Waking Up With Work Stress

One of the challenges that I struggle with in some regards is balancing the difficult situations that occur with work.

As many people are likely in the situation of, I struggle with the ability to sleep a full night through when I’ve got stressful things going on at work. These past few weeks have been challenging to say the least and I’m looking forward to getting them behind me in some ways, but in others not so much lol.

The recent happenings at work have been difficult, where a few things have gone sideways and we’ve gotten some negative consequences because of that. There have been meetings after meetings and folks unhappy and escalating things. It’s not been a good time that’s for sure but it comes with the territory a little bit and I only hope that we can manage to improve it in the short and long term.

When running projects, there are definitely lots of different things that come into play but one of the toughest ones for me is trying to dig in and get things done when I shouldn’t be. I don’t want my teams to fail so I am naturally inclined to get in there and get into the weeds to try and help move things along when unfortunately I shouldn’t be doing that as much, so that I can keep my head above water and not sink. I didn’t do that very well these past few months and things have started to sour a little bit which isn’t the end of the world but it adds layers of stress that really shouldn’t be there lol.

This has spilled over in many areas but one of the worst areas is my sleeping habits. When you wake up in the middle of the night because you are thinking of work, and the only way to calm your mind is to get an email written or a few lines of notes added so that you don’t forget it in the morning, that’s when you know you’re in need of a break. That’s sadly been happening to me for the past few weeks and it’s been hell on my mind and body.

Thankfully I’ve managed to not, to the best of my abilities, get frustrated and annoyed at home because of the change in my mental state because that would be the icing on the unfortunate cake. I don’t want these things to affect my home life in that I get into arguments with people that are really unnecessary. It’s been pretty good that I’ve recognized the stress in my life that I have but only tie that stress to work and when I’m done with work, I’m for the most part completely into relaxing with the fam and helping out doing what needs to be done. One of the funny ways that helps me decompress is cleaning a little bit even if it’s just picking up toys on the floor. Driving home used to be my decompression time but with working from home I don’t have that time any longer which is perfectly fine with me! I enjoy the extra time with my wife and son and I think that’s one of the best positive changes for me.

I’ll potentially write about it a little more in a future post but one of the other things that was funny, good but also stressful was that one of my leaders asked me if I wanted to step into a different role but on the client facing side that is far more technical and hands on. I was glad that she recognized my skill and felt I would be a good fit for that role but I was also stressed out thinking she thought I was doing a poor job at my current role so that was a mixed bag conversation sadly. That didn’t help my sleeping recently either lol thinking that she wasn’t happy with my performance in my role but I think it’s more of a situation as I said above where I was doing things I shouldn’t be and I should try to get back on track and into my lane.

I think the lack of versatility in the roles that companies are hiring these days is a little problematic. I would enjoy doing the more versatile things that I have been doing but it’s not an acceptable thing in the workplace that I’m at, which I guess isn’t the worst thing in the world in the grand scheme of things but I do enjoy wearing a few hats and it adds to the enjoyment of the work. The few hats in this scenario though ends up biting me in the ass and trying to untangle all of that and get myself back on track and into the right mindset has been a stressful endeavor. I don’t mind the work but what I have been stressing about is managements perception of me and the work I do. I don’t want them to think that I’m not doing good work.

One thing that does help is writing about it, even if I woke up at 2am to write an email and couldn’t fall back to sleep until after I did some writing about it such as I’ve done here lol. Mental catharsis is an important thing, I am just looking forward to when I can get a full night sleep!