October 2018

EMPLOYEE ADVISORY SERVICE NEWSLETTER

Welcome to the NJ Civil Service Commission’s Employee Advisory Newsletter! EAS is committed to improving the quality of life for all New Jersey Civil Service employees by encouraging a good work-life balance. The EAS Employee Newsletter contains useful articles and information for managing various well-being and work-life issues in order to create a healthier, happier, and more productive workplace.

Managing the Stress of Time and October is Domestic Violence Competing Priorities Awareness Month This training is designed to help individuals Often, abuse starts as emotional abuse and then becomes physical recognize how personal organization and later. It is important to get help early. If you are in immediate danger, use of time contribute to stress levels. The you can call 911. presentation will offer a practical approach to prioritizing efforts and maintaining Below are some of the services EAS offers to assist individuals that are focus on the most important activities in victims of domestic and intimate partner violence: our lives to reduce stress and increase our effectiveness. • In-the-moment telephonic support When: Wed. October 24th, 10:00-11:00 AM • Individual supportive services Register: • Referrals to community resources, local shelters, and support https://attendee.gotowebinar.com/register/7835535868033183747 groups New Jersey Domestic Violence Hotline: Phone: 866-327-9133 1 (800) 572-SAFE (7233) 24 hours a day / 7 days a week Web: www.state.nj.us/csc National Domestic Violence Website: Email: [email protected] https://www.thehotline.org/ October 11th is National Depression Screening Day, an annual event that takes place during Mental Illness Awareness Week. Take an anonymous screening at http://helpyourselfhelpothers.org/. Depression Basics

Do you feel sad, empty, and hopeless most of the day, nearly every day? Have you lost interest or pleasure in your hobbies or being with friends and family? Are you having trouble sleeping, eating, and functioning? If you have felt this way for at least 2 weeks, you may have depression, a serious but treatable mood disorder.

What is depression? Everyone feels sad or low sometimes, but these feelings usually pass with a little time. Depression—also called clinical depression or a depressive disorder—is a mood disorder that causes distressing symptoms that affect how you feel, think, and handle daily activities, such as sleeping, eating, or working. To be diagnosed with depression, symptoms must be present most of the day, nearly every day for at least 2 weeks.

What are the different types of depression? Two of the most common forms of depression are • Major depression—having symptoms of depression most of the day, nearly every day for at least 2 weeks that interfere with your ability to work, sleep, study, eat, and enjoy life. An episode can occur only once in a person’s lifetime, but more often, a person has several episodes.

• Persistent depressive disorder (dysthymia)—having symptoms of depression that last for at least 2 years. A person diagnosed with this form of depression may have episodes of major depression along with periods of less severe symptoms.

Some forms of depression are slightly different, or they may develop under unique circumstances, such as

• Perinatal Depression: Women with perinatal depression experience full-blown major depression during pregnancy or after delivery (postpartum depression).

• Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD): SAD is a type of depression that comes and goes with the seasons, typically starting in the late fall and early winter and going away during the spring and summer.

• Psychotic Depression: This type of depression occurs when a person has severe depression plus some form of psychosis, such as having disturbing false fixed beliefs (delusions) or hearing or seeing upsetting things that others cannot hear or see (hallucinations). Other examples of depressive disorders include disruptive mood dysregulation disorder (diagnosed in children and adolescents) and premenstrual dysphoric disorder. Depression can also be one phase of bipolar disorder (formerly called manic-depression). But a person with bipolar disorder also experiences extreme high—euphoric or irritable—moods called mania or a less severe form called hypomania.

2 What causes depression? Scientists at NIMH and across the country are studying the causes of depression. Research suggests thata combination of genetic, biological, environmental, and psychological factors play a role in depression.

Depression can occur along with other serious illnesses, such as diabetes, cancer, heart disease, and Parkinson’s disease. Depression can make these conditions worse and vice versa. Sometimes medications taken for these illnesses may cause side effects that contribute to depression symptoms.

What are the signs and symptoms of depression? Sadness is only one small part of depression and some people with depression may not feel sadness at all. Different people have different symptoms. Some symptoms of depression include:

• Persistent sad, anxious, or “empty” mood • Feelings of hopelessness or pessimism • Feelings of guilt, worthlessness, or helplessness • Loss of interest or pleasure in hobbies or activities • Decreased energy, fatigue, or being “slowed down” • Difficulty concentrating, remembering, or making decisions • Difficulty sleeping, early-morning awakening, or oversleeping • Appetite and/or weight changes • Thoughts of death or suicide or suicide attempts • Restlessness or irritability • Aches or pains, headaches, cramps, or digestive problems without a clear physical cause and/or that do not ease even with treatment

Does depression look the same in everyone? No. Depression affects different people in different ways. For example:

• Women have depression more often than men. Biological, life cycle, and hormonal factors that are unique to women may be linked to their higher depression rate. Women with depression typically have symptoms of sadness, worthlessness, and guilt.

• Men with depression are more likely to be very tired, irritable, and sometimes angry. They may lose interest in work or activities they once enjoyed, have sleep problems, and behave recklessly, including the misuse of drugs or alcohol. Many men do not recognize their depression and fail to seek help.

• Older adults with depression may have less obvious symptoms, or they may be less likely to admit to feelings of sadness or grief. They are also more likely to have medical conditions, such as heart disease, which may cause or contribute to depression.

• Younger children with depression may pretend to be sick, refuse to go to school, cling to a parent, or worry that a parent may die.

• Older children and teens with depression may get into trouble at school, sulk, and be irritable. Teens with depression may have symptoms of other disorders, such as anxiety, eating disorders, or substance abuse.

3 How is depression treated? The first step in getting the right treatment is to visit a health care provider or mental health professional, such as a psychiatrist or psychologist. Your health care provider can do an exam, interview, and lab tests to rule out other health conditions that may have the same symptoms as depression. Once diagnosed, depression can be treated with medications, psychotherapy, or a combination of the two. If these treatments do not reduce symptoms, brain stimulation therapy may be another treatment option to explore.

Medications Medications called antidepressants can work well to treat depression. They can take 2 to 4 weeks to work. Antidepressants can have side effects, but many side effects may lessen over time. Talk to your health care provider about any side effects that you have. Do not stop taking your antidepressant without first talking to your health care provider.

Please note: Although antidepressants can be effective for many people, they may present serious risks to some, especially children, teens, and young adults. Antidepressants may cause some people, especially those who become agitated when they first start taking the medication and before it begins to work, to have suicidal thoughts or make suicide attempts. Anyone taking antidepressants should be monitored closely, especially when they first start taking them. For most people, though, the risks of untreated depression far outweigh those of antidepressant medications when they are used under a doctor’s careful supervision.

Information about medications changes frequently. Visit the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) website (https://www.fda.gov/Safety/MedWatch/) for the latest warnings, patient medication guides, or newly approved medications.

Psychotherapy Psychotherapy helps by teaching new ways of thinking and behaving, and changing habits that may be contributing to depression. Therapy can help you understand and work through difficult relationships or situations that may be causing your depression or making it worse.

Brain Stimulation Therapies Electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) and other brain stimulation therapies may be an option for people with severe depression who do not respond to antidepressant medications. ECT is the best studied brain stimulation therapy and has the longest history of use. Other stimulation therapies discussed here are newer, and in some cases still experimental methods.

4 How can I help myself if I am depressed? As you continue treatment, you may start to feel better gradually. Remember that if you are takingan antidepressant, it may take 2 to 4 weeks to start working. Try to do things that you used to enjoy. Go easy on yourself. Other things which may help include

• Trying to be active and exercise • Breaking up large tasks into small ones, set priorities, and do what you can as you can • Spending time with other people and confide in a trusted friend or relative • Postponing important life decisions until you feel better. Discuss decisions with others who know you well. • Avoiding self-medication with alcohol or with drugs not prescribed for you

How can I help a loved one who is depressed? If you know someone who has depression, first help him or her see a health care provider or mental health professional. You can also:

• Offer support, understanding, patience, and encouragement. • Never ignore comments about suicide, and report them to your loved one’s health care provider or therapist. • Invite him or her out for walks, outings, and other activities. • Help him or her adhere to the treatment plan, such as setting reminders to take prescribed medications. • Help him or her by ensuring that he or she has transportation to therapy appointments. • Remind him or her that, with time and treatment, the depression will lift.

Where can I go for help? Your employee assistance program (EAP) can help with in-the-moment emotional support and referrals to local mental health professionals. You can also check online for mental health professionals; contact your community health center, local mental health association, or insurance plan to find a mental health professional. Hospital doctors can help in an emergency.

Source: U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH), National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH). (Revised 2016). Depression basics (NIH Publication No. TR 16-3561). Retrieved January 19, 2018, from https://www.nimh.nih.gov/index.shtml

5 Prioritizing Your Time

Time is a unique resource of which everyone is given an equal amount—a gift of 24 hours each day. How you invest that gift is a major factor in how you feel about your life.

Think of time as one of the tools that you have available to reach your goals. As with many tools, if you want to use time effectively, it may require some training (or retraining), determination and practice.

Even though the term time management is used a great deal, there really is no such thing as time management. Using time effectively is actually a matter of your own personal management.

Time goes by at the same rate no matter what you do. You can’t speed it up or slow it down. Unlike the other resources that you manage, there is no way to control time. The best you can do is take charge of yourself in the framework of time and invest yourself in those things that matter most in your life.

Defining Priorities List five aspects of your life that are meaningful to you. These are your basic priorities.

1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

Efficiency or Effectiveness Do not confuse efficiency with effectiveness when it comes to developing your time use skills. Efficiency relates to doing a job right in as little time and with as little effort as possible. Effectiveness, on the other hand, relates to doing the correct job right. Being effective with your time means you are investing your time in the most important tasks. Efficiency implies that you are able to accomplish a great quantity of work. You evaluate efficiency by how much you have gotten done. Effectiveness, on the other hand, implies that you know how to set priorities and are able to focus your efforts on what really needs your attention. You evaluate your effectiveness by whether what you got done was what really needed doing.

Learning to Set Priorities Setting priorities is a matter of deciding what is really important. In this case important means important to you. What activities and roles give your life meaning? These are the parts of your life where you most want to succeed.

Everything in your life cannot be a priority. Lots of important things will compete for attention over your lifetime, but there are not enough hours in anyone’s lifetime to give attention to everything that is good and worthwhile.

6 Deciding on your basic priorities is a key exercise in moving toward more effective use of your time. Your basic priorities provide a means for making time choices, helping you decide where it is important to invest yourself and where you can let go.

On a daily basis you also have to learn to set task priorities. Prioritizing tasks includes two steps:

1. Determining what needs to be done. 2. Deciding on the order in which to do the tasks.

How do you decide what work needs to be done? For the most part, it relates back to your basic priorities. To be effective in your time use, you have to weed out the work that does not fit with your basic priorities.

Learn to say no to tasks that look interesting and may even provide a strong sense of achievement but do not fit with your basic priorities.

You also have to be able to separate out the tasks that need doing from the busywork that tends to eat away at your time. Many tasks that fill your day may not really need doing at all or could be done less frequently.

Take note of the difference between tasks you need to do and those you want to do. Deciding the order in which to do tasks means you start with the needs list first and then move to the wants list.

Task prioritizing means working on the most important tasks first no matter how tempted you are to get a lot of less essential tasks out of the way.

Set yourself as a priority. You need to be one of the priorities you set for yourself. This can feel unnatural for many women who are used to thinking of the needs of others. Think of meeting your own personal needs as taking care of a valuable piece of equipment.

You need routine maintenance—the care and attention you often direct at others also needs to be directed toward yourself. Think of taking time for yourself as comparable to changing the oil in an automobile. Over the long haul it is an important investment.

Insisting on time to relax and pursue some of your own, personal interests is not selfish. Rather it is like changing the filters on your furnace. It will keep you operating more effectively in the other areas of your life. One of the resources you bring to your life is attitude.

The right attitude can make any task much easier, any problem more solvable. It is difficult to have a positive attitude when you never seem to have time to do things you enjoy. Investing some time in yourself is like refilling the ice trays—there will be something there the next time you need it.

7 Critical Skills for Effective Time Use Certain skills help in using time effectively. Most of these skills are mental. While it is not necessary to develop all of the skills, each makes a contribution to your ability to direct time usage.

Time sense is the skill of estimating how long a task will take to accomplish. A good sense of time will help you be more realistic in planning your activities. It helps prevent the frustration of never having quite enough time to accomplish tasks.

To increase your time sense, begin by making mental notes of how long it actually takes to do certain routine tasks like getting ready in the morning, running a load of laundry or delivering your child across town to baseball practice.

Goal setting is the skill of deciding where you want to be at the end of a specific time period. Goal setting gives direction to your morning, your day, your week and your lifetime. The exercise on deciding your lifetime priorities is a form of goal setting. Learn to write down your goals.

If you are like most people, goals are just wishes until you write them down. Keep your goals specific, as in “weed the flower beds in front of the house” rather than “work on the yard.” Keep your goals realistic or you will continually be frustrated by a sense of failure.

Standard shiftingis adjusting your standards as circumstances change. Your standards are what you use to judge whether something is good enough, clean enough, pretty enough, done well enough.

Perfectionists have very high, rigid standards, and they have trouble adjusting to the changing demandsor circumstances of their life. Develop the ability to shift standards so you can be satisfied with less than perfect when your time demands are high, instead of feeling as if you are somehow falling short.

Time planning is outlining ahead of time the work you need to get done in a specific time frame. Sometimes time planning is as simple as writing out a To Do list to ease your mind from holding on to too much detail.

At particularly stressful times the To Do list may expand to include a more specific calendar of when tasks will be done. While a detailed time schedule can be too confining to use all of the time, it is a good way to take the pressure off at exceptionally demanding times.

Recognizing procrastination is a skill in itself because procrastinators can do an incredible job of hiding their procrastination from themselves. Procrastination is needlessly postponing decisions or actions.

You might disguise the procrastination response with an excuse like waiting for inspiration, or needing a large block of time to concentrate with your full attention, or needing more information before tackling a project.

It takes skill to differentiate between procrastination excuses and legitimate reasons for delaying a decision or action. Without the ability to recognize when you are procrastinating there is little chance of overcoming this immobilizing habit. Source: Prather, C.G. (n.d.). Challenges& choices—Time effectiveness: Prioritizing your time (GH-6653). Retrieved August 17, 2016, from the University of Missouri Extension Web site: http://extension.missouri.edu

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