Reducing the Spillover Between Home and Work Stress

Facing significant stress at home or work is problem enough, but when stress crosses from one part of your life to another, it can create a vicious cycle. What can you do to reduce the spillover between home and work stress?

What is Stress Spillover?

Spillover is when your attitudes or moods from one domain disrupt your behavior in another. Spillover can be positive, but because we’re talking about stress management, let’s focus on negative spillover.

Negative spillover, particularly when family stress impacts you at work, has been shown to have adverse effects on performance and physical and mental health.

Problem-focused Coping Strategies

One way to reduce spillover is to address the stress afflicting you right at the source before it can transfer into other parts of your life. The most effective way to do that is to adopt problem-focused coping strategies. Three generic methods include:

Positive reinterpretation

Reframe the stressful event in positive terms. For example, at home, if you’ve had a defiant toddler making you late for work, remind yourself that your child is doing their job in carving space between you and them: healthy toddlers are challenging. At work, you might respond to a rapidly approaching due date by being grateful it’s due on Friday because it will make the weekend more relaxing.

Active Coping

Take steps to remove or avoid the stressor or reduce its effects. If busy evenings at home create friction with your partner, doing meal prep on a weekend is an active coping strategy to reduce the impact of the stressor. At work, active coping could involve enlisting support from a colleague who is more adept at something than you.

Planning

Prepare by thinking about how to cope with the stressor. For example, think through a calm and collected approach for the next time the neighbor lets their dog pee on your lawn. At work, consider how you’ll respond when your chronically procrastinating teammate tells you they don’t have their work done on time (again).

As you take a problem-focused approach to your stress at home or work, you reduce its impact and the likelihood that it will follow you from one part of your day to another.

Boundaries and Transitions

Other strategies to reduce spillover use compartmentalization to keep the stress where it belongs.

Time and Space Boundaries

Increase the boundary between home and work by creating buffer time in between. Taking 15 minutes after leaving one place before arriving at the other can be helpful. If you have a commute, use that time for neutral activities like listening to music or an audiobook. Giving yourself a brief reprieve from worrying about either work or home can decrease the contamination.

If you work from home, you need time and physical space boundaries to symbolically leave one domain and enter another. Where possible, use different physical spaces for other parts of your life. For example, you don’t want the kitchen table to be where you take exasperating Zoom calls and try to have a relaxing dinner with your partner.

Psychological Boundaries

Even if creating time and space boundaries is challenging, you can establish psychological boundaries that remind you that it’s either home time or work time. Take a page from Mr. Rogers and change into your comfy cardigan to say that work is done for the day.

Rituals

I’m also a fan of creating small rituals to exit one identity and enter another. That might be making your first cup of coffee at the office and reading the headlines from the newspaper. Alternatively, it might be coming home and spending a few minutes taking the dog for a walk. You take these things from simple habits to rituals by being mindful and deliberate about the small steps and what they mean to you.

Emotional Regulation

Another critical strategy for reducing the likelihood that stress in one part of your life will infect others is to process your emotional reactions. Hence, you’re more aware of and in control of them.

Mindfulness

Mindfulness and meditation techniques can help you tune in to your body, allowing you to notice when your heart is racing, or your palms are sweating. Just being aware of these processes and naming what’s going on can reduce their impact.

Breathing and Relaxation

Breathing techniques help activate your parasympathetic nervous system and slow your heart rate so you get out of the fight, flight, freeze, or fawn in self-defense mode. You can use box breathing or techniques to extend your exhalation for longer than your inhalation.

Progressive relaxation techniques can also be helpful. Start at your toes and clench as tightly as possible before releasing and relaxing as much as possible. Do that for your calves, then your thighs, and progress until you’ve zeroed in on each part of your body. This is a great one to do in stealth mode if your commute involves a bus, train, or passenger seat of a car.

Focus and Flow

Not all stress management techniques need to go after the stress directly. Another way to reduce the spillover between work and home stresses is to choose another activity that you can lose yourself in.

Engaging Activities

If you’ve had a rough morning at home, try picking your most interesting and engaging task to start your work day. Is there a topic you’re researching that’s fascinating? What about a colleague or customer you can talk to who will immediately transport you into work and out of home mode? Or when you walk in the door at night, what quick activity could you get lost in to close the door on the work day?

Physical Outlets

Finally, physical outlets are an excellent way to release emotions (and all their corresponding hormones and neurotransmitters). After you leave home or work, can you go for a brisk walk, Zumba class, or bike ride before you arrive at the other location? A physical outlet can help you leave your stress behind.

Emotional Coping Strategies

Up to this point, I’ve shared various problem-focused coping strategies. These strategies attempt to reduce the stress you’re experiencing or reduce the transposition of stress from one domain to another.

In addition to problem-focused coping strategies, there are also emotional coping strategies, where you try to regulate (tolerate, reduce, or eliminate) your physiological, cognitive, emotional, or behavioral reaction to a stressful event. This might include venting, denial, or disengagement from the cause of the stress. Research has shown that these methods are ineffective and can even be unhealthy over the long term.

Conclusion

It’s a stressful world. Job stress is increasing, so most knowledge workers feel stressed regularly. Stress at home is also all too common—the U.S. surgeon general even warned that our modern parenting approach is bad for our health. Dealing with stressors in either of these domains is challenging, but when one bleeds into the other, it can become too much. Make sure you’re implementing deliberate strategies to reduce spillover.

Additional Resources

Good and bad stress

Tsunami of stress

Everybody Hurts

 

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