How to re-enter the OFFICE WORLD
Dreading going back into the office or even meeting people? You’re not alone, as the experts reveal you have every reason to be anxious but there are ways you can deal with it...
IT was an unexpected note through the letterbox that sent me into a spiral of panic. ESB informed me essential maintenance would cut the power to our house for a full day. It could only mean one thing — my return to the office was being thrust upon me and I was not ready. I hadn’t enough time to prepare, given that I was just taking my first steps out into the world, safe in the knowledge that my immunity was now fully brewed thanks to that second Pfizer vaccine 14 days ago.
It has been a year and three months since I left the office, shortly after St Patrick’s Day in 2020, not thinking of what was to come. And I have been lucky that I have a job I can do from home, space in which to do it and all the technology I need.
Initially, working from home was a novelty, the house became a place of safety, away from the rule-breakers and those who were casually dismissive of the seemingly small efforts it took to protect the lives of others. I was asthmatic, vulnerable and armed with maybe too much information. So we stayed in, keeping to our own company — myself and my partner.
Up until last weekend I hadn’t seen some of my family for a year and there are others I have yet to see. But now the landscape has changed considerably and all the ideas and plans I’d made to change my life in lockdown were taking root.
By Monday night I was preparing for work and my anxiety levels were going through the roof. Myself and my closest compadres had been voicing our fears to each other but now it was all too real.
This state of panic is a natural reaction, according to Professor Ciaran O’Boyle, Professor of Psychology at the Royal College of Surgeons Ireland and the director of its Centre for Positive Psychology and Health.
‘We will be in a state of transition for a while and I think if we see it like that, that we are adapting to the change — it’s easier for us to deal with rather than saying ‘I must have everything sorted out by Monday,’’ he says. ‘It’s going to be very likely that people will be feeling anxious for a whole variety of reasons. We have been told it’s unsafe to be in crowds and in workplaces so I think a lot of people have found safety at home.
‘Home has become the safe space and now some of us are being asked to go back to work in a place which up to now was considered unsafe. So why wouldn’t you be a bit anxious? We should just acknowledge that will happen and it will pass.’
I was convinced that my serious online shopping habit during the lockdown months left me with lots of new workwear options. Like everyone else, I had embarked on a clearout and the drab, dull, plain work dresses were some of the first to go. I couldn’t understand why I wore clothes like that, plain and boring, so I had vowed whilst surfing my many shopping apps that my return to the office would be marked with attire that was much more ‘me.’
It wasn’t until I began looking at the new clothes I was keeping for my ‘return to work’ that I realised I had made a mistake.
The blue dress with paisley broderie anglaise? Ideal for a sunny Saturday in town but too short for office wear. That rustcoloured shift with the puff sleeves and large beagle collars? Perfect for work! Perfect, that is, if your job is lecturing at the local clown college.
Panicking, I rummaged round to find one of the last remaining plain navy shifts, spared the axe because of its summer sensibilities.
My new dress was perfect for clown college
Shoes also proved traumatic considering heels have been out for 15 months and despite having two wardrobes full of footwear, I fired on the Adidas runners I’ve been wearing for a year, put loafers into a bag and stepped tentatively out into the world.
Having eschewed public transport when the pandemic began, I determined I was going to walk to work in future. Sure, it’s a great fitness habit and after all, I’d been walking pretty much every day since lockdown. Why did I never think of this before? But a morning stroll through the parks of your own locality is very different to dragging yourself through the city carting a handbag, a laptop, spare shoes and all the other accoutrements deemed necessary for being an office-life woman.
A few months ago we moved office to a street I knew, that wasn’t too far away from the old place. However, the fact that I hadn’t been on the southside of the city and in the proximity of so many people breathing near me for over a year saw me distressed and disorientated, hot and very bothered.
Why was that maskless woman standing right beside me clicking at her phone like there was no such thing as Covid-19, I thought, as I edged away giving her a stink eye.
At that stage, I hit a crossroads, both physically and spiritually, and the unthinkable happened. My phone ran out of bat tery and I was nowhere near a charger. Google Maps couldn’t help me now and streets that should have been so familiar were blending into a sea of too many people and green trees.
I must have looked as bad as I felt as a kindly elderly gent walking his dog asked: ‘Are you lost?’
I affirmed the above in my best Michelle from Derry Girls accent, trying to hide the fact that I am almost 20 years in Dublin. But at last I found myself outside the office doors.
This disorientation is something that is akin to playing sport after some time, according to Dr Vincent McDarby, President-elect of the Psychological Society of Ireland.
‘Any skill when we stop using it is going to degenerate a bit and that is completely normal,’ he says. ‘It’s like playing a sport — if you don’t do it for a while you are going to be a little rough but you pick it up quicker than a novice. It’s simply lack of practice.’
Over the past year where contact has been limited to pretty much Slack messages, WhatsApp, Zoom and emails, my thoughts — and I know I’m not alone in this — ranged from “Everyone hates me
and I’m going to be fired” to “Isn’t life wonderful and I love working from home” to “This is the end and the walls are closing in on me and I am working alone on an island and I cannot do this, I want to see people and I want to see life,” as The Smiths once said.
But as life appeared on the horizon, I lost any courage I had and reverted to a shy teenager, awkward and bumbling. Even though the first people I met were two of my lovely friends, words would not come easily. And when my long suffering editor-in-chief said hi and that he’d talk to me in a minute, I think I said the words ‘Oh God’ out loud, as all the fears about being fired resurfaced.
‘People will find that their social skills will have decreased,’ says Professor O’Boyle. ‘Isolation has a nasty effect on us. We are built for connection and humans have evolved on the basis of our connectivity. There is amazing research that homo sapiens, our ancestors, were so successful because we were good at connecting with each other. Neanderthals were actually very clever with very big brains but they weren’t great at connecting with each other. So communicating is where our evolutionary advantage came from.
‘We have psychological systems built into us for connection with other people. So when you have to go into isolation that has a deleterious effect on us so it takes time to re-learn that kind of social interaction. That’s why solitary confinement is a form of torture. So we haven’t been interacting with many people so if you are back in work or out and about it’s going to take a little time for the social skills to crank up again.
‘If we are isolated there is evidence to show our capacity to interact with people deteriorates and diminishes and it takes time for that to come back. We might be quite clunky and shy in this transition phase but with practice that will ease and we will get back to interacting as we normally would.
That is why it is very important to think of it as a transition period rather than a switch we can flick and suddenly we will be back to our old selves.’
There was an extra sensory overload with all the local lunch choices which almost blew my mind and sent me running to the nearest Tesco, familiar ground for someone from the suburbs. My colleague, safely at home, asked if the return was as bad as we’d imagined, to which I could only croak ‘Yes.’
But as the day wore on, I settled into the pleasant feeling of being back beside some of my socially distanced and mask wearing colleagues, experiencing that shared sense of community.
And I realised work clothes for me are more about blending in than standing out, kind of like a uniform that helps you become one with different people and personalities all under one roof, a weird little community with the same goal.
The more I spoke to people, the more normal it became and before long it was time to leave again. I couldn’t walk home because it dawned on me my commute route isn’t really too safe at times and although I’d spoofed that there was no such thing as bad weather, a bright blue waterproof jacket can make you a slow-moving target for the feral children on corners throwing builders’ rubble for sport. So I braved the Dart, ignoring the rule-breaker yakking into his phone, mask down round his chin from a few seats up.
And this is important, says Professor O’Boyle, citing the Stoic philosophers from 2000 years ago.
‘The basic principle is we have to work on the things we have control over and not worry too much about the things we can’t control,’ he says.
‘You just get bent out of shape by worrying about things you have no control over. So it is a way of thinking, really, saying: “I will work on the things I have control over, I will do my hand sanitising, I will do my mask wearing and not worry about what other people are doing.”’
We need to ease our way back in, bit by bit, piece by piece and that way we will adapt again to the new old normal or at least something that resembles a pre-pandemic reality.
‘When we experience shock or trauma we make our world very small because it makes us feel secure and safe,’ says Dr McDarby. ‘We might not leave our house, we might make it smaller by not leaving our room and even smaller by not leaving our bed.
‘That allows us to recover and that is a normal reaction following trauma and significant stress. And as we start to feel better, we make our world bigger again when we feel up to going outside and so on.
‘What has happened here is that the Government has essentially told us to make our world smaller and a lot of people, even though they didn’t like it, feel safe in this small world. It is safe and predictable and we have been in this small world for a long time and now having to make it big again is going to cause anxiety.
‘It’s unpredictable and that’s where our anxiety comes from.’
Our natural instinct is to avoid these things that cause us anxiety but we need to push ourselves out of our comfort zones to recover.
‘The more we avoid it, the bigger the sense of threat becomes,’ says Dr McDarby. ‘The treatment for any form of anxiety is exposure and that is usually done on a gradual basis.’
I have to admit that I felt a sense of relief when I closed my front door behind me, reverting to the desk on the dining room table with my own things about me again.
But now that I’ve taken that first step back to recognising the person I actually am, the one with the dark, plain resses, who loves nothing more than a post work Friday pint and some craic with the office pals which I will hopefully do when we resume office life properly again, hopefully in September.
Just don’t tell that to the cat — he’s still furious with me for leaving him.
All the lunch choices almost blew my mind