Editor’s note: Today’s guest post is by Sylvia Hunter and Anna Jester, members of the Mental Health Awareness and Action CoIN. Sylvia is also Editorial Growth Coordinator at Canadian Science Publishing. Anna is also in Partner Success at Wiley in the Partner Solutions division.

Recently, Anna and Sylvia sat down to chat (in a low-stress virtual setting) about topics including cultural practices regarding mental health awareness, the importance of boundaries, and routines Sylvia employs to embrace balance. We hope you find these highlights from that conversation thought-provoking.

Anna Jester

Thank you for offering to share your experiences and input regarding maintaining mental health balance. You started your first full-time job in scholarly publishing almost 30 years ago. In that span, you’ve observed changes in how people care for themselves and support their own well-being. What have you found helps you nourish your mental health, including as a remote worker?

Sylvia Hunter

I’ve had a variety of roles at various organizations over my career, and you won’t be surprised to hear that the work cultures are diverse. In general, I think scholarly publishing professionals have started talking more about mental health, and the Mental Health Awareness series on the Scholarly Kitchen has been a game-changer in making sure our industry feels more comfortable having these conversations. We’re all living through this together, so we need to be able to talk about it!

I think people are much more willing to discuss mental health issues than they used to be, although obviously, there’s a wide range there. Some people are concerned about a rise in “therapy speak” or the idea that we are “therapizing” normal human interactions. We can’t solve every mental health problem, but we can try to make it safe to ask for and receive help from others when we need it. I don’t love the word “normal,” but thinking about whether you are within a normal range of feelings can be helpful. For example, you can’t move through life never feeling sad, but you can recognize when it’s outside the normal range because you’re clinically depressed, and try to do something about that. Or we can think about how, in almost every work situation, there will be people who feel anxious, and how being able to talk about those feelings honestly and be appreciated for showing up with those feelings, despite them, instead of requiring everyone to give 100% of themselves all day, every day, that would be an aspirational goal.

We can’t solve every mental health problem, but we can try to make it safe to ask for and receive help from others when we need it.

“Self-care” is not a term I love, because it tends to involve things and experiences people purchase and do for themselves. It individualizes what is partly a societal issue. The wellness industry and some of its more egregious manifestations also give me pause. People need time and resources to engage in that self-care! Otherwise, it’s just another thing on your endless to-do list.

There is still a long way to go with unplugging from work when you’re not at work. This isn’t exclusive to not-for-profits, obviously, but those of us working in not-for-profit land are mission-driven and tend to take roles where we believe in the larger purpose driving what we’re doing, the content we’re publishing. That can be twisted into expectations that you should want to work extra hours (also known as unpaid overtime). Because it’s the mission, and you believe in the mission! So you might find yourself being asked, or asking yourself, “Shouldn’t you want to volunteer for extra stuff?”

I find that keeping a boundary between work and not-work is simultaneously important and difficult, partly because we do a lot of thinking in our work, and it’s difficult to turn that off. During my work week, I like having some tasks I can accomplish while not thinking about them too much, like data entry, Excel math, and organizing. I wouldn’t want to do that all day, every day, but I do enjoy those moments because it allows me to do something useful while also thinking about something completely unrelated, giving my brain a little rest when it needs one.

I work from home for a fully remote organization, which also has implications for work-life balance; routine and ritual become key. So for me, every morning I take the dog for a walk and then feed him breakfast. Then I get my own breakfast and make a cup of coffee. I only drink one cup of coffee per day, but it’s an incredibly important cup of coffee! I have a few big, hefty mugs, perfect for drinking my coffee on the couch with the dog. Then I head to my office, which was also my daughter’s bedroom when she lived here (and when she visits!), since we live in a two-bedroom apartment.

Then at the end of the day, my routine is to close my computer, leave my office, and do something domestic — washing dishes, folding some laundry, thinking about dinner, or reading a book on the couch with the dog. Something distinctly not work. The dog gets another walk after dinner, so again I’m getting out of the house. And I don’t always manage this, but as often as possible, I take an actual lunch break. Ideally, I leave my office both to make my lunch and to eat it.

These days, I have the privilege of an office door to close. Back when my daughter was in high school, and I worked at the kitchen table, my ritual was to store my office stuff in a tote bin that I packed up at the end of the day and put away. When you can’t make a spatial differentiation between work and home, you can at least make a temporal differentiation: tuck the work away, and — this is important — don’t go back to work after dinner.

Now, I also do freelance work, so time off the job isn’t necessarily always leisure time. I don’t have more than one desk, but I do have separate laptops. If I’m doing freelance work on the personal laptop, I’m not doing work-work on the work laptop! And on Friday afternoons, I put away the work laptop and plug in the personal laptop. I frequently Zoom-host Shabbat (Saturday morning) services for people who can’t attend in person, and I need my home laptop for that. I’m still staring at a screen, but it’s a different screen, and I’m still at the same desk, but once the work computer is put away, I am not at work.

Anna

I always shut my computer down at the end of the day, specifically for that reason. I also flip up my keyboard tray and yell, “Honey, I’m home!” I find that ritual very helpful to prepare me for the next portion of my day.

Can you share with us how the collaborative act of singing in a choir came to fill a vital role in your life? Is it something you began when you were a child?

Sylvia

My parents were both amateur musicians, and my mother sang in choirs when she was pregnant with me and during my childhood. I have sung for fun my entire life, but I joined my first choir when I was nine, and it was like … yes, this is my thing. I’ve been singing in at least one choir at all times ever since.

Choir is my primary mental health activity. Rehearsals are three hours a week for my current choir (the Orpheus Choir of Toronto), which is time when I’m intentionally away from everything and fully engaged in doing something collaboratively with other people. We’re a diverse group, but we’re all nerdy in the sense that we sing in a pretty demanding ensemble on purpose. I think it really hones our teamwork skills! We’re very focused on making the music we’re preparing for our next concert sound as good as it possibly can. I get joy from singing in any context, but especially when it’s challenging, when we work hard, we all get it right, and it sounds incredible. It’s exhilarating to be part of that experience! I’m not sporty, but this might be how it feels to be on a winning team, when you’ve all done your individual jobs so well that together, you’ve achieved something none of you could have achieved by yourself.

Music is important for me in a lot of ways — emotional, sensory, intellectual, and social. I’ve learned to play several instruments, but I’ve never loved any of them the way I love singing, and specifically choral singing. Solo singing is fine, but there’s something that singing with people unlocks for me that I’ve never been able to access in any other way. There has been research indicating that people who sing in choirs have better mental health on various measures. These days, it’s unfortunately also a high-risk situation for respiratory infections, including COVID: singers are in close proximity to each other in an enclosed space, inhaling deeply and exhaling forcefully. For that reason, I’m still wearing an N95 mask to rehearsals and concerts. People may look at me funny, but I haven’t had a cold, flu, or COVID since 2021, and I am really enjoying that!

I also enjoy the music itself, the sensory experience of it, and the challenges of learning to pronounce lyrics in unfamiliar languages. When individual parts sound weird and disconnected, but we put them all together, and they sound magical and mysterious, that’s the feeling I’m chasing.

That is also one of the things I most enjoy about religious services. My synagogue does a lot of congregational singing and doesn’t have a choir, so I get to sing the whole time. And because our service leaders are a mix of professionals and volunteers, I also get to lead part of the service occasionally. It’s very participatory, and it gets intellectual, talking about the meanings of things, but it’s also emotional—meditative, joyful, with room for grief too. I think feeling like part of a community is key to mental health. People find community in many different ways and places, and this is one of mine.

Groups like the Mental Health CoIN, SSP committees, the Annual Meeting, those opportunities to connect with other people and do something cool together, those are also really important to a lot of us and the thing that keeps us coming back to SSP.

Anna 

I agree. Having non-work responsibilities that matter and require us to step away from the screen(s) is incalculable.

Sylvia 

Yes, and I think it’s especially important for people to notice that certain kinds of responsibilities are well recognized at work, but other kinds are not. For example, most workplaces—though there are exceptions—do recognize that if you have small children, that’s a responsibility that requires flexibility. But what if you have aging parents or other family responsibilities, a sick pet, friends who need you, or other caregiving responsibilities? It’s very important for both employers and employees to recognize those as equally valid demands on your time and energy! Differentiating between parents and non-parents creates artificial and unhelpful divisions between employees, and hamstrings employees’ ability to be fully participating members of society.

Here in Canada, companies don’t offer a single paid time off bucket, but have vacation, sick, and personal allotments. At Canadian Science Publishing, where I work now, they combine the personal and sick categories into something called “Wellness Leave.” It’s pretty generous, and we’re explicitly told we can use it for our own illness, a family member’s illness, a mental health day, or even taking your pet to the vet. It can also be used for religious holidays that aren’t statutory holidays, which is important for me! Actively encouraging staff to take all our time off and unplug while not at work, which CSP also does, is incredibly beneficial.

The same is true for volunteering. Not everybody is going to do all the same things, but everybody should have the opportunity to do things important to them, maintain relationships, and feel they are doing good in the world. The stuff that feeds your soul and also helps you show up to work feeling fulfilled and refreshed.

Anna

Can you discuss why interacting with others matters greatly to you?

Sylvia 

I have some pretty strong homebody tendencies, but even we introverted folks need other people! My whole family is long-distance (except for those who live in this house). I have a weekly phone call with my mother, who lives 3000km away, so we can only visit about once a year. That’s not the only way we stay in touch, but the rhythm, the ritual, as much as anything else, is important to both of us. I also have a weekly phone call with my best friend from elementary school, who lives even farther away. We have only seen each other in person twice in the last 15 years, but we text and WhatsApp, and our regular phone call is basically sacrosanct. If one of us can’t make it, we find an alternative time. Other friends I check in with very regularly are my “pocket friends,” because they live in my pocket on my phone. Of course, I see other friends and acquaintances in person, but many of my closest friends and family are people that I can only communicate with digitally, because we are not made of money. The thing is to maintain those connections that nourish you and remind you who you are and who you want to be, in whatever ways work for you.

There’s a lot of talk right now about how much connecting in person matters, and yes, that’s important when it’s an option. It isn’t always, though! And people who, for whatever reason cannot connect in person, still need connection. This is important to keep in mind for remote and distributed teams at work: while not everyone will find these virtual and long-distance experiences as fulfilling as in-person get-togethers, maintaining the connections still counts.

Anna 

Thank you for sharing. This has been an uplifting conversation for me.

Sylvia 

I always have a great time talking with you, Anna!

P.S. Because this is a Mental Health Monday post, I’m adding a little postscript here to clarify that, in addition to all the things we talked about, my mental health is also managed via counselling/therapy and medication. Those are less fun to talk about than choir rehearsals and poodles, but for those of us who need them, they’re very important!