There’s no arguing that when your work-life balance is out of whack, your stress levels soar. After all, it can be difficult to feel any sense of control when you’re overworking and neglecting your personal life, and vice versa.
Before COVID-19, it was simple enough to separate your work self from your personal self. You had an office to go to where you could work hard, and the moment you walked through your front door, you could easily turn work off and turn your personal self on.
But with many businesses forced into remote work, the boundaries have blurred, and working from home can cause many mental health concerns like severe anxiety, depression and stress.
Here’s how you can improve your work-life balance while you’re stuck working from home.
1. Turn off your technology
Technology has been a blessing in disguise. Without it, this time of quarantine would have been even harder, and we wouldn’t have had the luxury of connecting with our friends, families or our quiz group over the internet.
But when it comes to work time, it’s important to turn off your electronics and get your focus on. According to a study by HR Daily Advisor, more than 60 percent of people go less than 10 minutes between checking their email and messages during the work day. Even worse, HR Daily Advisor found that people who use Slack—a popular team chat tool meant to reduce e-mail use—actually switched to communication tools more often.
Notifications, social media and unlimited access to the news are bad for your health. This constant distraction is also making you unproductive. If you want to feel fulfilled in your work (and finish at 5pm without that nagging feeling in your brain), turn your electronics off and face your work head on. You’ll thank yourself for it later.
2. Leave your work at work
It can be easy to bring work home with you when your home is your work. In fact, it’s easy to never let work leave your brain when your office it at the foot of your bed.
To truly balance out your work life and your personal life, then, it’s important to set the right boundaries and leave work at home. This means reducing your access to your emails after working hours; it means saying no to last-minute tasks and setting good boundaries with your employers, explaining that you’ll ‘do it in the morning tomorrow’; and sure enough, it means spending uninterrupted quality time with your family, and not lashing out at them because your colleague failed to complete their report on time.
3. Care for yourself
What good are you at work if you fail to take care of yourself? Chances are, if you aren’t eating well, sleeping enough or exercising often, you’re failing to be a productive contributor to the business.
To work well, then, you must first care for yourself. The beauty of remote working is that you can pick and choose your own hours, too. If you’re feeling sluggish in the mid-afternoon and you’re wasting your time, for example, try turning work off and instead going for a long run. When you return to work later, you’ll feel more content, refreshed and focused.
Know when enough is enough
For many – especially the C-Suite executives who are the main drivers of business growth – it can be tough to completely turn work off. Oftentimes, work will seep into your personal life, and you’ll have to address urgent matters outside of regular office hours.
Where the problem starts, though, is when this is a common occurrence and your colleagues begin to expect your attention at all hours. It’s vital to the success of your work-life balance to set strict boundaries with your team and stick to them. Only then can you completely begin to segregate work from real life and find a happy balance.
If you’re struggling to maintain a healthy relationship with work and you’re feeling stressed to a point that it is negatively impacting your life, Tikvah Lake can help. We offer a specialized 10-day executive treatment program that helps high-level executives reset their relationship with work. We guide you through the building blocks to better work-life boundaries, and we help you identify key workplace stressors, teaching you the tools needed to mitigate and alleviate stress.
To find out more about how we can help, contact our admissions team today.
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