Some problems arising from working conditions in the workplace can negatively affect mental health. A balanced relationship and correct communication between work life and private life, between managers and colleagues can be effective in coping with stress.
Every year since 1992, October 10 has been celebrated as "World Mental Health Day" with the initiative of the World Federation for Mental Health. This year's theme of World Mental Health Day, whose primary goal is to raise public awareness about mental health and to emphasize the promotion of preventive studies and treatment services against mental disorders in this process, was determined as "mental health in the workplace".
Üsküdar University NPISTANBUL Hospital Specialist Clinical Psychologist İhsan Öztekin stated that various psychological problems, especially depression, stress and anxiety, arising from working conditions in the workplace today, and said, "Even people who think that they do not have such problems need to get away from the negative effects of the working environment from time to time."
Expert Clinical Psychologist İhsan Öztekin gave important advice on what to do to protect your mental health in the working environment:
1. To be able to use working time in the most appropriate way: Long-term work or inability to use time well due to many reasons such as loving one's job, excessive sense of responsibility, consolidating one's position, proving oneself can cause problems such as exhaustion, fatigue, burnout, depressive mood. The working person should be able to control time and manage it appropriately. Of course, in order to be able to do this, working conditions must be appropriate and you must have this freedom.
2. Establish healthy communication with employees: You may not have very good communication with everyone in the workplace. However, it will be good for you to be in the same working environment with friends with whom you enjoy doing business together, chatting in your free time, with whom you can trust, with whom you can share your problems, with whom you can be together outside.
3. Manager-employee relationship: The characteristics of your relationship with the managers of the workplace, such as the owner, boss, manager, etc., affect your mental health. The fact that the manager respects and supports the thoughts and ideas of the employees, gives compliments and positive feedback without considering the superior-subordinate relationship when appropriate, creates a feeling that the employee is valued. Employees also value and trust their managers more. The feeling of happiness increases.
4.Working life-emotional life relationship: Trying to meet your emotional needs in a professional working environment that you cannot meet in your private life can lead to unhappiness. Because the working environment is not a structure that enables emotional needs to be met. It is different from family and social life.
5. The effect of private life on emotional life: If you go to work with negative feelings and thoughts about the problems in your personal life, you may be subjected to questions such as "you don't look well today, do you have something wrong with you, are you sick". Instead of working unhappily and inefficiently throughout the day, you can turn the work environment into an environment where you can get rid of your external problems by focusing your attention on your work and sharing short conversations with your friends.
6.Be clear and precise: Be clear about what you want, what you expect, what you can and cannot do, what you accept, what you disapprove of. Express them in the appropriate environment and time. If you don't express them clearly, you may feel like they don't understand me, or the negative feelings and thoughts you have accumulated inside you may come out in the form of overreactions at an inappropriate time.
7. Excessive ambition tires and wears you out: Although competition plays a role in developing and increasing motivation in business life where a competitive environment is formed, an overdose of competition, attitudes that try to devalue other people, overly ambitious attitudes that disrupt the balance in the work environment cause unrest in the work environment. A restless environment and deteriorating relationships also make people unhappy.
8.Workplace psychologist: A "workplace psychologist" may be needed to protect and strengthen psychological and social well-being in work environments. Having happy and productive employees in workplaces provides added value in "national development" and gains in the field of "protection of public mental health".
9. Institutional support: Measuring the general psychosocial problems in the organization and providing employees with training seminars on coping with stress / stress reduction, holding meetings where employees can convey internal problems and suggest solutions are highly effective methods of providing psychological support to employees.
10. Maintaining the balance between mental and physical health: Mental health cannot be kept away from physical health. It is known that physical health is adversely affected especially in physically unsuitable environments and in cases of sitting and sedentary work in the office environment. It will be easier to protect both your physical health and mental health in your work environment with regular sports outside and simple exercises in the workplace.