It's Self Care Week: Megan on Work/Life Balance

I’m not going to beat around the bush, I have no work/life balance. Today I worked 9 hours at my full time job and now I’m writing a blog post and getting ready to create some social posts. All in, it’ll be around a 12-14 hour workday.

This is nothing new to me. For about a year and a half I was working two full time jobs and doing freelance on top of that. My work weeks were in the 80-100 hour range. I worked on the weekends, I worked early in the morning and late at night.

I see posts here and there on Twitter and Facebook about how people brag about how they’re so busy and boast about how they worked a ton of hours in a week. I know a lot of people who have to work in the gig economy on top of their full time jobs and that’s not easy. Many of us wear it as a badge of honor.

That’s bad.

Being so busy and having no work/life balance is terrible for your mental, physical, and emotional health. Right now my skin looks worse than it did when I was a ball of hormones in high school, I do some of my best crying in the shower, and I’m tired all the time and sometimes I forget to eat. I have seriously wondered if I’d wind up being one of those people who had a stroke at 31 from stress.

I don’t say this so you can pity me, I say all this to be a cautionary tale. Do not be me. You don’t want to wake up tired and dead inside.  

Thankfully, I know I’m in a bad place so I am making steps to improve it. It’s one thing not to realize that your work/life balance is out whack, ruining your chance to fix it. But take a moment right now and think about it. How is your work/life balance? Do you have it? Do you not? Now you’re aware of it and can go on from there.

So you’re miserable, Megan, what are you going to do?

I’ll tell you what I’m going to do. First, I’m going to set some boundaries. There’s no reason that I need to be responding to emails before my shift at work starts and after it ends, so I’m not going to. Setting boundaries might seem counterintuitive to achieving balance, boundaries imply restriction, restriction doesn’t connote balance. But if I think of balance in terms of hours, if I set a boundary around the 8 hours for my full time job, I have more time to do other things.

Next, I’m going to focus on things that drop my stress level rather than add to it and make time to do these things with purpose and presence. I love running, baking, reading, and writing. Running is important not just for my emotional health but my physical health as well, so I can kill two birds with that stone. Baking, reading, and writing are just fun.

Doing these things with purpose and presence does unfortunately require some planning. Katie mentioned it in her blog post, but I’m here to tell y’all about the Passion Planner. It’s made a huge difference in scheduling my life and being aware of when I’m overextending myself.

The last thing I’m going to do is nothing. Absolutely nothing. There’s stigma around doing nothing. If you’re not being productive, what are you even doing? I’ll tell you what I’m doing, I’m resetting my brain.

Think of your brain like a web browser. When you have too many tabs open, it’s gonna crash. Once it crashes, you lose everything. Doing nothing is like closing tabs in your brain. It releases some of the pressure. Ergo, you don’t lose everything. You don’t need to crash and restore all tabs (and wait for it to crash again).

So go ahead, do nothing. You have my permission. Maybe my permission doesn’t matter, but it should.

To me, work/life balance means that I can breathe again. It means that I have some life to actually enjoy instead of slaving away in the name of productivity. I’ve come to realize that it’s not worth it. It’s not worth it for me, it’s not worth it for you. You are more than your work, go live your life.

-Megan