Do you find yourself feeling overwhelmed by things that were once easy? Perhaps it’s difficult to focus and even harder to be productive. You may feel numb or over-sensitive, restless or exhausted, irritated or angry.
Stress and anxiety are normal responses to difficult situations, and nobody would argue that the last few years have been challenging.
While it’s appropriate to feel apprehensive about the future, prolonged, poorly managed stress can lead to ongoing mental and physical health issues.
That’s why it’s important to develop healthy coping strategies to support your wellbeing.
Below, we share three simple tips on managing stress and anxiety to help you get started...

​​Working from home might seem like a nice idea, but often, the reality doesn’t quite match up with the vision - especially if you’re making do with a temporary home office and sharing your space with other family members!
Instead of feeling relaxed and productive, you may find yourself stressed, overwhelmed, and full of aches and pains from attempting to work at your dining room table or kitchen counter.
However, many of us don’t have an alternative right now, so it’s important to find ways to relieve your discomfort.
Here are our top three tips to help you reduce pain and stress when you work from home. 

How To Work from Home Without Pain or Stress
1. Make Your Workspace Comfortable
How tempting is it to work from your bed or couch when you work from home? There are all those pillows, and you can stay in your PJs all day.
Goodbye productivity and hello RSI!
While this may be fun for a day or two, the novelty quickly wears off. Before too long, your back hurts, your wrists ache, and it’s far too tempting to have an impromptu nap, pick up a book, or switch on the tv.
The most valuable thing you can do to set yourself up for success is to create a dedicated workspace and make it as ergonomic as possible.
That means making sure your body is positioned in a way to reduce discomfort and improve efficiency.
Here are the most important things to consider when setting up a work area:

Why Zoom fatigue happens:
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Your environment 
A good portion of the time we Zooming from our home environment.  Which means that you might not be in your ideal ‘work’ environment. Some of you might be lucky to have a great home office set up, but plenty of us are perched at the kitchen table, squashed into a small corner of the bedroom or even out in the garage!  
You are also much more likely to have other distractions from your family, flatmates or kids in the background. 
Not to mention a certain level of anxiety about what’s happening with this global pandemic that got so many of us into this new way of working in the first place.  
Some of these factors can be managed or improved, but it is important to acknowledge these environmental aspects all have an impact on our overall level of comfort, tension and ability to concentrate before we even turn our computer on!

Self-view
Zoom adds an extra layer of weirdness to the online experience because having your video broadcast out there heightens your awareness of being seen and appearing “on”.  This vigilance and self-monitoring can be exhausting.  
With having a video call we assume that everyone is paying attention to every move we make. But of course, this isn’t really true. Everyone else on the call is probably also worried about their own self-view (and wondering is what my neck really looks like?!). 
Of course, you can simply turn your camera off so you can’t see yourself or change the view to speaker view (assuming someone else is doing most of the talking).  This can be quite liberating.  However I also found it a little anxiety inducing. Without being able to see myself, I couldn’t monitor whether my expression still read “interested” or how many times I did things like touch my face without realizing.  I also found I wasn’t as engaged in the meeting and tended to start multi-tasking.  

Staying Still
When we have the camera on we tend to keep our heads in the middle of the screen and sit in one position for a long period of time. This fixed posture and gaze also add more tension and strain to our usual sitting posture. 
When I’m on a Zoom call, I notice that I stay VERY still with a wide fixed stare. Almost like a possum caught in headlights.  It doesn’t help that my laptop is old and the camera blurs with any movement from my end.  This means I also often cross my arms to curb my tendency to wave them around. 
And I’ve observed similar posture and fixed gazes in others on my Zoom calls. 
The good news is that there are some things you can do to avoid Zoom fatigue and improve your posture during Zoom meetings, whether the camera is on or camera off.

Here’s my top 5 solutions for avoiding Zoom Fatigue:​