5 Tips To Improve Your Work-Life Balance
There is a certain irony in writing a post about work-life balance while working on my laptop from my bedroom. Sometimes work, and life inevitably sit dangerously close to one another or overlap in some capacity. Therefore I can’t sit here and tell you some hard and fast rules you need to follow to be 100% productive yet effortlessly sociable while also prioritising time for yourself.
Finding balance is challenging, and you may struggle to feel on top of all aspects of your life. But that doesn’t mean that you can’t strive for a little more harmony and a sense of wellness within your daily activities.
Why Finding Balance Is Important
In the fast-paced modern world, finding balance is becoming ever harder to achieve while simultaneously being even more important to prioritise. Balance is vital on a holistic level to ensure you can keep in good overall health, reduce stress, improve your mood and recognise your emotional capabilities with yourself and within your relationships with others.
Yin Yang Philosophy
The Ancient Chinese yin yang philosophy is a wonderful concept to bear in mind when seeking balance in your busy life. It represents how all things have two sides that work in unity and that no one side is inherently ‘good’ or ‘bad’. The Yin and Yang use one another to help transform each other with the notion that balance is at the centre of life.
Yin is connected to the feminine energy. It is the cold, the water (the transformation), the moon, and the spirit in all things. Yang is the masculine energy, the sun, the light, the fire (creativity, striving for performance)
As an example, the Yang of your life could represent your work, feelings of productivity, and planning for the future. At the same time, the Yin symbolises your desire to seek meaningful relationships and practise your creativity and hobbies. Although this notion allows you to actively pursue different parts of your life with work and play, this may sound like a somewhat reductionist approach to balance as .
For example, it suggests that we only have two halves to balance. In reality, you may feel like you are trying to balance something that more closely resembles a pizza being cut into twelve slices, representing work, family, friends, hobbies, self-improvement, sleep, exercise, mindfulness practises, experiencing new things, travel, daily chores, and your emotions.
I believe the key is to recognise that balance in your life can help the opposite side thrive. However, this equilibrium can sometimes shift when one aspect of your life becomes more prominent, such as when you are approaching a deadline at work or have just undergone a significant life event such as moving house or city.
5 Tips to Find Balance in a Busy Life
Prioritise Meditation, Exercise and Self Care
When we start to see the month becoming busier, many of us find the first things to fall through are self-care, exercise and meditation. However, these activities are worth prioritising as they can help reduce your stress, improve your sleep, and help you achieve a positive mindset to help you cope with the other stressors in your life.
To improve your work-life balance, start dedicating time for meditation, exercise and self-care, even if this looks like taking a few minutes to mindfully enjoy a coffee in the morning. Plus, you are less likely to spill the coffee over your top or laptop when you aren’t in a rush. (Not speaking from experience or anything...) Ok, so your friends may laugh at you for booking in a bath in your own home, but if you find these activities are the first to slip away when things fall out of balance, writing them in your diary can help them stay a priority.
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A great app for timing your meditation practices on your phone is Insight Timer.
2. Set Boundaries Ahead of Time
If you struggle to keep all your plates spinning at once, a friend asking you for a small favour could throw you completely off. This is why it is important to set boundaries for yourself and others ahead of time.
Setting your boundaries can be especially tricky if you are a freelancer, business owner, or parent. You may find your time can often get ripped away from under your feet if those around you don’t understand your boundaries. Unlike in traditional jobs where your friends and family know instinctively not to call you between 9 am and 6 pm on the weekdays, when you work for yourself, people can often overstep your boundaries if you haven’t set them out clearly. If you set your limits now, it can help you stick to them in the future when a crisis occurs, and others expect you to pick up the pieces.
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Take a moment today to grab a notebook and pen or open your notes app on your phone and write down the boundaries you want to stick to when you feel like your time is under attack from external sources. For example, I am notorious for wanting to help my friends in need, but I also have to recognise that I can’t be a good friend, listen and be fully present, if in the back of my mind I am worried about my to do list or the deadline I fixed myself for the course I am writing. So I try to set a boundary that I need to get my most important task for the day complete before helping others in non-emergency situations.
3. Be Realistic
Set realistic goals that you can trust yourself to achieve. I find it’s best to set yourself a realistic goal rather than attempting a massive overhaul of your entire life and becoming too paralysed by the task before you even begin.
For example, when I tell myself I will spend that day doing every last item of laundry and cleaning every space right down to the inside of my draws, I likely won’t get as far as getting the hoover out of the cupboard. Giving myself overwhelming tasks means that I will probably feel too defeated even to begin. Whereas if I set myself one or two achievable small jobs, I won’t end up with the feeling of guilt that I couldn’t accomplish the tasks I wanted to get done.
4. Practise Self-Awareness
Knowing yourself can be one of the best ways to take back some control of your life, thereby allowing you to manage better a work-life balance. By understanding how you work best, what overwhelms you and recognising the cues that indicate when you are starting to feel the effects of stress, you can support yourself before you fall ‘out of balance’.
For example, if I notice that I start to lose my appetite or have trouble falling asleep, I reflect on my situation, and more often than not, this is down to overwhelm and stress. So taking a step back and recognising that my physical signs could be how my body is trying to communicate with me can help me allocate more time to stress management techniques.
5. Transform Your Space
Creating a calming, organised space can help you when it comes to implementing the other tips. Of course, you don’t need to do a fabulous big makeover of your home extreme makeover style or follow the minimalism trend on social media and throw out all your belongings in the hope of finding inner peace with a decluttered environment. But a calmer environment can facilitate an easier time for you to find balance and some order in your life.
Before you go, take a breath and be kind to yourself. - Hopefully, even by integrating just one of these five tips into your daily life, you might find yourself living with more ease and less resistance.
Remember, even small mindset shifts can help reduce your stress levels when you feel rushed off your feet, and you don’t have to implement all these tips in one go. So take it slow and enjoy the process.