subject: Work Life Balance and Your Health [print this page] So is a lack of work life balance killing you? It very well could be. Our common sense tells us that if we overdo work or life, meaning achievement or enjoyment, we are headed for a problem. That is why most of us change our behavior continually.
When we eat to much over the holidays, we then diet. When we find that weve been working 18 hours a day, we plan a vacation of rest and relaxation. When we spend too many hours watching television, we change our pace and go visit some friends.
The problem with most of us, though, is that we dont balance our work and our life on a daily basis. If we never ate too much, we would never have to diet. If we didnt overwork, maybe wed have time to plan our vacations so that wouldnt seem like so much work. If we didnt just turn on the television, but took some time to seriously determine which shows are the most entertaining, we wouldnt feel so empty after we shut it off.
Stop the Vicious Cycle of Work Life Imbalance
Health, and thats not just physical health but mental health, affects not only our work and our lives, but also our ability to enjoy our work and our lives. Once our health is out of balance, we are no longer at our strongest to deal with our work or life. This often leads to more problems. As our health erodes our work and life erode, which further erodes our health.
So stop the cycle. Some work life coaches recommend that you improve your health first. This will give you the strength and stamina to improve your work, which will improve your productivity, which will give you more time to improve your health.
Dont Set Yourself up for Failure
However, what if you have one of those jobs that is unending in demands. The more you work, the more productive you are, the more work that is demanded of you. Living this work life takes more and more planning, and as you move up, what many find is the unavoidable work life collapse.
The demands become too much and they come when you are too tired. Regardless of how hard you try, you fail and fail big time. It could be that your health fails, your business fails or worse yet, both.
Productivity and Work Life Balance Training
That is why work life balance training is becoming more popular at companies. The concept of a successful company is no longer a company that works its staff to the bone, but a company that has the highest employee productivity rates, both in the short term and the long term.
Those with the highest employee productivity rates, companies are finding out, are companies that have given all their employees the work life balance training.
