Mental Health During Lockdown

Mental health has recently risen to the surface as a national concern, magnified by the COVID-19 pandemic and global lockdown. It’s interfered with our regular sense of control and our usual ways to operate by cutting us off from the outside world. Moreover, recent research has shown an array of symptoms that lockdown has impacted people’s mental health, like sadness, insomnia, confusion, fear, irritability, and emotional exhaustion.

The disruption that lockdown caused really showed us that we have been designed to be free to interact with one another. If something as simple as that is taken away (a natural human behaviour), the mind finds it difficult to process, which can severely affect our mental health.

What started out as a few weeks of working from home quickly became months of uncertainty for many.

We’re told this is normal and OK to feel this way; however, we’re also advised to completely refocus our lockdown experience through a process called ‘Cognitive re-framing’. Cognitive re-framing turns a negative into a positive; feeling negative about being stuck at home could be turned into a positive of keeping you and others safe by staying at home. Or using lockdown as a positive springboard to put remote working on a global scale into practice.

The good news is with remote working becoming the norm worldwide (and for Accent), it has been advantageous, allowing more interaction with team members and clients globally. Best of all, we get to spend less time in traffic and more time with our families.

Managing the team’s mental health is a significant ongoing concern for Accent. Throughout the year, we will organise physical and virtual events and schedule times for general non-work-related catchups, contributing to a more healthy work-life balance.

Article by Brenton

By Karen Fuller