[Strive4health]

I've had depression since a child, and with PCOS it gets worse when I am stressed or going through a hard time. I want to learn how to manage stress without contributing to my depressive episodes. I always know I am depressed when I start eating a lot and put on a lot of weight, which is bad for PCOS.

Sometimes I've been depressed from conflicts with my husband or from really tough work situations. What could I do to self-care when those things happen? I'm so tired of falling into the same old rut with weight gain and feeling more depressed. What I've done so far that helps a little is to not engage with people anymore who aren't interested in having a healthy relationship. It's easier to set boundaries with friends than it is with a work or a spouse. What works?

[Perna]

I would try to reframe some of the conflicts so they appear more like challenges than conflicts? For example, when I get in a conflict with my husband over money, I stop trying to change him and figure out what I want and how I can get that. My husband has a certain mindset so I figure out how to present things so he can "agree" with what I say. Sometimes I just go ahead and buy/do what I feel is right and deal with any immediate fallout, knowing that is what I want for us and that it will help me and him more than it will hurt us and that way I can ignore his ignorant criticisms as not being about the subject (if I study a subject and he does not, I allow myself not to have to pay much attention to his emotional opinion -- both of us value "facts" so I marshal my facts and he has nothing to counter with).

[Strive4health]

What happens when it's something you can't really influence? It's easy for me to influence my husband but at work that is entirely different. I have been through work stress before that infiltrated every aspect of my life and made things so unpleasant all I wanted to do was sit on the coach, eat, and watch tv. I don't want to go back to those days. I'm just not sure how to change my mental state at work so it doesn't trickle into home life (which can make things worse at home).

[hvert]

Is there anything specific at work that's causing the stress?

I've had the same problem with work stress before, where it starts to seem like the only solution is to get out of that workplace. Over the years I've started to realize that I am contributing to my problems by not having good boundaries in the first place. Eventually I get to a breaking point.

These are a few things that helped me with the work stress:
1. Remind myself when I start to obsessively think about work when at home that I am not being paid to think about work when I am not in the office.

2. Work on plans to leave that workplace. Send out resumes, go on interviews. Sometimes interviewing somewhere else makes me realize that my current job is better than the alternative

3. Develop really encompassing hobbies outside of work that help distract me from the problems. I am not sure if you have this problem as well, but I started to lose self confidence due to one horrible work situation. Finding something I was good at outside of work (volunteering, community projects) made me feel better.

If you figure out how to set boundaries at work, please tell me the secret

[Strive4health]

Originally Posted by hvert

Is there anything specific at work that's causing the stress?

I've had the same problem with work stress before, where it starts to seem like the only solution is to get out of that workplace. Over the years I've started to realize that I am contributing to my problems by not having good boundaries in the first place. Eventually I get to a breaking point.

These are a few things that helped me with the work stress:
1. Remind myself when I start to obsessively think about work when at home that I am not being paid to think about work when I am not in the office.

2. Work on plans to leave that workplace. Send out resumes, go on interviews. Sometimes interviewing somewhere else makes me realize that my current job is better than the alternative

3. Develop really encompassing hobbies outside of work that help distract me from the problems. I am not sure if you have this problem as well, but I started to lose self confidence due to one horrible work situation. Finding something I was good at outside of work (volunteering, community projects) made me feel better.

If you figure out how to set boundaries at work, please tell me the secret

Oh, setting boundaries personally at work is easy, but it's the stress that isn't. I have some "rules" for work.

-I go to work for work and not to make friends
-I keep myself out of gossip
-I keep my personal life personal
-When people would ask what I was up to or did, I'd keep it really generic. I didn't want to share too much because people are nosy and then they can make something small into a huge mountain.
-I was always polite and professional, and made sure I was easy to approach
-I made it known I was a private person and after a while people respected that. I'm also from an ethnic group where it's stereotypical to be known for being private, so I was able to get away with it. LOL

Usually what stresses me out at work is the disorder or someone making my life miserable. Whenever a workplace has been really chaotic-- no structure, lots of disorganization, expected to drop something right away to do something completely different, etc.

[hvert]

I definitely learned about each of those rules the hard way. I have 'don't ever date a coworker' on my list, too. I'm going to cut and paste what you wrote to remind myself how to act in group situations-- it helps to have reminders.

Chaotic workplaces where management refuses to plan and only reacts to crises are unbearable. My new rule about those places, also learned the hard way, is that if they are unwilling to change, I am unwilling to stay. I also decided to leave my field (systems administration) and go for something that didn't involve being on call 24/7 (software development).

Is getting out of that workplace an option? Or imposing some kind of order?

[Strive4health]

I don't think there's much you can do at a workplace sometimes. The best you can do is to let people know what your boundaries are and your expectations. That can be a problem because sometimes your manager doesn't care about what YOU need to work best. It's about them. I can remember a situation where I was responsible for a task every month and I explained to my coworkers "I need to follow this deadline, so I am asking for everyone to make their submissions no later than x date." Then I've have someone trying to bypass the deadline and when I wouldn't budge, they'd get a supervisor involved who'd of course go over me and tell me I needed to do it. I think quitting sometimes is the best course of action, but what happens when you can't quit because the job market is bad? You don't want to look like a job hopper either, so what do you do? It's so tough out there job wise, and I think that's why so many people are stressed out from their jobs.

I too, learned that the hard way. I stayed at jobs before for too long even when I knew they were unwilling to change. At least when you are married and you change, over time your spouse has to change in order to accommodate you. You live together after all, but the workplace is an entirely different animal. Some people can leave at the end of the day and don't care about what happened, but that was so difficult for me. When I left, I ended up taking some of work at home and it just made things worse.

[Perna]

Originally Posted by Strive4health

Usually what stresses me out at work is the disorder or someone making my life miserable. Whenever a workplace has been really chaotic-- no structure, lots of disorganization, expected to drop something right away to do something completely different, etc.

I started a work diary and that helped me some keeping the "thread" and my own organization going. You can always take 30 seconds to write the time and what is being dropped (and where you are with it) and what picked up and do a little thinking about (get distance from) what you are going to do and give an estimate of how long it will take, kind of do a bit of personal organization of your thoughts before you jump up and actually "do" anything.

I also brought in a good book of quotes or daily "messages" or some other book I enjoyed a lot and did not mind re-reading, etc. and would take a few minutes to remind myself of good stuff while something was printing or before picking up the next thing, etc. I thought of things to do on my lunch half hour (go find where the library was, how to get a library card from the "foreign" library (I needed a letter from an officer of my company on letterhead); just drive 10 minutes down the road and note what was "that" way then drive back, the next day go the other direction, etc. I took some online classes too, and would do papers/projects based on work where I could or I'd read company/industry magazines we'd get and think about angles I could take to write an article for them or I'd just up my knowledge of the industry, check out other companies advertising in the magazine (one I liked so much I bought stock in the company and that made me a lot of money), etc.

[Strive4health]

Originally Posted by Perna

I started a work diary and that helped me some keeping the "thread" and my own organization going. You can always take 30 seconds to write the time and what is being dropped

At my previous employers, I didn't have that option. I remember I was in the middle of writing an important report and a supervisor said "you need to go out and do this." I asked when and he said "right now," and didn't care if I had my own deadlines to take care of. Where I was always experienced severe understaffing issues, and people were expected to cover for others. At my last job, when a certain section of the department was understaffed, I would be given work to do that I wasn't trained on, yet my poor performance on the work would be used against me during monthly reviews. I did my best and it wasn't enough.

[Perna]

You have to anchor yourself and what you want and learn to state where your boundaries are. I remember I was given a job that was too hard and the time constraints were too short and the software broke, etc. and I was right there on the urge of tears and the company executive vice president, who was normally not even remotely kind or thoughtful made a statement of fact, "If you can't do it, you can't do it!" absolving me of the responsibility I had taken on. Just because someone says, "Go, do this, NOW!" their wish is not your command. You have to learn to say, "I do not know how, I have not been trained to do that." Otherwise we are just taking on stress for ourselves? We have to know who and where we are and what we want/can do, etc. and stay with that, not just jump when someone else says, "Jump!" or we'll be more anxious and more depressed. If other people we work for are unreasonable we cannot stay healthy working for them so there is no point trying to please their unreasonableness, teaching them they might be able to get away with it?

[Strive4health]

What happens if they can use that to fire you? The threat of losing one's job looming over your head is enough to send a lot of people into a depressive state or cause them to become anxious.