All of a sudden many people find themselves in an unaccustomed and disconcerting workspace. Home!

Your new workspace can be filled with very busy “colleagues” and distractions. On the other side you may be totally isolated and alone, which can be equally distracting. Working from home is certainly not everyone’s cup of tea.

The involuntary quarantine causes many mental health issues to surface, because we are social beings. This is even true of the self-proclaimed introverts, because people need social interactions. We don’t realize the value of the interaction and exchanges between colleagues during the course of a normal working day.

The issues that can come to the foreground from being forced to work from home in the midst of a world-wide pandemic are:

• The change in your mind-set from “living” to being in survival mode. This shift in mind-set is the clearest in people binge shopping for so-called essential goods, leaving shop shelves empty. The empty shop shelves aggravates the feelings of anxiety and despair. People who cannot afford to stock pile are even more anxious, because their situation turns out to be more hopeless.
• Increase anxiety takes a toll for the worse on your health. Stress and continued anxiety erode your wellbeing and leave your general immune response wanting.
• Working from home can decrease your job and financial security. In the process where decentralization wins ground, people’s fear for becoming redundant increases.
• The increased sense of insecurity leads to feelings of hopelessness and helplessness.
• In reality it becomes more difficult to distract oneself from existing mental health issues and this promotes social withdrawal and loneliness.
• On top of all these reactions there are the fear for the lives of loved ones. We do not know how safe, our children, elderly parents and loved ones working in emergency and medical services are.
• Many people also do not know how loved ones are doing when they work somewhere outside the country.

Read more: Working from home? What a scary thought!