Serving People Serving Coffee Since 2005
Issue link: http://baristamagazine.epubxp.com/i/804825
T'S DIFFICULT TO TALK ABOUT mental health. People often confuse mental illnesses with a mood or a personality trait—some- thing a person has control over. Even when we acknowledge the realities of mental health, they can easily be overlooked due to the necessities of working in the fast-paced, constantly changing service industry. We often tell baristas they have to be positive at work, or we tell introverted baristas that they have to smile and be cheerful and gregarious with every customer that walks in. These examples are simplifi cations of issues that affect every barista on the fl oor—from those who have documented and diagnosed mental illnesses, to those who have to invest intense emotional labor into their jobs. To simply attribute the continued and often exhausting work of emotional labor to a prerequisite of barista work ignores the real ways our labor pool is drained and never replenished. It's not possible to tackle the number of ways mental health needs to be addressed in our industry in this one article, but here are a few things we as baristas, café owners, and other coffee professionals can do to take better care of ourselves and our colleagues. Barista work often seems simple. You come in, make coffee, hang out with your friends, and listen to cool music. But there's a distinct difference between the labor performed by a barista, and the labor carried out by someone outside of the public eye. Not only does a barista make drinks and keep a store running, but they have to look happy and engaged as they do it. In her book The Managed Heart, Arlie Russell Hochschild notes that there are jobs where the labor required isn't just to make a thing or to accomplish a task, but that "seeming to 'love the job' becomes part of the job." She defi nes this type of work as emotional labor, or labor that "requires one to suppress or induce feeling in order to sustain the outward countenance that produces the proper state of mind in others." Whether or not they are actually happy in the moment, baristas are always expected to be, or at least to pretend to be. In coffee, we put a ton of value on the way we carry ourselves and handle our customers. "We're seeing people put service at the forefront of their entire busi- ness model," says Eli Ramirez, trainer at Wormhole Café in Chicago. Eli has experienced anxiety and depression resulting from the constant stress of barista work. "Going deeper into service was creating a lot of issues for me mentally," he says. "I was having a lot of anxiety when it came to harboring any kind of interaction with anyone." When the brunt of our job is based on the quality of interactions we have with customers, it's easy to experience dread or inadequacy, especially when you have a poor interaction with a customer. "My self worth now weighed upon how good my service was," says Eli. ACKNOWLEDGE THE CONNECTION BETWEEN SERVICE AND MENTAL WELL-BEING The strains of barista work may seem petty or insignifi cant, but a study conducted by the Southern Medical University in Guangzhou, China, in 2015 suggests that service workers in high-stress, low-paying jobs are the most likely to suffer from strokes. Talor Browne, cofounder and head roaster at Talor & Jørgen in Oslo, Norway, cited this study in her Tamper Tantrum talk about mental health behind the bar. "Sometimes a customer is really awful to you and you have to pretend that it's OK," she says. The Guangzhou study states that two contributing factors to stress are lack of respect from both employers and customers, and lack of control over an employee's work and spaces—and these are things baristas face every single day. The study, which was published in the fall 2015 issue of the medical journal Neurology, further notes that women in service industries are more likely to suffer a stroke than men, which suggests that women are expected to provide more emotional labor than men. Although the study doesn't specify the risks associated with being a minority or inhabiting a marginalized identity, we can also assume that members of underrepresented groups likely suffer from added strain and higher expectations. As this is true of people who are otherwise assumed to be free of any specifi c mental disorders, we can only imagine the doubly damaging effects emotional labor can have on baristas with diagnosed problems. "I feel as if baristas are often treated as an expendable commodity," says Talor, noting how the duality of writing barista work off as easy while at the same time enforcing exacting standards of service can cre- ate environments where baristas feel depressed, anxious, and emotional- ly drained. "A conversation about service isn't really complete unless you talk about the mental-health repercussions," Talor adds. Baristas shouldn't necessarily feel like they are responsible for strat- egizing coping mechanisms. By simply acknowledging that service is 2 104 barista magazine