difference.

Once I became aware of that I started being able to remedy it. To start with I actively sought and encouraged discussions of the emotional components of whatever work I was a part of. Retrospectives were a great way of having a structured framework for these discussions (as opposed to giving the impression that I wanted to psychoanalyze my colleagues or vice versa).

After a while I noticed, too, that management in some places actively preferred the dehumanizing effect of making emotions undiscussable, because it afforded easier control over people. I started avoiding these places and selecting jobs that accepted and expected me to behave as a human adult.

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