In this week’s episode, Alix talks with an expert facilitator and mindfulness teacher Faith Bosworth about the causes and symptoms of stress in remote life and how to reclaim your calm.

Together, Alix and Faith discuss strategies for setting remote teams up for success rather than stress, and they unpack ways of decoupling stress from productivity for you and your team. In remote work as in life, your state of mind determines your experience, so listen in for wisdom and guidance on reframing your relationship with stress, productivity, and joy in remote work.

For more from Faith, you can find her website here, and read her article, What the stress of remote work tells us about our mind and how we can care for it.

1. Stress is a symptom

Stress isn’t a necessary part of work, either in person or in remote life. In fact, stress is a symptom of something gone awry. It may mean that you or your team has begun to conflate being busy with being impactful, rushing from one meeting or task to the next in such a flurry that you’ve lost sight of why you’re doing the work to begin with.

One possible solution? Ask yourself if you’ve begun to value stress as a sign you are getting things done and spend more time focusing on actual impact rather than busy-ness.

2. Don’t confuse interpretation with information

Think about your last in-person meeting. You could read body language, you could debrief with colleagues in the hallway afterwards. In other words, there was depth and context to help you interpret what was said in the conversation. But we don’t have that context in remote settings. After a meeting we are left alone in front of our computer. Or worse, bouncing to the next call.

In the absence of context, our brains scramble to find meaning, often confusing interpretation (read, guessing) with information. We make assumptions about how colleagues feel or about what our manager wants, jumping to stressful conclusions. That was a disaster! She thinks I'm no good at my job! I'm no good at my job!

One way to get out of the stress spiral? Check if your fight-or-flight panic is being fuelled by fact or assumption. You could also schedule time with a colleague to debrief so you can check your assumptions.

3. Team norms combat stress

Team agreements about how to work together can minimise stress. They can create clarity about modes of working, decision making, and agency. They can also empower team members to propose solutions to stressful situations rather than just feeling stuck and, well, stressed.

Does your team have a set of agreements about how you want to work together? If not, try starting a conversation about how you could approach making them. If you do have team agreements, have you looked at them recently or are they lost in a folder somewhere? As we approach the halfway point of the year, it’s a great moment to revisit this 'metawork'.