5. Improve Your Working Conditions
As a highly sensitive person, I can’t work in certain atmospheres. I need a window ... and proper lighting ... and an assistant who will fetch me iced-tea whenever I want, with lemon and not too much ice (kidding on that). But there are simple ways you can improve even the most sterile and miserable working conditions: putting a nice plant in your cubicle, hanging or framing personal photos (a recent study say that looking at pictures of loved ones reduces pain), using a 10,000 lux daylight-balanced light (a lamp used for Seasonal Affective Disorder, but doesn’t look any different from an average desk light). Keeping a clean desk will also help you feel less overwhelmed.

6. Get a Life Outside of Work
If I were to name the single most important lesson I learned when I was in a psych ward, it would be this: get a life outside of work. You see, pre-psych ward, I had invested all my self-esteem into my profession. Thus, each career flop set me back a considerable chunk. If a book bombed, so did my self-confidence. My goal when I left my in-patient psych program in 2006 was to get a life and to sustain that life.

I’m doing better today. I swim in a master’s program. I joined a book group. I’m involved with a moms’ group at the kids’ school. None of these things is related to my job. I’ve met a whole other set of friends aside from my fellow bloggers, editors, and writers.

7. Get into the (Right) Zone
No doubt you’re behind at work and feel like no matter how much you get done the day before, you always begin the next day at the foot of a mountain. You may very well have more work than is humanly possible for one person to accomplish. However, according to Elisha Goldstein, psychologist and author of the meditative CD Mindful Solutions for Success and Stress Reduction at Work, identifying the four zones of your workday can help you do your job in less time, which will lower your stress.

This Attention Zones Model was developed by Rand Stagen of Stagen’s Leadership Academy, who maintains that during our day, we are in one of four zones: a reactive zone, a proactive zone, a distracted zone, or a waste zone. The goal is to stay out of the distracted and waste zones: responding to unimportant calls and emails or killing time by surfing the Web, etc. Explains Goldstein: “The cultivation of mindful awareness allows you to non-judgmentally name what is happening right now, and turn your attention to your top priorities in the moment.”

8. Take a Break
Guess how many Americans took two weeks of vacation last year? A measly 14 percent. Huffington Post blogger Keri Henley lists some other surprising statistics in her post Why Americans Are the Worst Vacationers. Even though Europeans work 300 fewer hours than Americans (most get between four and six weeks of paid vacation), the level of productivity per worker is the same, or slightly higher than ours, and 137 other countries are ahead of us in guaranteeing at least some vacation time. Writes Henley, “Vacations are not just luxuries or pithy pastimes for the rich. Statistics [show] that other countries who take regular vacations are happier, and live longer than we do.”

Vacations protect us from job burnout. Often times we emerge from a break with a new perspective that can help us navigate through the maze of impending deadlines. Whenever I shut down for a few weeks, I always come back to the page with a clearer mission and renewed passion.

9. Ask Yourself: Is This Toxic?
There certainly are work situations you want to leave. I should have left my first “real job” sooner. After being cut down every day for nine months, my self-esteem had plunged to below sea level, and it took me years to build up my self-confidence. In her book, Toxic Work, Barbara Bailey Reinhold writes, “The syndrome of toxic work overtakes you when what’s happening to you at work causes protracted bouts of distress, culminating in emotional suffering or physical symptoms and [is] heightened by the perceived inability to stop the pain and move on to find or create a more rewarding situation.”

This is where a mentor or advisor of some sort is very helpful. He or she may be able to identify some possible solutions within your toxic work situation, or provide you with the motivation and support you need to leave.

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