Working from home might feel like a blessing to many. But according to a recent survey conducted by the United Nations taking 15 countries into account, 41% of fully remote employees find their jobs more stressful as compared to on-site jobs. Why do people get more stressed even after working from the comfort of their home?

Clash of Two Worlds

It’s in the name itself. When you are working from home, it is likely that your home life and work life will get tangled with each other. This trend was observed mainly in people who did not have a separate dedicated office space at home. Lack of dedicated space leads to lack of dedicated focus, resulting in higher stress levels at work. 

So, if you cannot afford to have a dedicated room to call your home office, you can try to arrange a space within your room where you can place your workstation and other work related documents. Doing this can surely help in reducing the stress by providing a somewhat office environment.

Social Isolation

While 44% of participants in the survey felt that staying away from people helps increase their focus at work, 66% of them felt that social isolation leads to higher stress levels. Workplace interactions are not just for coordinating with your fellow team members but they also fill a void that is always there in humans. 

Humans are social beings. When working from home, social platforms and team management tools help maintain communication. What they do not provide is the real socializing experience. Remember the tea breaks where you used to share your stress with your colleagues? So a phone call or a text with your office best friend apart from work-related talks can give you a similar experience of in-person conversation resulting in lower stress levels.

Prioritization

When you are at the office and someone from home calls with their problems, what do you do? You simply try to navigate them towards the solution quickly, or tell them to wait till you get back from work. This behavior does not arise from lack of attachment to the problems at home, but due to a sense of priority towards work as compared to the problem itself. But, when you are physically present at home, maintaining the same behavior is quite difficult. So, most of the employees end up addressing the issue resulting in reduced work time and continuity leading to increased stress levels.

As you cannot ignore the things happening, applying strict prioritization on them based on the tasks you have can help stay more organized. If direly needed, reorganize your tasks by contacting your team to ensure that the work pressure does not accumulate. Again, communication plays an important role here too.

Extending The End

One of the most underrated causes of stress and exhaustion in people working from home is the lack of sense regarding when to end work. With no supervisor or senior team as surveillance, leisure usually kicks in too fast. This leisure silently extends working hours beyond needed leading to higher stress levels.

Simply recollect the things you did that led to extension of your working hours, and contemplate on the need and productivity of those. Work from home is still work, and working hours should be ethically treated likewise. If you ensure least distractions of leisureliness, most of the work will be actually done before the end of your shift. Take pride in the efficiency of your time management and relax better by ending work early instead.

When working, just work

As a wise man once said “The lesser you focus on distractions, the lesser you need to stay focused at work.” When working from home, treat your working hours as your time dedicated only to work. That does not mean your freedom gets snatched. Pre-organize tasks, prioritize home issues, maintain consistent communication, take limited & healthy breaks, and end your work on time. It is this easy to reduce almost 70% of your stress while working from home.