Tell me what you are like, and I’ll tell you how alone you feel.
Taking as a reference the Big Five model, the most widespread classification of personality traits among the scientific community, some of the factors that can make it difficult to adapt to working alone are:
- More extroverted people with a high need for social contact.
- Introverted people with little social exposure, for whom work is a source of contact (or almost the only one).
- People with little openness to experience may find it difficult to adapt to new work modalities.
- People with a more neurotic personality factor (with less emotional control) have more problems with focus and concentration.
- People with self-esteem and recognition problems who need continuous feedback on the results of their work may have a feeling of abandonment.
- People who need the existence and notoriety of standards, deadlines, monitoring of their work, and supervision.
- People with a tendency toward depressive personalities. Those who have a pattern of thought, emotion, and behavior tending toward pessimism and negativity may need more direct social contact to balance their perceptions.
How do you detect if you are anxious?
- Excessive and repeated fears associated with feelings of anguish that prevent us from functioning on a daily basis as we used to.
- Exaggerated reactions to trivial situations: irritability, ‘we jump ahead’…
- Difficulty disconnecting from recurring ideas, magnifying the possible consequences: thoughts like ‘what if…?’.
- Systematic avoidance of situations that we anticipate are threatening or uncomfortable, which we previously faced without major problems.
- Difficulty retaining information and concentration, which slows down tasks, meeting deadlines, and increasing errors and complaints.
‘Mindfulness’ and goodbye to diazepam
“Stress is the great workhorse.” This is clearly stated by Rosa González Muñoz, founder of Emoveris, who believes that there is nothing like meditation to combat it. Her advice for that self-employed person who suffers from loneliness at work is to train her mind to bring it to a state of peace, calm, and positivity, and her bet is on mindfulness, a discipline in which she is an expert.
“A clinical trial has been published in which REBAP [refers to the indicator of stress reduction based on mindfulness] was compared with escitalopram, one of the most prescribed anxiolytics, and the results were practically identical.” González alludes to a trial published in the journal Jama Psychiatry (November 2022), in which 272 adults with anxiety disorders obtained similar benefits with mindfulness training as with the prescription of the drug and, as claimed, with fewer adverse events.
But taking the step is not always easy for those whose income depends on daily work. “We have to break with that feeling that prevents us from stopping, because the problem gets worse. In fact, the average sick leave for the self-employed is three times longer than that of the rest because he only takes it when he can’t take it anymore.
And that is where the practice of mindfulness, which trains the mind to pay full attention to the present moment, is useful because it is easily adaptable to the daily grind: “It is about incorporating these micropractices into our daily lives and using those moments when we usually think about the same thoughts that worry without achieving any benefit, to feel and enjoy the present.”
Something that can be done on the way to work, in the shower, while we eat, or by breaking the day to take a short walk and return to the task with more energy.
González invites those interested to search for information on the Internet and, if it convinces them, take the step of putting themselves in the hands of a trainer. “Self-care is a great investment; that time that we sometimes think we spend uselessly is then multiplied,” González emphasizes. Muñoz.
How does depression manifest?
- Persistent sadness.
- Difficulty enjoying the things that used to make us feel good.
- Vacuum sensation.
- Loss of self-esteem and increased feelings of guilt.
- Increase or loss of appetite.
- Sleeping problems.
- Social withdrawal.
- Persistent fatigue.
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