Today is my second day of re-entering the workforce, and it’s been challenging for me – mentally and physically.

Yesterday I started to work in an agency for UX, branding and conversation design, and will continue to do so full time for the next three months. My focus will be on conversation design, chatbot user experience, and related topics. I believe that this will be an interesting and educational time for me, and is a good fit for my experience in linguistics and research, as well as for my background in design.

However, on a mental and personal level, going from 0 to 100 is quite a challenge for me. My body and mind made sure to let me know that, as already halfway through my second day I got a migraine with extra nausea, and despite trying my best to deal with it at the office by talking a walk, eating some Zwieback and resting, I went home for the rest of the day.

I am honestly not surprised by that, as the whole situation is quite a lot for me. Not only am I going from 0 to 100, I’m also not in my usual surroundings – this agency is in Berlin, where I’m spending the next week, while I usually live in Düsseldorf. I’m quite lucky that I have a place to stay in Berlin for myself, but it is still not quite the same as home. I don’t have my own bed, my own comfy sofa, my TV, my PC and my PS5, and all the other little things that make my daily routine comfortable for me.

But honestly the biggest challenge is adjusting from being an unemployed couch potato1 to working a 40 hour week. During my PhD, I’ve had the luxury of nobody caring how much or little I work, as long as I can present some results at the end of a deadline.

Additionally, I have had the luxury of being able to work wherever I wanted, which ever since the pandemic, has been about 95% from home. While I did go to the office occasionally, it was mostly for meetings and socialising, not so much for actual work. And my office was a wonderful little 2-person office with a really great office mate, who also enjoyed having peace and quiet whenever we were not chatting.

While I will also primarily work from home in this new job, I am going to the office for 5 days in a row, and it’s an open-plan office, so it can be a bit noisy. So yeah, going back to an office for a 40 hour work week after having been used to being in the comfort of your own home and being able to just lie on the sofa for a power nap whenever I felt like it, is quite a challenge for me.

I honestly believe, that especially in open-plan offices, there should always be a quiet room where you can go to rest and recover from sensory overload, migraines, or just take that 20 minute power nap to help you get through the day after a bad night’s sleep.

While all of those are contributing factors, sensory overload is probably the main culprit here. Even though they went fairly easy on me with the work on the first two days, it was still a ton of input, combined with a completely new environment and a whole lot of new people to get to know. With that, and all of the other factors combined, my brain just said “no”. I’m obviously a bit embarrassed that already on my second day, I feel like such a failure, but everyone was very understanding and told me to go home and rest. I just hope that things will improve after this rocky start, and I will slowly get used to working full time again.