A good life balance means achieving a balance between work activities and your personal life.
This doesn’t have to just be your day (or night) job – it can be anything you think of as ‘Work’. For me ‘Work’ would be Gardening, but someone else might think this is ‘Play’ or ‘Rest’. It all depends on what we think fits into each category for us.
It can be really hard to achieve this if you don’t know how and as we are now living in a faster paced environment it’s more important now than ever to keep this in check. Research tells us that when we fail to meet a good work/life balance, the effect on our physical and mental wellbeing can be detrimental.
Having a good balance can help reduce your stress levels, improve your quality of life, improve your energy levels and give you a longer life expectancy.
Learn about your needs
What do you need? Is it more sleep, more time to relax, socialising, exercise, intimate relationships?
We all have needs but quite often we forget about ourselves and look to only serve other’s needs. This can leave us feeling like we always help others but never have help ourselves and it can lead to significant low mood and a lack in motivation.
• Sleep well - We all know that we need a good night’s sleep to function well. Without good sleep we risk physical health issues, making mistakes, feeling unmotivated, falling asleep during the day, being unproductive and inefficient at work, having headaches, experiencing changes in our mood and eating more food (and many more).
• Eat well - Food is our source of nutrients and energy. When we eat well we feel better about ourselves and having a more positive outlook on life, our mood improves and we have less risk of serious physical health conditions. Not just eating well, but eating is important! When we feel low or anxious, the last thing we might think about it eating – but it’s really important that we eat enough to energise our bodies in order to help us feel more motivated.
• Exercise – When we exercise our brain release feel-good chemicals. It helps us to sleep, improves our mood, reduces symptoms of anxiety and depression, improves memory and reduces stress and enhances our self-esteem.
Prioritise whatever is most important to you and make time for family and friends as well as lone activities.
Sometimes caring for ourselves and looking after our wellbeing means saying no!
If you’re already busy and feeling overwhelmed, the last thing you need to do is keep on saying yes. Define your boundaries and let go of having to please others and meet their expectations. Your time is limited, make sure it’s spent doing things that meet your needs and not everyone else’s. If you always say yes to things, everyone will expect you to always say yes – this sets you up for more stress and more difficulty in saying no.
We can’t look after other people if we do not look after ourselves.
Switch off
We find that often we can spend so much time checking our emails, checking if someone has text back or browsing social media that we miss out on a lot of time we could have been using more productively.
• It might feel important to check your emails when you’re not at work ‘Just in case there is something important’, but this can have a huge impact on your stress levels and can increase the temptation to answer work stuff outside of work. Take your emails off your phone or just don’t check! Leave work to work time, don’t let it spill into your personal time (when you’re not getting paid and should be enjoying yourself…) – Don’t you work so that you can afford to have personal time and do the things you enjoy?
A few years ago in there was a rumour that France has banned employees checking their phones after 6pm – it wasn’t true, but it was good notion and something we could learn to live by. Leave work at work.
• We can easily get distracted by social media – what Tom had for his dinner last night, where John and Jane went on holiday last week or what’s happening in Tim and Jo’s latest argument – and we can find we spend hours online looking at other people enjoying their personal time… Make a plan to put your phone down more often and take in more of the world and have fun with your friends and family. There’s nothing wrong with going online, but keep an eye on how long you spend doing it and how it makes you feel about yourself and your life.
Make time count
No matter how you break up your day, you still only have 24 hours.
A lot of clients often say ‘But I don’t have time’ or ‘I’m always busy. This often isn’t the case. We usually find that there is plenty of time to do all of the things that you want, but you are spending time doing things for others, doing things you don’t want to – or just spending time procrastinating!
An activity diary can be really useful to show what you are spending your time doing.
You can use this to write down everything you’ve done in your week, then highlight it in different colours for ‘Work’, ‘Rest’ and ‘Play’.
Set Goals - Decide what you want to do and make a plan with a deadline.
When we have an ‘I’ll get round to it’ or ‘I’ll do it tomorrow attitude’, we create more stress and worry for ourselves. By planning when and how we are going to do something and setting a deadline for when it needs to be completed, we can visualise having more time for other things we want to do and give ourselves the space to achieve this.
Using SMART Goals can be a really good way of planning what we want to achieve and having a really good idea of how we are going to do it:
• Specific (simple, sensible, significant).
• Measurable (meaningful, motivating).
• Achievable (agreed, attainable).
• Relevant (reasonable, realistic and resourced, results-based).
• Time bound (time-based, time limited, time/cost limited, timely, time-sensitive).
Try setting some SMART Goals using this worksheet - https://www.getselfhelp.co.uk/docs/SMARTgoals.pdf
