Transitioning effectively – arriving home

The other aspects of transition or what to do when you get home and things to do when you are at home. On arriving home particularly if you’re living with other people, partner or family. Meaningful gestures of connection as soon as possible are significant. Changing clothes may seem obvious, but changing out of work clothes or uniform into non-work clothes or uniform almost gives us permission to change that sense of persona. However, if we arrive home and we are still feeling maybe overwhelmed or stressed from the day, then that response is going to be on and we could become less tolerant of stresses and triggers when we are at home.

On this occasion, we would suggest that there is a meaningful activity that you can redirect this sort of charged emotion into. Activities that will engage your thinking and consume your thoughts in the way that the work-related issues do. An activity that’s got a meaningful length of time of around 20 minutes or more, and an activity that you find enjoyable. So whilst doing this, you’re relabeling the feelings of stress, to ones of more enjoyment and relaxation. An emergency doctor that we work with is a keen cyclist. On days when he comes home like this then he will go into his garage and he’ll service one of his bikes, he needs to concentrate on it.

He enjoys it, he finds it rewarding, and it lasts a suitable period of time so that when it’s finished, he feels far better able to cope with the rest of the day or the evening ahead. When at home, we need to identify some of these triggers that we may have less tolerance to. So we need to take an audit over time and find what they are. Is it personal administration? Is it interactions with other people? Or is it just our energy levels? And then we come up with strategies to deal with those things.