Breaking The Ruminating Habit

thinking
The way that we think can impact on our mood and result in depression. In particular, there is a strong link between the thinking style of rumination and depression.

Rumination describes a tendency to compulsively focus on the symptoms and causes of your unhappiness and distress. It is the need to constantly ponder on the things that are causing you distress without taking any positive action to identify and make changes. It is that point at which you are wallowing in unhappiness with the mistaken belief that by focusing on your distress and your past failures you will find a way out to resolution and happiness.

Continue reading Breaking The Ruminating Habit

Loneliness at Christmas

christmas

For many of us, the Christmas festivities bring with it a range of difficult feelings. It can remind us of the people that we have lost, and it can bring into sharp relief the difference between the ideal families depicted on television and our own complex and less than ideal reality. More than at any other time of the year, Christmas can be a time of great sadness and loneliness. Feelings of loneliness can be as acute when you are in a room surrounded by people, as it is when you are in a room on your own. And it isn’t just something experienced by the few: 1 in 10 of us do not have a close friend and 1 in 5 of us feel unloved. It can affect us at any age whether we are young or old.

Continue reading Loneliness at Christmas

Work-Life Balance – moving towards a more integrated approach.

Maintaining a work-life balance has grown to mean maintaining a strict separation between your work life and the rest of your life. As technology has developed we bemoan the blurring of that separation seeing it as both the cause and a symptom of stress.

Some of us do jobs where the distinction is an absolute. We work in jobs where we have to be in a certain place during our working hours. We don’t have flexibility or autonomy. But many of us do. We work flexi-time, or part of our time from home, we are in creative roles, we work for ourselves or we are lucky enough to work for an organisation that focuses on our achievements and not the hours we are sat at a desk.

Continue reading Work-Life Balance – moving towards a more integrated approach.

Oh The Fickleness of Research

We love research at WorkGuru, it underpins everything that we do. Just in the same way as medicine that is prescribed by your GP should have a very strong scientific evidence base to say that it works, so should any programme that is delivered over the internet which claims to reduce levels of stress, or increase your wellbeing or happiness. But beware programmes that make huge claims. The ‘brain training’ app Lumosity was recently fined by the Federal Trade Commission for making exuberant claims that brain games could increase intelligence and reduce or delay age related cognitive impairment. The Commission ruled that the claims were unfounded.

Continue reading Oh The Fickleness of Research