Why Team Building Activities Is So Important London Ed.

It is more important now than ever before to check in on your team and talk freely about mental health.

In our latest Journal we are looking at why work stress is so high and how booking team building activities could be a perfect solution for you.

Around 7 in 10 Londoners feel overloaded with stress, research shows. Researchers at Censuswide surveyed 2,007 adults, with two thirds (66 per cent) reporting higher stress levels since lockdown restrictions eased.

Meanwhile, 42 percent of people are struggling to keep on top of their to-do lists as more firms scrap work from home mandates and call staff back to the office.

Working from home might have once been viewed as a utopia of exercise on our breaks, making healthy home cooked lunches and easily being able to make the school run. For many, however, the reality has looked very different.

Research shows that remote workers are putting in longer hours at their desk, with data suggesting that up to 80% of UK employees feel that working from home has negatively impacted their mental health with no socialising or team building activities to get them out.

“81% of under-35s feared loneliness from long-term home working, and studies have showed heightened levels of stress and anxiety among younger workers since the shift to remote work”

Playing sardines on the tube, trying to keep up with targets, barely seeing your friends or family, not having the once dreaded now missed team building activities and building bad habits when working from home…London life can be pretty stressful!

Here’s 3 Quick Tips for Shaking Off Your Personal Work Stress

1. Disconnect: Put up that proverbial stop sign in your head when you’re caught in the spiral of overthinking. Put your phone down, leave the room, find something kinetic, physical to do. Axe throwing anyone?

2. Straighten Up: You know how your emotions affect your body? What about how your body affects your emotions? Stretch, pull your shoulders back, hold your head up. You may also find our axe throwing instructors offering this technique hack on the lanes.

3. Focus your vision: When navigating our way through London we tend to go into a goal focused mode of trying to get where we need to be. Our mind can fill with inner talk, for example. “I am going to be late”. This increases our stress levels. This single-minded focus is known as foveal vision. If, on the other hand, we use peripheral vision, it is less stressful and it turns down our inner talk. Look straight ahead and focus your attention on a fixed position in front of you, just above eye level. Relax the muscles around your eyes, soften your gaze and become aware of your breathing.