Optimism is really a Thing these days, and there are websites and programmes devoted to promoting it. This is because adopting an optimistic attitude, and behaving in certain ways, really does improve your sense of well-being. 

One of the best sites I know of is the Australian initiative Project Optimism. They suggest that optimism is 'a belief that things will work out in the end, and if they haven’t, it is not the end.' They identify fourteen habits of optimists that we can learn to adopt, in a free course that takes less than an hour.

Here are three of them,

• Smile
• Laugh
• Ask yourself, what makes you optimistic?

This third one, 'what makes you optimistic?', is really interesting. It seems that even asking yourself this question raises your level of optimism and thus your well-being! 

Couldn't we all do with that little bit more optimism? What do you think? 

I am hoping you are not suffering from O for Overwork, but the way things are these days, you probably are! The pandemic probably made us think about this more clearly. Fundamentally Overwork is bad for us when we do it and also for the people who receive the results of it. We get stressed when we overdo things and then we go into survival mode, where we don't think so clearly, and we easily make mistakes. And depending on the work we do, these mistakes can have enormous consequences - I am sure you can imagine!

In emergency situations - as we have seen in the pandemic and in the recent fires and floods around the world, it's unavoidable to experience the intense stress in the moment (our nervous systems are actually set up for exactly this kind of sudden emergency). But it's absolutely necessary to prioritise recovery afterwards, as soon as you can. It's not wimpish to take time out where you need to - it's an essential part of well-being. 

We can also see this tendency in what's become known as Presenteeism (as opposed to Absenteeism), where people show up for work when really they are too ill or too exhausted, because they fear they will be seen as not pulling their weight, and then lose out on promotion or even the job itself. 

What about you? Are you overworking right now? If so, what's one thing that you could do, or not do, to improve that?