Typically, people choose to participate in Dry January—a month without booze—after a holiday season of overconsumption. But this New Year, Dry January comes after not just a couple of months of above-average drinking, but nearly a full year.
Editor's Note: We recently updated this previously published post with new insights. Enjoy!
Employees often talk about feeling “burned out,” but are they really?
True employee burnout is more than needing a temporary break from work or feeling briefly worn down by an intense project. Instead, it’s a state of chronic job stress that results in overall exhaustion, frustration, and a defeatist attitude that negatively affects an employee’s personal and work life.
The approaching New Year will have many of your employees thinking about establishing new habits and putting plans in place to achieve their goals in 2021.
The key word here is “plan”—healthy habits don’t become habitual overnight. They start as elements in a deliberate plan, and, over time, they become part of a routine. Eventually, the routine becomes second-nature, and a healthy lifestyle is born.
One of the best places to start? With a morning routine.
The most wonderful time of the year … is also among the most stressful.
This holiday season promises to be more stressful than any in recent memory. The average American is already experiencing record-high stress levels due to the COVID-19 pandemic. And now, the holidays are here.
This spring, at the height of the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic, the U.S. Census Bureau screened a representative sample of Americans for depression and anxiety. What they found was nothing short of a nationwide mental health crisis.
Is digital technology good for employee mental health, or does technology inflict more emotional harm than it alleviates?
It’s a surprisingly nuanced question, and one that couldn’t be more relevant these days, as millions of workers around the globe have been uprooted from their customary office workspaces and now find themselves working from home.
Editor's Note: We recently updated this previously published post with new insights. Enjoy!
The generational makeup of the workforce is changing rapidly: for the first time in history, four generations of employees are represented in the workplace. Millennials have surpassed both boomers and Gen X to make up the largest portion (40%), while the first wave of Generation Zers, composed of people in their early 20s, are just entering the workforce.
As the COVID-19 pandemic continues to rage in hotspots throughout the country and around the globe, it’s beginning to dawn on the working world that the “new normal” may mean continuing to work from home full-time, part-time, or on a flexible schedule.
Remote work is likely here to stay for many companies. Is that good news or bad news for your employees’ well-being? As it turns out, it’s a little bit of both.
"What does it mean to live a life worth living? Philosophers, artists, and everyday people have wrestled with this question for centuries, but only in the past few decades has the field of psychology taken it up,” shares Stella Grizont, positive psychology expert and speaker.
Around the turn of the 21st century, Martin Seligman, at the time the president of the American Psychological Association, lamented the “exclusive focus on pathology” in his field and proposed an alternative approach he termed “positive psychology.”
According to Seligman and his collaborator Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, positive psychology is “the scientific study of positive human functioning and flourishing on multiple levels that include the biological, personal, relational, institutional, cultural, and global dimensions of life.”
If we think of traditional psychology as helping people overcome their mental health issues to improve their functioning, positive psychology aims at empowering people not just to achieve functionality, but to thrive.
Even though many companies have temporarily closed their office doors and are operating with a remote workforce, work stress hasn’t disappeared. Indeed, it may have gotten worse. Back-to-back Zoom meetings, homeschooling, an overflowing email inbox, and working late nights once the kids go to bed can add up to frazzled employees trying to balance the demands of work and home.
Luckily, employers have access to a tool that has the power to help employees manage stress, increase productivity, and improve their overall sense of well-being, while lowering healthcare expenses and reducing absenteeism. Even better, it hardly costs a thing.
Magic? Nope. It’s mindfulness.
