If you’re not careful, the demands of modern life can easily cause you to bury yourself in your work and lose track of your social life. Even worse, the work flexibility that allows you to attend a web meeting from your dining room, send emails from your bed, and even work on your vacation makes the line between work and life balance blurrier. Unfortunately, spending too much time working can negatively affect your health. More specifically, overworking results in issues such as fatigue, stress, poor sleep, burnout, and even life-threatening conditions such as stroke. Here’s some more information on this topic.
Why a Work-Life Balance Is Necessary
In life, it is normal to experience short-term stressful situations such as running late for a job interview, an aggressive puppy tearing your favorite dress, or just striving to beat short deadlines. While cortisol levels may rise in such situations, they will be short-lived, and therefore, non-lethal to your health. It is worth noting that subjecting your body to constant stress such as overworking every day, can cause your body to over-produce cortisol. In other words, if you don’t balance your work and life, you’re likely to experience chronic stress. As a result, you will constantly experience headaches, poor appetite, sleeping disorders, and irritability. Worse still, you may try to cope with the stress by engaging in unhealthy habits such as binge eating and drinking, smoking, using drugs, self-isolation, sleeping for too long, and abusing pain medications.
How to Balance Work and Life
Typically, work-life balance requires you to take all the aspects of your life seriously. More specifically, you should try to be a top employee in your workplace, the best parent, a good spouse, a present friend, and a concerned neighbor, all at the same time. Additionally, you need to set apart some time just for yourself. For instance, other than being there for others, spend time meditating, walking in the park, treating yourself, and going on vacation by yourself.
While it may seem impossible to strike a perfect balance, it is possible if you are determined to. The first step towards creating a work-life balance is acknowledging that both aspects of your life are important and that any imbalance can adversely affect your health. Furthermore, although excelling in your career may give you the much-needed satisfaction, it won’t make you happy if your family feels neglected in the process. That said, the following tips can help you strike a work-life balance:
- Have a routine – Typically, following a strict routine is one of the best ways to ensure that your work does not collide with your personal life.
- Be flexible – While your work and life should not mix, if possible, a little flexibility can go a long way. For instance, there’s no harm in taking a 30-minute break from work to pick prescription medications for your child, just like there’s no problem if you spend an extra 30 minutes in the office to finalize an urgent task.
- Don’t sacrifice too much – Work-life balance requires a lot of sacrifices. Nevertheless, don’t strive to be always present for other people at the expense of your personal life.
- Manage your time – With proper time management, you should be able to fit every task in your schedule and satisfy all parties.
Creating a healthy work-life balance can improve your health and help you stay happier. Another way to take care of your health is by purchasing the right life insurance policy. For all your insurance needs, contact our experts at Donald Weiss Insurance Services today. Our dedicated team is ready to assist you with all your health and life insurance needs.