It’s Time to Make a Pivot for Your Mental Health

If you don’t make time for yourself, no one else will.

Jacob K Thomas
5 min readMay 24, 2022

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It’s been quite a month or so for me. The big return to the office has happened. I go in two days a week now. While I get to work at home three days one week, then two days another because I’m off every other Friday.

I decided when this began that I was going to make a bold move, get to work way earlier than I have in a long time, well, since when I worked in hospitality over ten years ago. My decision to do this was to simply get ahead. It was to get ahead of the chitchat, the time-sucking that was going to happen. The “watercooler” talk about my weekend and the office gossip.

The plan to do this was a move to work around distractions. Has it been helpful, it’s been quite interesting, to say the least? I’ve thought about the fact that I don’t know how long I’ll be able to keep a pace of getting up after 4 am going, just so I can get to work at 6 am, just so I don’t have to talk to so many people.

With this change, another reality hit me and made me rethink a lot. I started to think about how I work and how hard I work. This made me think about how we need to pivot or make changes in our lives. Mainly in our work lives. What’s your relationship with work?

After the last two years, we’ve gone through a lot. The entire working from home situation. Realizing we can work and live anywhere. Finding new jobs that better suit what we are looking for. Through all of this, we’ve made strides to make our lives better. Unfortunately, in a lot of cases, we’ve also ended up working harder. The thing is, with all that hard work, did we end up working smarter?

I thought I did, but these past few weeks, I realized, I wasn’t working smarter, I was stressed and really stressing myself out. I was going so far as wanting to blame other people for my stress. I was upset at the fact that I felt other people were causing my stress. Why was I feeling that way?

I wanted to blame other people because I didn’t realize I needed to pivot and start to care less and understand what’s important and what’s not. In our work history, we are constantly told that this or that is important. The thing is, what is important. For those of…

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Jacob K Thomas

Writer. Cook. Traveler. Photographer. Featured on the Food Network and newspapers around America. https://jacobkthomas.com/