Work plays a crucial role in people’s lives, from being their bread and butter and putting food on the table to providing professional satisfaction and helping them stay content in their profession. An average individual spends nearly 90,000+ hours working in their entire lifetime, making it play a significant part. Paying heed to the current working norms, one shall witness how “hustle and grind” has been on the top of trend-lists, especially with the millennials having an inclination towards proving themselves in their respective fields.
With the youth making ambitions their focal point, they often tend to digress from the path where they blur the line between passion and unhealthy exhaustion. People are observed setting unrealistically high work targets and making their long working hours longer by the day and short-term goals more clustered and hectic as they completely sideline the latter part of the “work life” – life!
Emotional repercussions of “The Hustle”
Work is often misunderstood as an element that enhances the quality of life; however, what improves the quality of life is how one caters to their emotions and how contentment and self-love plays a role in maintaining a person’s emotional well-being. With the onset of mental health awareness, people are becoming aware of the psychological intricacies of burning out, however, the awareness factor still remains confined to a minority of the professionals whilst the “long nights and early mornings” culture is glorified. Creating an imbalance in one’s work and professional life leads to piled up emotions, bottled feelings and not allowing oneself to delve in the depths of introspection or simply take time off to relax and refuel.
With overworking without proper rest becoming the new cool, the mental health concerns such as anxiety, distress, employee-burnouts increase by the day. To curb the numbers, the community collective needs to understand the nitty-gritty of psychological well-being and how work-life balance will help them nourish themselves holistically without compromising their health.
Paving a path to escapism?
Unintentionally and unknowingly, people often extend their working hours and disrupt the balance to avoid confrontation from their internal emotional issues and behavioural concerns. Work-life balance prevents emotional outbursts and aids people in dealing with their issues head on, rather than allowing them to create a window that opens to their work-station and standby laptops.
When employees or professionals interfere with the balance, there is a high possibility that they are fanning escapism as their coping mechanism and avoiding what we often call “the real talk.” Maintaining an equilibrium without compromising with any of the components of the work-life seesaw helps in whetting one’s individuality and making them emotionally aware.
Balancing; all about boundaries
Work-life balance is about prioritising what is important to a person without feeling guilty about it. With the outbreak of the pandemic, we all have not only put our best foot forward but also befogged the boundaries that helped us departmentalise our tasks and manage time proficiently. Retaining stability in the work domain as well as personal life is about establishing those boundaries again and setting a limit to our tasks to avoid wearing ourselves out and emotional well-being out.
Demanding careers v/s work-life balance
Having a demanding career is not a matter of concern, the concern remains balancing it aptly and developing a streak of mindfulness and being present to learn and explore rather than to burn out and exhaust oneself. Work-life balance not only strengthens your emotional responses and understanding but also helps you be smart with your EQ and enhance your intra-personal and interpersonal relationships with yourself and the people around you.
Establishing a new precedent for growth, work-life equilibrium boosts emotional prosperity while minimising the stress-factor in professionals’ lives and empowering them with a toolset to create their own horizons of success as they pen their tales of emotional, corporate and psychological triumphs.