ABUNDANCE
W E L L AT W O R K ...
And Working on Wellness // By Maria Kostelac
H
ey you! Yes… YOU! Get your nose up off the grindstone, grab a cuppa-J and pull up a couch. We need to talk about how work is working out for you. If COVID-19’s contagion hasn’t vapourised your industry/career/ job, it’s likely that ‘working from home’ rudely switched to ‘living from work’ overnight. And if this is ‘the new abnormal’, how do we operate beyond knee-jerk habits sprung from crisis control toward engaging practices that build clarity and calm amid the incoming fog waves of pandemic pandemonium?
74 \\ W W W. W E L L N E S S W A R E H O U S E . C O M
First, let’s breathe. Take a moment to remember the trends preceding corona’s theft of the spotlight on ‘pending global catastrophe’. Consider that the world’s urban economies have steadily drifted from being multiple production economies of the industrial era to being a globalised identity economy in the age of mass digitisation and personalisation. What that means is that ‘work’, as we urbanites know it, has shifted from being what we do to who we are. This would have been tricky enough to negotiate in combination with mankind’s inherent egoism, but
the exponential effect of the internet raises the stakes even more. In the production economy (circa 1950 - 1990), the signature experience associated with work was boredom. Today, it’s anxiety. Studies show that the effects of this prolonged sense of urgency on our nervous systems constrict the higher functioning processes of the brain, like motivation, decision making, planning, social behaviour, language and speech production. My point? We were being called to these crossroads of reconsidering the development of corporate
