Create Balance

For many of us we revolve our week, our time, and our priorities around our work schedule. Whether you work standard 9-5 hours, are running your own business, or follow the sporadic hours of shift work. The time you spend with friends and family, go to sleep, get to the gym, and work on your hobbies is often dictated by the time you have left over from your work schedule. For some it might be hard to leave your work where it belongs and for various reasons you may find it coming home with you. As much as you may or may not love your job, it is a significant part of your life and can strongly impact your mental wellbeing. The stress that you experience from feeling like there is never enough time and the chaos of trying to keep up with everything you are supposed to be doing can become overwhelming. Taking the time to check in with your mental health and make adjustments where you can may help prevent you from going further down the road of stress and poor mental health.

Often we do not think of our health until we find ourselves in an unpleasant situation. The decision to lose weight or to quit smoking sometimes doesn’t come until something bad enough happens to make you consider the reality of your bad habits. I know from personal experience that the same thing occurs with our mental health. We don’t think about how to prevent stress, build resilience, or promote emotional wellbeing until we find ourselves in a situation damaging to all of those things. This may lead you to burnout, an experience described by the World Health Organization as a factor influencing health status that is defined by chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed. Characteristics include low energy or exhaustion; distancing yourself from your job or having negative feelings towards it; and a reduction in performance at work. Burnout is not an illness or a health condition and only exists in the context of occupation, it is not intended to be applied to other areas of your life. However we can all become overwhelmed in many ways and there are strategies that you can use to apply to all areas of your life that need attention too.

So maybe you are feeling exhausted or just generally unhappy, but going to work is not an identifiable cause of these feelings for you. You may be overwhelmed by too many pressures in your life that place high demands on you physically and emotionally. Stress and burnout can be closely related, but can present in different ways. Maybe you feel hopeless and negative thinking is affecting all areas of your life. Depression and burnout share certain signs and symptoms, but require different approaches to manage. Becoming aware of your own feelings and understanding the different signs and symptoms is a good place to start. Stress can be characterized by over activity and engagement, you might feel like if you could just get everything under control you would then feel better. Stress can make our emotions overactive and lead to feelings of anxiety and loss of energy. Burnout looks like disengagement with a loss of motivation and feelings of hopelessness. You may be spending more time working, but accomplishing less and making more mistakes. Burnout can leave your emotions blunted and may lead to depression. While burnout and depression share similarities, the characteristics of burnout are due to work-related problems whereas depression can include negative feelings about all areas of life. Symptoms more related to depression include low self-esteem, deep sadness; listlessness; and a loss of interest in the things you usually care about.

Start to pay more attention to the way you are feeling and consider what factors in your life may be influencing your emotions. Pay attention to the things that make you feel good and increase your positivity, these can be helpful coping skills. When you experience negative feelings consider what precipitated them. Ask yourself if they are related to work, are they due to feeling like you have no control over your work; unclear or overly demanding job expectations; or doing work that is not challenging you? Or are these feelings related to other factors in your lifestyle, or maybe you can’t identify any clear cause of why you are feeling this way. Awareness of these things is a powerful way to start taking better care of your mental health. Pay attention to some of the things you may be telling yourself as a way to avoid or cope with the unpleasant things you are experiencing. “I’m fine”, “I’m just tired”, “people are depending on me”, “It’s not me, it’s everyone and everything else”, it can be hard to recognize these thoughts while you are experiencing them, but by starting to pay attention to your thinking and the way you talk to yourself today, it can help you recognize if you are denying signs of poor mental health or burnout in the future.

Take preventative action to avoid burnout, manage stress, and promote overall well being. Be mindful of what stress and burnout look like for you so you can implement strategies for prevention before things get any worse. Connect with people who care about you rather than withdraw, it is important to have social supports who you can talk to when you are going through difficult times. Socialize with your co-workers to avoid withdrawing in your work environment. Ask other people for help and delegate tasks if you are feeling overwhelmed. Create a work-life balance and develop a plan of self-care to make a part of your daily routine. Determine your priorities for the next week, month, and year, be mindful to review them regularly to ensure you are focused on the things that matter most to you. Following a healthy diet, getting regular exercise, and using principles of mindfulness on a weekly basis, are all helpful ways to prevent stress and burnout and promote good mental health. You can find more information on these strategies in our previous posts.

Preventing burnout and managing stress can begin with developing good work-life balance. Try implementing some of these tips to get started staying balanced today. Schedule brief breaks for yourself throughout your day, aim to take a ten-minute break every two hours. Create a separation between work and the rest of your life by turning off communication with work in your personal life. Create a distinction between work and home. Make a habit of going for a short walk, listening to music, or doing something else you enjoy after you finish work. This will help you turn off from work and be able to focus on your evening routine while you are home. Choose to participate in activities that are fulfilling and rewarding to you, and learn to say “no” to other obligations that pull you in too many different directions.

If it seems like you are experiencing more than stress or burnout and that you may be struggling with an anxiety or mood disorder, reach out to your healthcare provider to get connected to the right supports in your community. You can also find some additional mental health support services at the end of our first post.

Try This!

I wanted to include this in this post as it is something I have recently felt inspired by. During the month of February create your “List of 100 Dreams”, I found this idea through Laura Vanderkam’s blog, and think it is a great way to think about the things you want and to help you figure out your priorities and set goals that can help you move toward these things. It’s easy, write a list of one hundred things that you want to do or have more of in your life. It’s important that you challenge yourself to write all one hundred so give yourself some time to work on it and try to have it complete by the end of the month! You can visit lauravanderkam.com for more information.

We know this post is long and appreciate you taking the time to read through it, we hope you were able to find something of value here. Part of maintaining our work life balance meant taking a day off yesterday from posting every day this month. We would love to hear from you what you are doing to maintain work-life balance or any other thoughts you have on this topic. Please feel free to share them in the comment section here, connect with us on instagram at @renmartialarts, or contact us through our contact page!