Working From Home: 7 Ways To Not Go Stir-Crazy

There are currently millions of articles floating around about how to work from home effectively. While it can be a welcome break from your daily commute, working from home has its downsides, such as loneliness, cabin fever and productivity slumps.

There are some obvious tips on how to work from home well, like getting out of bed, sticking to a routine and staying active.

But there are also some less obvious productivity tips you need to know that are rooted in ancient philosophies and lesser-known logic. Here’s your rundown of how to make working from home work for you – and avoid going stir-crazy.

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The obvious ways to work from home effectively

Keep work and life separate

In short, get out of bed. You’ll be tempted to set your alarm for five to nine, lift your laptop onto your duvet and start your day from a throne of pillows, but you’ll feel the effects of cabin fever a lot quicker if you do.

Set up a makeshift office that’s separate from your bedroom. We’ve seen photos of ironing-boards doubling as sit-stand desks and liquor cabinets opening up to be workstations, so there’s plenty of room to get creative.

Once your workday comes to an end, make sure you switch off. When your office is in the next room, you’ll be tempted to dip in and out of work throughout your evening.

But blurring the lines between work and down-time runs the risk of a burnout – making you less productive in the long-run. Trust us, your brain needs a break.

Stick to a routine

Do your morning routine up until you leave the house. Minus putting on your shoes. Have your morning coffee, eat your breakfast and get dressed. Your morning sets the tone for your day, so getting off to a good start will lay down the right foundation.

In their book, My Morning Routine: How Successful People Start Every Day Inspired, Benjamin Stall and Michael Xander analyse the morning rituals of 300 successful people.

According to the duo, “There’s nothing intrinsically special about the people we profile in this book; aside, that is, from their ability to keep the habits and routines that allow them to achieve at a high level.”

Routines include a mix of exercising, limiting technology when you first wake up and practising mindfulness. Find something that works for you and stick to it.

Move as much as you can

Our sedentary lifestyles wear our bodies down. If you’re working from home without a proper setup (like an ironing board which doubles as a sit-stand desk), your posture might slump, and your muscles might start to get stiff.

Every half an hour, take the time to roll your shoulders back, stretch up tall and if you’re feeling brave, do some jumping jacks.

A healthy body is a healthy mind, so shaking off any of the physical tension that’s built up over the day can help you stay focused.

If you can concentrate while listening to music, get some anthems going and let yourself ‘fidget dance’ so you keep moving even when you’re sitting down. We recommend Donna Summer’s I Feel Love.

Embrace biophilia

Biophilia is our “innate tendency to focus on life and lifelike processes”. We’re drawn towards greenery, natural landscapes and animals, which is why there’s plenty of research on the benefits of biophilic design.

By bringing the outside world in, you can boost your productivity, happiness and physical health, which will naturally relieve your feelings of cabin fever.

UK charity Mind has even reported that incorporating nature indoors can reduce stress, improve confidence and boost your self-esteem. It can be as simple as working near a window with plenty of natural light or adding a plant to your home office.

Get face-to-face through technology

One of the causes of cabin fever is feeling intensely isolated from the outside world. While technology is an amazing tool that can help to combat this, conference calls can be impersonal, task-heavy and action-based.

Switching to video calls to have genuine, more informal check-ins can go a long way in combatting the loneliness of working from home.

Ask how your team are doing. Humans are social creatures – we need to feel connected to a wider group. It’s one way of replicating the micro-interactions you would enjoy within the community of a shared office.

The not-so-obvious ways to work from home effectively

Don’t try to do more

You may have already experienced the 5 pm panic of feeling like you haven’t done enough. When working from home, you do not have to finish that massive project in a single day, kickstart a new revenue stream or record a podcast.

Be easy on yourself. While it sounds counter-intuitive, don’t set stretch targets or unrealistic workloads for yourself, because you’ll only feel unproductive. Trust that you’re probably still doing the same amount of work as you did in the office.

As the ancient Greek philosopher Socrates said, “Beware the barrenness of a busy life”. Focus on doing a few, important tasks really well, rather than thinking about all the things you could be doing or rushing through your extended list haphazardly and finishing nothing.

Understand your ‘monkey mind’

In the office, your biggest distraction is usually your colleagues asking you for “a quick chat”, which turns into a long, actionless brainstorm that could have been pinged over email. But at home, when we’re going stir-crazy, our biggest distractions are our own minds.

Buddha coined the term ‘monkey mind’ to explain how our minds chase one stressful thought after another; “Just as a monkey swinging through the trees grabs one branch and lets it go only to seize another, so too, that which is called thought, mind or consciousness”.

This can start with mundane worries like “Why can’t I concentrate?” or “What if my manager thinks I’m not doing anything?” and can quickly progress into existential crises like “Did I waste my youth?” and “What do I want to do with my life?”.

The trick is to learn to watch the monkey jump from tree to tree, without getting too emotionally attached to the branches it’s grabbing on to. One way to do this is through meditation; the quiet act of watching your thoughts come and go, without any judgement.

You’ll slowly but surely learn to watch your monkey mind’s havoc as if through a glass partition in a zoo, rather than inside its panicking pulse. Alternatively, exercising can shift your mind’s energy into your body and tire your monkey mind out.

When the only constant thing in life is change, the future will always be uncertain. Making a conscious effort to take each day as it comes whilst looking after your mind and body is all you can do.