So … I’m only diagnosed with ADHD but also live with the assumption of being autistic which means: I recognize overload-patterns with me and follow autism-advice which almost always improves my situation.

Now I have this peculiar problem: Most of the time I work from home (which is great!) but every few weeks I have to show up at the office. On those days I get up an hour earlier than usual and take the train to the city where the office is. The journey consists of 20min bus ride, then about 1h of train and then 2 subway-rides and 10min of walking. I got a routine for that, so it usually is no big mental load.

On those days the stress-meter of my Garmin-Smartwatch is constantly at peak values. On the next day I’m always tired and drained, no matter how much sleep I get. (below you should find a screenshot from the app)

I already have noisecancelling-headphones which I wear during the journey and whenever I’m working alone in the office. Working alone in the office while listening to music on the nc-headphones is similar to my work-situation at home, but the stress-level still stays at peak.

I also try to do breathing exercises and try not to cram too many meetings and other stressful-work-items into those office-days. And I try to have the train journey as comfy as possible, my employer pays me a 1st-class-ride and I usually use this time to relax, listen to some podcast / read / watch a film or do some work which I consider as interesting/funny, like reading about some new technology. None of this seems to improve the situation. The stress doesn’t go away.

As rising earlier usually ain’t that much of a deal for me (I sometimes have weirdly early remote-meetings) and as the people I meet in the office are the mostly the same as I’m having videocalls with all day when I’m at home, my suspicion is, that it is the fact that I’m not at home but at another place which causes this stress.

So do you folks have any additional advice what I can do on those office-days to be more relaxed / less stressed / less burned-out?

  • 73ʞk13English
    2·
    2 years ago

    My stress during travelling is caused by sensory overload due to a weakness in stimulus filtering. To cope with it I:

    • use earplugs or/and NC Headphones against accustic overload
    • use a hoody, a basecap or/and sunglasses against optical overload
    • try to read while travelling against informational overload caused by banners, screens and the like

    However at the end of a travelling day I am still tired beyond measure. So I decided to work (and earn) less, in order to able to recreate and rest more.

    BTW: I have the less expensive Polar Grit X, which has less features then the Garmin Fenix 6 in terms of stress measurements, but still does a good job in measuring my recovery during sleep and based on that predicting my energy level.

    • n_toOPEnglish
      1·
      2 years ago

      OK, this sounds reasonable. I will try to shut more of the journey out. Thx :)

      Regarding measuring: Do you also see patterns in your energy levels when you catch a cold. It shows already before the symptoms kick in. I wonder if those data is inspected thoroughly by medical research.

      • 73ʞk13English
        1·
        2 years ago

        Autonomic nervous system recovery values do decline, before I show any symptoms of illness. Makes sense IMO, because these values represent how good my body copes with stressors of various kind: mental ones, e.g. sensory overload, and physical ones, e.g. illness.