Individual Strategies

Beating the Sunday Night Blues

Beating the Sunday Night Blues

It's Sunday afternoon. You've spent the morning slowly rising out of bed, running errands that you've put off during the week, and have even managed to hit up your favourite brunch spot.

Then it sinks in ... tomorrow is MONDAY. 

You suddenly feel a wave of anxiety rush over you. The relaxation and enjoyment of the weekend's activities come to a halt. You begin to preoccupy your thoughts about the upcoming work week; thoughts of upcoming projects and meetings, colleagues that you need to attend to, conflicts that are unresolved. Your mood takes a down turn, and you begin to feel irritable and restless. You may even have a tough time falling, or staying asleep as those ruminating thoughts about your upcoming workweek invade your mind. If these feelings resonate with you, you might have a case of the 'Sunday Night Blues.'

Games for Mental Health & Mindfulness

Games for Mental Health & Mindfulness

With the increasing use of technology in our everyday lives, electronic games have become accessible enough and are of enough quality that it is not uncommon to see a child walking down the street playing Pokemon Go on their phone or a working mother playing Candy Crush on her laptop after dinner. Electronic games are often designed to be stimulating, based on progressing through levels or achieving rewards, are available on phones, computers, tablets, gaming consoles etc., and are often linked to social media, which help enable them to be highly addictive. Although electronic games can have a bad reputation for being "mindless" or harmful, there are newer (and often indie) games designed to be therapeutic, mindful, or simply relaxing. 

Social Media and Mental Health Part 2: Strategies for Self Care

Social Media and Mental Health Part 2: Strategies for Self Care

It’s midway through Mental Health Week 2017. In our post from earlier this week, we discussed the role of community managers, and how mental health can be impacted by frequent social media use. We know that being in this role can put you at risk for developing mental health concerns. Today we will discuss strategies on how to manage some of these challenges.

Mental Health and Social Media

Mental Health and Social Media

Today marks the start of Mental Health awareness week in Toronto! With the rising usage of social media in corporate and personal contexts, our focus this year is on raising awareness about mental health and social media. Are you a community manager? Do you manage a corporate social media account? Are you a social media guru? Blogger? Vlogger? Or regular Facebook checker? Then stay tuned this week to the blog and L&L Social channels for information, tips, personal stories, and strategies to maintain your mental health while using social media.

The "Do What You Love" Mentality

The "Do What You Love" Mentality

We’ve all heard this advice at least once: “do what you love, and you’ll never work a day in your life”. Sounds pretty simple right? Create a job out of your life passions and you’re going to like going to work so much, that it won’t even feel like you’re working! But don’t go quitting your job just yet. The do what you love (DWYL) mentality has not been immune to criticisms... 

Showing Strength by Asking for Help

Showing Strength by Asking for Help

Asking for help has been promulgated as a sign of weakness, incompetence, or an imposition on other people's time. When we don't want to come across as being a nuisance, we tend to avoid asking for help altogether, and expect that things will just work out.

I want to stress that this approach is flawed, and that the opposite is true. Asking for help is in fact a STRENGTH, not a weakness. 

Tips For Job Seekers

Tips For Job Seekers

With a masters graduation ceremony and a licensing exam on the horizon, I spent nearly 2 months in a warehouse. Walking briskly down musty aisles picking out clothes and accessories for online orders, daydreaming about the best-selling novel I’d never write, interacting with co-workers with limited education and/or English skills – I spent my days wondering how I ended up here.

We cannot talk about workplace mental health without dealing with the reality of the job market – which is that some people are underemployed (high skilled workers working low paying jobs), precariously employed, or between jobs and unemployed.

You Are Your Clothes

You Are Your Clothes

Unless we wear a uniform, one choice we make is the outfit we are going to wear to work. Some of us work from home in pajamas, others wear a crisp suit, and still others are somewhere in between.

Researchers Galinsky and Hajo studied what they call “enclothed cognition”, where those who wore a doctor’s coat (as opposed to painter’s coat or no coat) actually performed better in attention tasks, showing that the symbolic meaning of the clothing plus the physical experience of wearing it had an effect on participants (Hajo & Galinsky, 2012).

Reframe Your New Year's Resolutions

Reframe Your New Year's Resolutions

2017 is officially here ... which suggests that we begin to conquer our New Year's resolutions with a new light. In fact, the early Babylonians believed that what people did on the first day of the year affected what they did for the rest of that calendar year (Durlofsky, 2016). Although this Babylonian philosophy may a bit extreme, many of us share a similar viewpoint in that we have a blank slate to work with, and a chance to start a new chapter of life! It is the perfect opportunity to start over, refresh our mental state, or change bad habits.