Managing my mental health at Register Dynamics
As part of Mental Health Awareness Week and our Blogathon, we came together as a team to give ourselves the opportunity to create content, collaborate, share experiences, support and to appreciate each other. One team member, Al Norman, was inspired to write about how he manages his mental health and in this article he shares with us his thoughts.
Register Dynamics has signed the Mental Health at Work Commitment.
I’m trying to quit my job. It has excessively long hours, zero pay and my employer is a tyrant who follows me everywhere, criticises every single thing I do and shouts at me when I’m trying to get to sleep. You’re probably wondering why I haven’t taken this despotic boss to an employment tribunal. Well, the issue is that he … is me.
I have lived with depression and anxiety since I was a young teenager, and it has not exactly made my life easy – especially when it comes to work. How am I supposed to concentrate during a morning meeting when my brain is yelling ‘What’s the point? You’re going to die. We’re all going to die!’ How am I going to meet a deadline when I’ve only had two hours of sleep and can barely remember my own name? It’s hard to earn a living when just living is so bloody difficult.
I’m far from alone in this. In any given week, 1 in 6 UK adults will experience a common mental health issue, such as depression or anxiety, which is why it is so important for businesses to provide support for their staff. My managers and colleagues at Register Dynamics have shown nothing but compassion, awareness and understanding, which is a rare thing in a culture that still very much stigmatises and minimises mental health problems. I’m not seeking pity or demanding special treatment, I simply want to feel heard. And that’s why I love working at Register Dynamics.
How I cope
Thankfully, after a combined effort of therapy, medication, incremental lifestyle changes and support from my actual employers, I feel largely on top of my mental health. I’m not peddling a miracle cure, or claiming that I’ve ‘beaten depression’ because it’s not something you can cure or beat. It’s something you learn to manage, and get better at managing with time. This is not a self-help guide, this is simply my story (or a small part of it), and if any of it resonates with you – great!
I want to work. It’s tremendously important for people to understand that, because on my bad days (as I call them) some might label me as lazy or apathetic or uncaring or useless or… oof, there goes my inner critic! This is where my bosses demonstrated their understanding of mental health issues. Instead of saying ‘why aren’t you doing this?’ they asked ‘how can we help?’. They understand that if I’m not getting the work done, it’s not because I don’t want to, it’s because my brain is getting in the way.
Over the course of the two years I’ve worked at Register Dynamics, my managers and I have tried and tested various coping strategies. Every two weeks, we would review the strategy, and if it didn’t work we tried something else. If it did work, we discussed ways it might be improved and– wait a goddamn second… have I just been Agiled?
The bad days
Depression and Anxiety can bleed into each other meaning it’s often difficult to distinguish which one is chucking stuff about upstairs at any given time, but for me, depression is usually moaning ‘what’s the point?’ and anxiety is yelling something along the lines of ‘everyone hates you and you suck at everything’.
It’s not easy to focus on the task at hand when you’re questioning your own existence and berating yourself for having the audacity to exist in the first place. Basic daily tasks become herculean labours. If you’re lucky you might manage to wash, dress or feed yourself, but never all three – and you’ve got to get out of bed first, which is a whole other mission. By the time you have your first morning meeting, you’ve perhaps accomplished putting on a T-shirt and a sock, your stomach is growling but you don’t feel hungry, you’re frantically trying to remember which day it is and then, when it’s your time to talk, you feebly splutter a few technical sounding words in an order that probably makes very little sense.
Next comes the actual work. The job you’re being paid to do. Your fingers hover over your keyboard and you freeze up. You’re paralysed by the fear of getting it wrong and then suddenly two hours have passed and you realise you’ve done nothing, which puts your anxiety into turbo mode. You promise you’ll make up for lost time by working late, but now you’re questioning, interrogating and criticising every small decision you make, and decision you’ve ever made for that matter. Intrusive thoughts come flooding: ‘am I good enough?’ ‘Do my work colleagues think I’m an idiot?’ ‘Will I lose my job?’ ‘Why am I like this?’
Coping strategies
The last question is easy to answer. I’m like this because I have depression and anxiety. Unfortunately, that’s not going to change, but I can make gradual lifestyle improvements to make the bad days less bad, and the good days more frequent.
My managers have been tremendously patient and understanding of my mental health struggles, and I wouldn’t be writing this blog if they hadn’t. They first reassured me that I’m great at my job and backed this up with evidence – intrusive thoughts do NOT like evidence, so remind your anxious friends that they are good at what they do!
Once I divulged my litany of problems, I was happily surprised to not receive the usual ‘Why don’t you just exercise, eat well and sleep well?’. Whether it’s because they are more informed, have lived experience or are simply more empathetic, they recognised that it’s not a helpful thing to say to someone who can’t motivate themselves to get out of bed, let alone run a 5k.
So instead of discussing barre classes, super green salads or ‘sleep hygiene’ (save that for another blog), we focused on getting me to a place where those things would become feasible. This is not an exhaustive list, but here are some of the lifestyle changes that helped me:
Set multiple alarms on separate devices and put one of those devices on the other side of the room. I have chronic sleep problems, which means it is very easy to sleep through alarms. Some people are fine with obnoxious beeps or sirens, but I don’t particularly like being screamed at in the morning, so I’ve linked my alarm clock to a Spotify playlist that won’t lull me back to sleep, but equally won’t trigger my fight or flight response.
Make my bed every morning. Fellow depressives will know that bed is a safe place. Sleep is our greatest weapon, and a quick escape route when everything is getting on top of us. I have found that making my bed not only makes me feel like a functional adult, but it makes my room look instantly tidier and gives me a small sense of accomplishment (and we’ll take anything we can get).
Write a script. As I tend to panic about saying the ‘wrong thing’ in stand-ups and work meetings, my boss suggested I spend five or ten minutes scripting out what I’m going to say beforehand. This not only gives me the confidence to speak clearly, but also reassures me, and the clients, that I’ve actually been doing work.
One task a day. Multi-tasking is not one of my strengths, even if it says so on my CV. My boss suggested I try to focus on one project a day, so that I can give it my full time and attention. On days where this isn’t possible due to deadlines or time constraints, my managers or colleagues will help me allot my time and frequently check in on me to see how I’m getting on.
Check-ins. Regular stand-ups keep me on task. Knowing that I’m going to have to explain what I’ve been doing with my time is terrifying, but that’s only if I haven’t been doing anything. It sounds like they’re using fear as a motivator, but that fear is coming from me. So long as I communicate with my work colleagues, they are always happy to help out if I’m struggling with work - or my mental health.
Co-working space. I will never complain about having a fully remote job, because it suits my needs and lifestyle, but the cabin fever really starts to kick in if I’m working by myself for too long. I don’t need people to talk to, but it’s nice to have them around, so I was grateful when my bosses paid for a co-working space. I try to go two or three times a week so that I can charge my extrovert batteries and get a change of scenery.
Meal Prep Service. I hate cooking. There, I said it. I have my reasons, and I shan’t go into them here, but eating healthily is hard when vegetables generally require chopping and heating. I’ve been using a meal prep service called Frive, who sends me healthy meals every week. I can just pop a meal in the microwave when hunger strikes and, as they’ve done all the nutrient maths for me, I don’t need to worry about hitting my five a day quota. It’s an expensive solution, but one that works for me.
The good days
I’m still a work in progress, but since making these changes I’ve already become a better and more dependable employee, and I have my supportive work team to thank for it. They have actively listened without any judgement and helped me build a healthier work lifestyle (workstyle?).
I still have bad days, but nowhere near as often. And on those bad days, I feel safe in just admitting it because we have fostered a work culture in which it’s ok to do so. In fact, I’ll prove my point by admitting that those nagging voices are present: ‘this blog is garbage’. ‘Your sentences are too short’. ‘Who are you to talk about mental health?’.
I’m going to shut them up by doing something that I’ve never done before - I’m going to publish a blog. In all its garbage glory.
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