The dangers of bed-rotting for professional life

Have you heard of 'The phrase "bed rotting" in Portuguese is ambiguous and needs context. It could refer to several things. Please provide the full sentence or paragraph it appears in.If your answer is 'no', and you act as a manager in any company – regardless of size or sector – I advise paying attention to this term, especially if you have younger colleagues on your team. Translating from English, the term...A rotting bedIt means 'bed-soaking', and it's related to spending a long time in bed after waking up.

The term gained traction among younger people on social media, starting from a... The translation of "trend" from Portuguese to UK English is simply **trend**. No translation is needed. Using TikTok. The audience embracing this practice, besides helping to spread its concept, is precisely Generation Z, born between 1996 and 2010, and frequently criticised by many organisations for their behaviours and conduct, often inappropriate for the corporate environment.

Despite the...A rotting bedWhile being touted as a self-care practice, there's currently no scientific evidence that it actually works, let alone benefits people's health. On the contrary, spending excessive time in bed doing nothing and "rotting", as the term suggests, tends to bring only harm to people in general, affecting their personal and professional lives.

The truth is, from the moment we enter the workforce, we're subject to excessive demands, which can sometimes cause stress and fatigue. However, when we find ourselves in this predicament, the ideal course of action is to seek support from leadership to report the issue and align on what can be done to alleviate the overload, which may occur without the leader realising it.

However, it's important to highlight that for this to happen, the manager also needs to be very well prepared to handle the situation, both to support the employee and to avoid judging them, so as not to further harm their well-being and potentially their mental health. It is crucial that the leader has a great deal of flexibility to understand what is happening before making any decisions.

Besides rest or a reduction in activities, depending on the case, leadership can also consider ways to help the team organise themselves better. Often, people don't necessarily have that many tasks, but they don't know how to divide their time and end up taking everything on, or taking a long time to do things, or starting one activity and stopping to start another, and so on in a vicious cycle.

I believe it's crucial that managers help their employees understand that quality time for rest, and even for doing nothing, is very important, but that it must be limited and shared with other responsibilities – both in personal life and, especially, in the workplace where other individuals depend on you. Balance is key to making it work.

In this respect, it's crucial to prioritize the discipline of tracking team goals and objectives, but also, as a leader, to use those one-on-one moments to try and discern what isn't being said verbally, but what the body language is communicating.