Workspace Wellness

Relieve Stress and Boost Health While Working from Home

In 21 years as a consultant, I’ve had a close-up view into people’s personal and professional lives. I’ve learned that nearly everyone needs help reclaiming not only their space, but their HEALTH as well. I’m going to show you how to create new habits and improve your environment to enjoy a healthier space and life.

To lead a healthy, productive life at home and work, we need to intentionally invest in ourselves.

I know: that sounds lovely, but most all of us are taxed with the collision of home and work life, and most people are stressed out.

Taking the time to make changes to improve our health can feel overwhelming. We feel time-strapped enough as it is. Reclaiming our health seems like an unreachable goal that will take time we can’t spare.

But, take heart – it doesn’t have to be complicated! I’ve written this blog to help you make some VERY EASY adjustments to your daily life to incrementally shift unhealthy patterns.

I’ve personally implemented every one of these wellness tips. I can testify that they’re simple and make a big impact in your physical and mental health!

Let’s start with taking care of our body throughout the day….

Interrupt Sitting

Let’s start with saving your life!!

With so many of our organizing clients working from home now, I did some simple online research and it’s widely recommended in many articles that standing up from sitting and moving every 30 minutes cuts your risk of DEATH! Yikes! It’s not just nice to move around, it’s critical.

So apparently you can save your life while saving your backside by simply standing up from your desk!

If you’re ready to go all-in and address habitual sitting, buying a sit-stand desk is a great way to mix it up and adjust your position frequently. (Please be advised, however, that you must actually change the desk height to vary your position.) In my experience as a workplace organizing consultant, many people OWN a sit-stand desk, but only use it in the standing position. If you plan on doing that, just get a standing desk. There are health recommendations against constantly standing as well (think about checkers in grocery stores)….so the point is to vary your position and make a wise investment if you’re going to acquire furniture to improve your health.

But there is also a simple solution to interrupt constant sitting: set a timer, or use an app, to remind you to get up and “move about the cabin.”

For an 8 hour day, taking a brief break every 30 minutes breaks adds up to about 14-16 breaks (depending on whether you count the first and last half hour of your day). Think about that for a minute. Those breaks offer a lot of opportunity to build healthy mini-habits.

Here are some ideas for your healthy mini-breaks:

• Refill your water bottle
• Take your vitamins
• Stretch out your top half
• Stretch out your bottom half
• Go outside to get some fresh air
• Hug your family
• Make some herbal tea
• Pray or meditate
• Stroll around your yard or garden
• Rub your feet or hands
• Tap on some essential oil
• Blend up a smoothie
• Throw a ball for your dog
• Pick a bouquet of flowers from the yard
• Engage in real socialization vs. social media
• Change workstations

If you’re getting up anyway, instead of just making a phone call, use your mini-breaks to build enjoyable, healthy new habits.

One of my favorite strategies to interrupt sitting is to get outside and put my feet in the grass. Sometimes I walk around and sometimes I just stand and breathe in deeply the country air.

Practice Grounding

Several years ago, I had some DNA testing done, and found out I was massively “geopathically stressed.” I didn’t even know what this meant, and I had to do some research.

This is a big topic, and I’m not an expert, but I will try to give you the highlights in Vicki-terms. I recommend researching this fascinating topic.

So, the earth has a frequency (7.83 hertz); and – as it turns out – it’s a healing frequency for humans. Earlier and nomadic cultures have understood this, but in our modern, concrete world, we have all but forgotten the importance of humans being connected to the earth. People whose way of life intrinsically relied on the earth for sustenance knew that even the wearing of shoes separated us from the “grounding” effect of connecting to the earth in bare feet.

Since we are electrical beings, simply connecting with the earth’s frequency can “ground” us.

Today, we are mostly separated from the healing the earth has to offer. This causes geopathic stress on our bodies.

To further the problem, the electromagnetic forces, equipment, and technologies we humans have introduced have magnified our stress and illness. Just consider how much time we sit in front of screens and daze out on devices. We get up from our electronic web and use the microwave and phone. We constantly have man-made rays and frequencies passing through us ALL THE TIME. Easily accessible research shows we are actually getting mentally and physically worn down by these jarring, disabling frequencies.

Let’s remember that much of this technology is helping us remain connected, build and serve. So, we don’t have to abandon these modern conveniences; but we can mindfully connect to the earth to bring “balance to the force.”

Since we’ve learned all this, our whole family practices “grounding” – where we put our bare feet on the earth on a frequent basis. I should do it daily, but I usually find myself grounding when I’m stressed or have been glued to the screen and chair too long.

It’s amazing how fast I feel the stress melt away and restore my electrical system by grounding. Be sure to add grounding to your daily mini-habits.

This is a great, broad topic to research, because there are a lot of other things you can do to reduce your geopathic stress in your home and workspace.

Breathe Clean Air

While you’re grounding, you’re outside getting fresh air – which is critical to your wellness. We have to breathe clean air!

Yet, most of us spend our lives INSIDE our homes with compromised indoor air. We are surrounded by chemicals leeching from the carpet, paint, and furniture. Add to that toxic load the vapors and mists from the cleaning products we are using, and it’s just not good for us!

We help our organizing clients reclaim their health by simply going through their home and detoxifying it, including their household and personal products.

You, too, can go through your kitchen, office, bathroom, and personal care products and consider their contribution (or degradation) to your health.

• Allocate Time. Set aside a half hour at a time and just go through ONE type of products (first aid, cleaning, bathroom, etc.)
• Research. Read the ingredients and look up their purpose and effects on the human body. Pay special attention to the ingredients that you can’t pronounce!
• Evaluate. An app called Think Dirty and another one by the Environmental Working Group (EWG) called Healthy Living have databases of common products in which you can look up the toxicity of tons of daily-use products. Both apps also have barcode scanners. Ongoingly, I use the Think Dirty app when I’m shopping for hand soap, shampoo, laundry detergent and more.

Detoxing your products goes a long way to fixing toxic indoor air. For those of us working from home, as well as living there, cleaner air is literally a lifesaver.

Using an air purifier in the spaces you’re in all the time helps a LOT. I also like the white noise many air purifiers offer.

Rest Your Eyes

Now that we’ve given our lungs what they need, let’s help our eyes, too!

The other day I had a four hour video call and ended up with a blazing headache. Eye strain is a real thing and it causes dry eye, blurred vision and headaches.

Resting your eyes is a healthy habit that we often forget.

I use blue light glasses to help relieve my eyes for those marathon computer days.

Getting a pair of lenses to save your eyes is a simple and easy way to look after your health.

Fuel with Nutrients

We all feel better when we eat healthy.

A simple way to get the nutrients to fuel productive work and home life is by making daily juices or smoothies. Living people need living food!

We give our blender a workout with daily smoothies with the kale from our garden, ginger, basil, and fruit.

One superfood-packed liquid drink a day will boost your mental acuity and productivity, too!

This tip to fuel yourself with good nutrients may seem obvious, but too few of us are doing it because it takes a little pre-planning to execute.

To pull off a daily infusion of nutrients, start by drilling back to your grocery list.

List all the smoothie and juice ingredients you love, and keep your fridge and freezer stocked. I’ve been doing more online grocery shopping which allows me to purchase frozen fruit, for example, in bulk so I’m never out of smoothie ingredients.

As you become a smoothie aficionado, you can try adding seeds like chia, sunflower, flax to add dimension, protein, and nutrition to your daily power-up.

If “eating healthy” has been a goal of yours, just start with nutrifying daily juices or smoothies. There’s no time like the present to leverage more at-home time to USE those corded appliances and rev up your health!

If you want a baby step, there are now online subscriptions for smoothie delivery! A little research can help you test drive this concept.

APPly Yourself to Health

If you are a pro at using your phone and its many apps, consider downloading some apps to enhance your health!

An organizing principle I love is to model after what IS working for you…so if leveraging tech works for you, go grab some health apps to boost your workspace wellness, increase productivity, and reduce stress.

Here are some fun apps to improve health:

• Break Time or Stand Up – apps to remind you to stand and move
• SunDial – gives you quick glance at your remote team’s timezones and work hours
• Lux – for re-making your screen brightness/color schemes to save your eyes
• Headspace – clearing your mind during breaks
• Waterlogged – helping you track your water intake
• Coffitvity – background noise generator

A quick online search will help you match an app to the healthy habit you want to adopt. Pencil in a few minutes to research an app that would help you. Compare it to similar options. Only adopt one new habit at a time; give each new habit a month to adopt and you’ll be on your way to a healthier workspace and life!

I hope you’ve enjoyed these easy-to-adopt wellness ideas.

If you’re looking to “restore order” to your health, I have a couple of free resources that may help:

1. Enjoy my health-related blog articles on my Reclaim Your Health blog channel at RestoringOrder.com
2. Visit my YouTube Reclaim Your Health playlist for practical ideas

Here’s to reclaiming your work and your health!

Your friend,

Vicki Norris