Return to Work Part 1: Reimagine the Future
As our economy slowly re-opens and we return to work in a way that somewhat resembles our pre-COVID reality, my strong suggestion is that we do not establish a goal to “go back to normal.” I don’t want you to think, “All of my efforts are to get me back to the way life was before the pandemic.” Why not? Because normal wasn’t all that good. In fact, a whole lot of that normal was factually bad for us.
Photo by Drew Beamer on Unsplash
Normal means that 25% of our population has a diagnosed sleeping disorder. Fifty-eight percent of us are overweight or obese. Eighty-five percent of us don’t get enough physical activity to prevent a chronic disease. One in five has a mental health challenge. The burnout rate is skyrocketing.
I believe that returning to work requires reimagining the future. We can have a future better than getting back to normal. I want us to do things differently. I want us to move forward with intention, whether that involves working from home, working in an office, homeschooling, heading back to the classroom, or anything else. I would respectfully submit that for many of us, going back to normal is actually not what we should be trying to do.
This is a moment of disruption in our historical timeline. Use it. Do things differently. Be better, be healthier, more productive, more creative, and more focused on your personal wellness and the wellness of others. Reimagine the future.
I want to start with some context for what is happening to all of our bodies right now and has been happening for the last three or four months. At a population scale, we are in fight or flight mode, which is our stress response to threat and danger.
All of our senses – our eyes, our ears, even our nose, taste buds, and skin – are designed to collect information from the environment. They then send that info to our cerebral cortex, which is the higher level thinking centre of our brain that interprets that information and decides if it's a threat or not.
From an evolutionary perspective, our brains treat a perceived threat as a life and death situation. Running late to a meeting you’re presenting at? Crocodile heading for you at full speed with cold, dead eyes? Same thing. The first matters but it isn’t literally life or death – and your physiology doesn't know the difference. It also doesn’t know the difference between a COVID-19 headline and that beady-eyed croc.
For months, as a population, we've been getting information from the news, from social media, from our friends and family, from our own experiences out in the world about the threat in our environment. The whole world's been on edge for a long time. And the part of our brain called the amygdala decides if we should be scared about that. While there are differences in the amygdala from person to person, the fact remains that there has been a significant change in all our lives.
However acutely we experience that threat, we have a physiological response. Our bodies are sent into fight or flight mode, which increases our heartrate and dumps adrenalin into our blood. This makes us feel activated all the time. It also makes us tired. In the first few weeks of lockdown or even now, have you gotten to the evening just exhausted? You haven’t gone anywhere, but you feel like you’re back in kindergarten and need a few naps to get through the day?
That’s stress. That’s a response to how much we don’t know, how much we’re learning, how worried we are, how our bodies are reacting and changing as a result, and how all of that impacts our mental wellness.
Life when it was “normal” also shared some of these features. We were in go-go hustle mode all day. We didn’t eat well, rest well, focus on the right priorities, and protect time for essential recovery and regeneration. That’s why normal is not the goal. Better is the goal.
I’ve got three main ideas to share with you that will give all of us a better future: put health and wellness before all else; focus on psychological safety; and provide clarity in all communications. Executing on all three areas packs a powerful punch.
Read on to learn how to elevate “normal” into something so much better: optimal health, wellness and performance.
