Home Working: A Psychological Perspective 🧠

This talk will be online only via Zoom. Anyone who sets themselves to "attending" will get details of how to dial in closer to the time. Any questions please get in touch.

About the Talk

We started this strange period with a can-do, keep calm and carry on, spirit. Which is admirable. But as the weeks of lockdown turn into months and the path forward is uncertain it is helpful to pause and reflect.

• What’s the psychological weight that I am carrying? The stresses, worries and responsibilities.
• What am I not noticing, pushed into the background, ignored?
• How am I coping with all of this? Are they the best ways?
• Am I giving myself enough slack or pressuring myself too hard to carry on as normal in an abnormal world?

This Techfast will be an opportunity to reflect on all these questions. Using psychotherapeutic concepts from Cognitive Behavioural Therapy and Transactional Analysis, we’ll review this strange Covid-19 landscape and our attempts to keep productive, while in the background we try and protect ourselves and our loved ones from a mortal danger.

At the end of it, we’ll hopefully have a refreshed sense of what’s happening to us. What we are coping with and how we coping with it. Plus have a sense of the psychological pitfalls and unhelpful ways of being that are really easy to get into, and how we might get out of them.

About the Speaker

Robert van Tol is both a digital consultant for the Sparck strategic design team of BJSS and an experienced psychotherapist. As a therapist he has a particular interest in relationship problems: couples counselling, anger issues, the problems of non-monogamous relationships, and the self-defeating behaviours in relationships. This lets him bring an unusual perspective to how we, as tech folk, do our very best to keep going during this pandemic. We love our work, but need to keep a healthy relationship with it, the more so in this difficult time.