3 1/2 Ways to Help Protect Your Mental Health at Work

Between client meetings, internal deadlines, and 24-hour notifications, we’ve all got a lot on our plates. In marketing, social media, and other industries, these constant pings, negative comments, or unsatisfactory emails make protecting our mental health while at work and at home a challenge. At GROWL, our experience is no different. We’ve collected three killer ways with resources and tools to help you build resilience and protect your mental health.

First things first, create mindfulness

Mindfulness is a mental state achieved by focusing on awareness, accepting feelings, and being conscious of your situation. As marketers, business leaders, or owners, we put ourselves out there and often take feedback personally. While fielding push notifications, emails, and social interactions, screen time adds up quickly. Create mindfulness by following these steps:

• Time block your schedule, including time just for email responses
• Manage your time spent on social; most phones and platforms include "activity monitoring," which allows users to set daily reminders, indicating when their time is up
• Flip on DND during meetings and non-work hours
• Mute social media notifications; platforms like Instagram allow you to set a specified amount of time to take a break

top 3 ½ tools (and apps) to take control of your mental health at work

1 Mind your mental with Headspace

Headspace is an award-winning meditation app that is backed by research. With hundreds of bite-sized meditations (some are only five minutes!) and practices, not having time isn’t an excuse. Headspace is great for protecting your mental health at work because it enables users to silence their internal chatter while at work. Plus, work-based studies have shown that in 30 days of use, Headspace lowered stress by 32%.

2 Measure mental health at work (yep, bring on the data)

Contrary to belief, stress levels can actually be monitored. With new tech, tracking your heart rate, stress levels, and sleep is possible on smart devices like Apple watches, Samsung Watches, FitBits, and Suunto watches. These wearables monitor your body and alert you when elevated stress levels are detected. Monitoring stress gives you the opportunity to take a break, stretch your legs, and focus on your breathing. Being mindful and monitoring your stress will allow you to be proactive in bringing it under control. Plus, most smart devices connect to apps, helping you keep track of your mental health (and health) in the palm of your hand.

3 Improve focus at work with Noisili

Noisili helps improve mental health and focus by blocking out external noise. As an app (available on mobile and desktop), Noisili enables users to narrow their focus, improve productivity, and create a perfect work environment. From a thunderstorm to an ocean breeze, Noisili creates the best background noise to relieve stress and improve focus.

3 ½ Instagram Guides for mental health

Instagram has recently launched a new format of scrollable content: Guides. Instagram Guides curate content and help users consume helpful recommendations and tips from approved accounts. Using guides can help improve and protect your mental health at work by providing guided resources in a consumable (and shareable) format. Instagram initially launched guides to help users cope with stay-at-home orders with mental health but has opened the feature to other resources.

Sometimes, using these tools like these isn’t enough. If you need additional mental health resources, don’t be afraid to speak up and ask for help. Check out GROWL’s mental health hub for more resources.