Mindfulness For the Wandering Mind

CHAPTER ONECovid, Work from Home, and Employee Well‐Being

Overview

Ever since Covid shut the world down in 2020, conversations surrounding mental health have come to the forefront like never before. For too long, people were afraid to talk about and address their mental and emotional health needs. There has been and continues to be a stigma around mental health that people feared would isolate them in the workplace and possibly make them look weak, inefficient, and unproductive. After all, the workplace isn't a space one wants to be vulnerable in and so workers would simply brush their mental health needs under the rug and just ignore them.

Social isolation forced everyone to talk about this topic because the matter could no longer be ignored. It was almost as if Covid revealed to society that many of us are actually struggling with our mental health even though we didn't think we were. We were forced to face this harsh reality. Covid either brought out our mental health struggles, helped to create them due to the uncertainty it put the world in, or possibly both.

Society worldwide got completely blindsided by the pandemic. This was the first time in human history that the entire human population shared a similar struggle. Perhaps for the first time, we could truly relate to each other. Generally, whenever we watch the news and learn about some part of the world experiencing ...