At Mind on the Job, November is #RECOVEMBER, the time to talk about ways to improve wellbeing and reduce risk of burnout by improving our day-to-day recovery.
Researchers such as Professor Sabine Sonnentag have conducted and inspired a lot of scientific study of the factors influencing our day-to-day recovery from the demands imposed by work and life.
Check out this review paper if you’re interested!
Much of this research looks at psychological detachment from work, our ability to stop thinking about work so that we can properly enjoy our leisure time. The research recognises how our ability to detach from work psychologically can be impeded by many aspects of work, including the intensity of such work demands as time pressure and emotional labour.
Our top priority should always be to address these workplace psychosocial hazards directly, but there’s still value to be gained from identifying things we can do to get the most benefit from our time off work.
#RECOVEMBER is a month-long celebration of healthy recovery strategies. Below is the 2025 schedule:
How Do I Complete These Challenges?
Click on any activity listed below for a detailed description:
1. Reflect on your personal boundaries
One of the benefits of setting goals is that it helps you make decisions — pick the option that takes you closer to what you want. Boundaries are the other side of the same coin. If you understand yourself, if you’ve seen a pattern of situations that regularly make you feel stressed, frustrated, or overwhelmed, then you might be able to reduce these experiences by setting boundaries.
Boundaries are rules you apply to yourself, standards you use to ensure your needs are met, and decisions you make about how you’d prefer to live your life. Boundaries aren’t for controlling others.
For example, telling co-workers to stop contacting you after hours isn’t a boundary. A boundary is deciding that you’re not going to check work emails after 6pm. This is a boundary that, if you can sustain it long-term, can facilitate better recovery and wellbeing.
2. Reach out to reconnect with or thank someone
Meaningful connections are good for wellbeing. Connecting with friends and family can help you feel supported, especially if you’re struggling.
And if you’re already burned out, deliberate efforts to reconnect can be even more important! Burnout makes us inclined to withdraw as well as prone to emotional outbursts, so people who burn out can quickly become isolated.
Do you feel like you need a reason to reach out? Ask yourself who you’d like to thank. Few people are appreciated for all they do, so this can be a great place to start!
This approach also encourages you to reflect on feelings of gratitude, an act that has own benefits in terms of personal wellbeing and recovery. We’ll get to those soon…
3. Plan rest breaks into your day (and take them!)
Resting is not a sign of weakness!
Research shows that microbreaks (rests of 10 minutes or less) help you to maintain energy levels throughout the day. They can also help you to maintain focus and concentration — and in some cases they can help you to review your goals and make sure you are focused on the right things!
But many of us (including me!) have a tendency to push ourselves for hours at a time without a break. This may seem like Peak Productivity, but few of us can sustain it. Prolonged concentration can lead to earlier onset of fatigue, more difficulty concentrating, and higher risk of errors — including realisations that the task we’ve been so focused upon isn’t well aligned with our priorities.
If this sounds familiar, then try scheduling short breaks into your day — and take them! Often you’ll start the break feeling like you still have plenty of fuel in your tank, but you might be surprised how much more seems to be there after a 5-10 minute rest.
4. Spend 30+ min working on art, craft, or a hobby
For many of us, resting during our downtime involves passive entertainment activities such as scrolling through social media or watching TV. There’s nothing wrong with doing this occasionally, and it’s usually better than pushing ourselves to keep working. But it tends not to yield the best recovery outcomes.
But research on recovery shows that a better alternative is “mastery” activities. These are skill-based activities with the potential to provide feelings of pride and accomplishment (e.g., practicing a musical instrument, attempting a new recipe, learning a language, or working on a hobby). Spending off-job time on mastery activities is associated with better psychological outcomes that last into the next day.
Many people who have heavy workloads find that they don’t get much time to exercise creative pursuits. Arts, crafts, and other creative activities are mastery activities that can meet our needs for creative self-expression. If they’re activities we’re interested in, then spending time on them reinforces our self-worth and helps us meet our need for autonomy.
So today I challenge you to find at least 30 minutes to spend on mastery activities, such as arts, crafts, or a hobby.
5. Make a list of 3 things you are grateful for
What’s so great about gratitude?
Paying attention to positive things in life can be a very powerful mental practice, and a daily gratitude diary is one of the easiest ways to do this. Attending to the good things in your life helps to keep you from ruminating and worrying about the negatives. It can remind you of things that went well, small acts of kindness, and the easily-overlooked people and things we rely on.
Reflecting on your gratitude to others can strengthen personal and professional relationships. Reflecting on grateful feelings about things that you handled well can boost your confidence and self-worth. Reflecting on gratitude can encourage an optimistic outlook on life.
Of course, most of this assumes that you’re not just doing this once, you’re taking time to reflect on positive things every day. But all habits begin with doing something once!
6: Record the next steps for incomplete tasks
Do you ever get so involved in your work that you feel frustrated at the end of your shift because of incomplete tasks? If so, I have a great hack for you: just a little post-work planning can help you psychologically detach.
Research shows that we tend to remember incomplete tasks better than complete ones. It’s like we reserve space in our working memory for incomplete things to ensure we resolve them. And a consequence seems to be that if important tasks are incomplete at the end of a work period, we’re more likely to find ourselves thinking about them.
Fortunately, there’s a nifty solution. If your tasks are incomplete and your workday is over, take a couple of minutes to make a quick plan. On a notepad, write down each important task or goal that you didn’t complete (if the tasks seem unimportant, you’re not likely to ruminate about them after work, so leave them out of this activity). Then, for each important task, write down (a) where you’re going to complete it, (b) when you’re going to complete it, and (c) how you’re going to complete it (the main steps).
Your plan might look like this:
FINISH STAGE 3 OF MY MEETING PREPARATION
Where: On the Metro
When: Between 7:30 and 8am
How: Find answers to all of the questions I wrote on page 2.
That’s it! Just getting that plan out of your head and onto paper can reassure your brain that you’ll follow through and it doesn’t need to keep remining you to get this important thing done. Give it a try today!
Smit, B. W. (2016). Successfully leaving work at work: The self‐regulatory underpinnings of psychological detachment. Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology, 89(3), 493-514.
7. List 5-10 stressful work demands (SWDs)
Work demands are any aspects of work that require your effort or attention. Stressful work demands might involve tasks you perform (especially if they are difficult or unpleasant), procedures you follow (especially if they feel cumbersome or unnecessary), people you interact with (especially if they are rude or selfish), and even features of your work environment (especially if they are uncomfortable or distracting).
Just a few days ago I wanted you to focus on the positive, so why would I encourage you to focus on “stressors” (things that cause you stress)? Well, I certainly wouldn’t want you making a list like this every day! Nevertheless, #Recovember would not be complete without an honest look at your stressors. Here’s why:
Firstly, identifying your stressors is a starting point for taking action to resolve them. If we aren’t willing to look closely at our own stressors, why would we expect anyone else to do so?
Secondly, after making that list, we could do things with it. One of the easiest next steps is to group the stressors into categories, which can help us think about them differently. For example:
- Which stressors do you think are specific to you, and which ones are causing stress for everyone in your team?
- Which stressors are about the work itself, which stressors are more about your organisation’s systems and procedures, and which ones are more about people?
- Which stressors could you probably do something about if you really decided to fix them, and which ones are entirely outside of your control? [we’ll come back to this one on November 15]
Having made a list, we can also consider people we could talk to about it. Sharing details of our stressors can make us feel less isolated, it can lead to collective problem-solving, and it can prompt the development of better relationships. We’ll discuss this further on November 10.
Sometimes, reflecting on things that are bothering us can be useful for its own sake. It can be a form of journaling, which can help us to offload our worries or frustrations (similar to the approach covered on Day 6) as well as to process our feelings instead of pushing them down. Regular journaling can allow us to see patterns in our emotional responses (e.g., the sorts of things that regularly upset or frustrate us) and behavioural responses (e.g., the sorts of situation that makes us avoid problems instead of trying to fix them), which can lead to better self-awareness and self-regulation.
For today, it’s ok to just make that list.
Guo, L. (2023). The delayed, durable effect of expressive writing on depression, anxiety and stress: A meta‐analytic review of studies with long‐term follow‐ups. British Journal of Clinical Psychology, 62(1), 272-297.
Searle, B. J. (2008). Does Personal Initiative Training Work as a Stress Management Intervention? Journal of Occupational Health Psychology, 13(3), 259-270.
8. Get some exercise
This is nice and simple. Exercise appears to help us deal with stress. It makes our bodies and minds a little more resilient, and also improves our short-term responses to work stressors. So go get some exercise today!
(Except of course that nothing is that simple — many people have medical conditions that limit their capacity for exercise or mean that exercise carries a high risk of medical complications. And for everyone else, it’s worth remembering that no amount of exercise will shake off the effects of a truly toxic work environment.)
9. Share a personal boundary
Last Saturday we reflected on our personal boundaries. A personal boundary is a rule you apply to yourself, standards you use to ensure your needs are met, and decisions you make about how you’d prefer to live your life. I gave the example of deciding that you’re not going to check work emails after 6pm, a boundary with potential to facilitate better day-to-day recovery and wellbeing.
Some boundaries are just for ourselves. If you find that listening to radio news updates while driving makes your commute a lot more stressful, then unless you carpool, the decision to switch off news while driving is nobody else’s business.
Other boundaries intersect with our personal or work relationships. In such cases, communicating our boundaries to others may help avoid misunderstandings. Consider the example of deciding that you’re not going to check work emails after 6pm. If there’s no requirement that we check work emails after 6pm, there’s nothing wrong with having this boundary. But if we let our co-workers know that we have this boundary, they’re less likely to be surprised or annoyed when we don’t respond to an urgent message. To be clear, in this example we’re still not telling them to never contact us after hours, we’re just making them aware of the boundaries we apply to ourselves.
But this isn’t the only reason for sharing boundaries. Having had lots of stress management work in organisations, I can tell you that most people seem to enjoy sharing and listening to personal stress management strategies. Since many people never even consider setting boundaries, other people might really benefit if you share a boundary that you find helpful. And by listening to others, you might identify a new boundary you’d like to set.
10. Tell someone about 3 things you find stressful
On Day 7 we discussed making a list of stressful work demands. Today, we’ll share some items from that list with other people.
One of the challenges with identifying psychosocial work hazards is that many people feel compelled to keep silent about them. Perhaps they worry they will be punished for complaining. Perhaps they voiced concerns when changes were implemented, and now they assume (since the changes went ahead anyway) that no-one cares about the problems. Perhaps they assume there’s no alternative.
Sometimes, these concerns are valid. But not always!
And even when there is some truth to these concerns, it’s often still worthwhile to share them with others. Talking about stressful work demands is draining if it happens every day, but a monthly conversation with co-workers about aspects of work that are obstructing you from your goals or making you stressed can be very healthy. It can be validating when other people say they feel the same way. It can be productive to collaborate on trying to identify solutions. And sometimes, peer support can help you to recognise a problem is serious and needs to be reported. Your peers might even be willing to help with the process!
11. Take 5 min to rest and reset after difficult tasks
This shouldn’t need a lot of explaining. The more difficult a task is for us (even — or perhaps I should say especially — if the difficulty is just pushing ourselves to start it), the more it drains us of energy. We need that energy to regulate ourselves — to perform other tasks, to keep track of what else we’re doing, and even to manage our mood and wellbeing. So when we finish a difficult task, it’s quite reasonable to take a proper rest and allow ourselves to recover some of that spent energy.
12. Take 30+ min to learn about a topic of interest
13. List 3 people who have shown you kindness
14. Record next steps for incomplete goals
15. Identify SWDs that could maybe be changed
16. Try a different kind of exercise
17. Assess your use of personal boundaries
18. Contact someone to ask for help (or offer help)
19. Practice slow, deep breathing for 5 min (3x)
20. Take 30+ min improving your personal strengths
21. Talk for 5+ min about someone who helped you
22. Schedule time to do a thing you keep avoiding
23. Identify 5 actions that might help with SWDs
24. Try exercising during a break from work
25. Pick a goal you’d like to achieve in December
26. Assess time / other resources the goal requires
27. Scan, tighten, then relax your muscles (3x)
28. Spend 30 min on a hobby or on arts/crafts
29. List 3 things from this month that went well
30. Schedule times to work on your goal for December
How Do I Participate in #RECOVEMBER?
It’s easy to participate in #RECOVEMBER! Just post the image of the #RECOVEMBER challenge schedule and share a description of what you’ve done (or what you’re planning to do) to enhance your recovery. For examples, check out my social media posts throughout November.