Workplace Mental Health Standards

It does not require that you are always positive and never collapse, but that you can maintain a dynamic balance between work pressure, personal needs, and career development, and that your ability to perceive normal life will not be consumed by work for a long time.

Last week, when I was doing an EAP interview for an Internet company, I met an operator who graduated from 985. His KPI ranked among the top three in his department for three consecutive months. His boss praised him as a benchmark every day. However, he said that when he got home from get off work every day, he just wanted to slump on the sofa. He couldn't even make an appointment to kill the scripts he had to write every week. When he went for a physical examination, all indicators were normal, and the doctor only gave him a diagnosis of "preliminary burnout in the workplace." In the eyes of many people, they will definitely think that "there are any psychological problems with such good performance." It is precisely this kind of cognitive bias that makes many people wait until they have physical problems to realize that they have stepped on a psychological red line.

Practitioners of the clinical psychology school generally pay more attention to the hard indicator of "symptom threshold": if you have physiological nausea when you think of going to work, unreasonable insomnia or drowsiness, uncontrollable irritability, and a desire to avoid normal social interactions for more than two consecutive weeks, or even have headaches, stomachaches, and chest tightness for which no organic cause can be found, then regardless of whether your performance is good or whether you can get along with your colleagues normally, it is already a red light in your mental state. I have been in contact with a To B salesperson before. I woke up with stomachache on Monday mornings for a month in a row. I went through various tests and found nothing wrong. Then I gave myself a week's leave and drove myself around in western Sichuan. When I came back, I never had stomach pain again. This kind of somatic reaction of psychological problems is the last warning given by your body. Don't bear it.

Different from the hard indicators of the clinical school, the enterprise side looks at this issue from a completely different perspective. Most business management researchers and HR attach more importance to "functional adaptability": as long as you can complete work tasks normally, communicate smoothly with collaborators, and do not frequently engage in impulsive professional behaviors (such as speaking out without warning, losing control in public and having conflicts with colleagues), you are considered to have met the mental health standards. This view has always been controversial. Many workers complained that it "treats people as working machines" and only looks at the output function without considering individual feelings. However, from the perspective of enterprise operation, this set of standards is indeed the most efficient way to judge management. There is no absolute right or wrong, just different positions.

What’s interesting is that in the past two years, when we conducted surveys on workplace populations, we found that workers’ own mental standards deviated from the previous two. Nowadays, more and more people in the workplace regard "self-perceived comfort" as the core judgment criterion: they don't have to force themselves to play the role of emotionally stable mature professionals every day, they don't have to spend most of their energy dealing with meaningless internal conflicts and blame-shifting, and they can smoothly forget about work after get off work. Even if they occasionally have to work overtime, as long as it is a project that they approve of and there is no feeling of being forced to open business, they are considered to be in good condition. I have a friend who works in product development. She used to have an annual salary of 600,000 yuan in a large factory and spend 2 hours a day dealing with cross-department bickering. Last year, she switched jobs to a small team of 20 people, and her annual salary was cut by one-third. Now she can take a detour to the park to run 5 kilometers every day after get off work, and she invites friends to camp and visit stores on weekends. She said that her current situation is 10,000 times better than when she received a high salary.

In fact, no one of these three sets of standards is higher or lower. People at different stages can refer to them as needed. When you have just graduated one or two years ago and have no savings, you should first follow the standard of "functional adaptation" and work well enough to earn enough money to eat. Don't be so conceited that you want to leave your job because of trivial matters. ； After working for three to five years and gaining a certain ability to resist risks, you should pay more attention to your own subjective feelings. There is no need to spend your life in an environment that consumes you just for the sake of glory in the eyes of others. ； If you have clinical somatization symptoms, don’t think about anything else and stop making adjustments first. No matter how much money you make, you cannot buy back normal sleep and appetite.

The mental state in the workplace is actually similar to that of a mobile phone. You don’t need to ask yourself to always have a full battery. It is normal to occasionally drop to 30% and fish for a long time to replenish the battery. As long as you don’t hold on until it is below 1% and it automatically shuts down. Don’t believe the nonsense on the Internet that “excellent professionals are always emotionally stable”. How can normal people not be crazy at work? Occasionally complaining about something or hiding in the stairwell and crying for two minutes are normal ways of adjusting as long as it doesn't delay business. Don't be too harsh on yourself.

After all, it's just work, so there's really no point in involving yourself. Whether you are comfortable or not is always more important than "excellence" in the eyes of others.