We need money to live but we shouldn’t live just to make money. While cultivating a career is essential for our financial well-being, it’s important to strive for a healthy work/life balance whenever you can. Even if you love your work, it’s crucial to be able to step away from it and find purpose and pleasure in other areas, too. If you’re worried that a strong work/life balance could make you a less productive or effective professional, it can actually have the opposite effect. Just as absence makes the heart go fonder, time away from the workplace can lead to renewed purpose and enthusiasm when you’re back in the workplace.
Stress Reduction
One of the biggest benefits that come from maintaining a firm work/life balance is that it can help reduce your stress levels. When we give ourselves enough time to have satisfying work and home lives, we’re reducing our stress levels. The decline in cortisol– the hormone whose elevated levels cause us stress– offers several benefits. Stress weakens our immune systems, making us vulnerable to all sorts of potentially debilitating illnesses. This is a big reason why grinding away at work all the time and giving yourself no time off can mess you up: you end up working yourself sick, thus necessitating the use of sick days, which puts you further in the hole with your productivity. The irony of working too much is that eventually it can cause you to work less.
Stress also impacts our cognition, making it harder to concentrate and retain or recall memories. If stress isn’t alleviated, chronic stress can lead to serious health issues like increased blood pressure, chronic inflammation, damaged blood vessels, and heart problems.
Avoid Burnout
Speaking of stress: if you spend too much time working and not enough time decompressing, that stress can snowball into burnout. Burnout is a state of physical AND mental exhaustion, in which you’ve had so much stress over a prolonged period of time that you’re stuck in a stressful state of being. This leads to fatigue, mood changes, back pain, gastrointestinal issues, tension headaches, sleep deprivation, and a change in eating habits (either too much or not enough). Burnout also impacts our executive functioning, i.e. our ability to set and complete tasks. It becomes harder to get your work done when you’re burned out: deadlines get missed, projects fall behind schedule, the quality of your work drops off.
Work/life balance can help prevent this. Work can be stressful and intense at times; there’s no getting around that. But being able to go home, unplug, and leave that stress at the workplace can give you the time you need to relax, recharge, and temporarily relieve yourself of the professional burdens you carry.
Improve Relationships and Health
If you don’t give yourself time outside of work to focus on your personal life, your relationships will suffer. Friends, family, romantic partners, children, even pets: all of these relationships can lapse into neglect and unhappiness if you’re too wrapped up in work. A proper work/life balance in which you leave your work behind both physically and mentally– because it’s not enough to be away from work, you have to stop thinking about it– gives you the emotional space and bandwidth to give the people you love your full attention. This also helps to alleviate any stress that could be caused by relationship problems or the guilt you may feel from not being more present in other people’s lives.
Another crucial benefit of work/life balance is having time to exercise, cook healthy meals, and focus on your health. Giving yourself time to live an active lifestyle outside of work will have cascading positive effects on both your personal and professional lives. A healthy diet and exercise can lead to more energy, sharper cognitive functioning, and increased confidence.
The Balancing Act
If you find yourself struggling to strike the right balance, here’s a few things you can do to even things out:
- Be less available. When you log out or clock out for the day, that’s it. You’re OFF. Don’t check your work email. Set your work chats to away or offline. Don’t respond to texts from work. Sure, there can be exceptions to this rule: legitimate after-hours emergencies can happen. If you’re being contacted about something that REALLY can’t wait until the next time you’re working, do what you gotta do. Otherwise, you shouldn’t be responding to any off-the-clock communications.
- Communicate your boundaries. If you have coworkers who don’t respect your off time, be polite and firm about establishing boundaries with them. This can be trickier when it’s a manager or supervisor who is over-stepping, but it’s important to have that hard conversation with them anyway. If you don’t stand up for yourself, that will create an “always on” expectation that you will have to deal with for your entire time at this workplace.
- Take time off. Do you have vacation days? Personal time? Use them. You do yourself no favors letting them pile up unused- especially if you’re working for an employer who doesn’t rollover unused vacation time to the next year. Don’t feel guilty about “leaving people hanging.” It’s the job of your manager to make sure your absence at work won’t impact the rest of your team. The only burden on you is to make sure you commit your vacation plans with enough lead time that they can plan around your absence accordingly.
- Say no. A quick way to get burnt out and ruin your work/life balance is to take on too many responsibilities at work. Be realistic about your capacity and current workload. Can you afford to take on more than you have? Don’t be quick to volunteer for more work unless you’re sure you can handle it.
- Leave work at work. Try not to think or talk about work at home. Maybe you can do a little venting over a beer with friends or at dinner with your partner, but keep it brief. Treat your work day like water on a dog’s back that they’re trying to shake off. Once you’re “dry” you can enjoy the rest of your time. This can be harder to do if you work from home; if you have a home office, keep it in a room you don’t spend too much time in outside of work. If possible, work on a separate device that you only use during office hours. Develop a closing “ritual,” something you do at the end of the work day to mark that you’re closing up shop. Maybe it’s a blazer or tie you take off; a snack or cup of tea; turning off a specific lamp; or listening to music. Whatever that closing ritual is, do it every time you stop working at home. Over time this habit will make it easier for you to switch gears from work life to home life.
Ask For Help
Don’t be afraid to seek out counseling or therapy if you’re feeling overwhelmed by work. For many people, part of the difficulty of maintaining a work/life balance is that most of their social life is tied into their work life. It can be hard to find a supportive network to connect with and talk to outside of work if your social life is so deeply rooted in your career.
Article by Austin Brietta
Career Corner
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