Work-Life Balance Is Real: Getting Your Home Life Together Is Good for Business
Mayra Kavan,
Your personal and professional lives are more linked than you think, so let’s give them both a boost
Whether you’re self-employed or work for a large company, it’s important to keep a healthy, confident mindset while working. Sure, work pays the bills, but your mental well-being is the most important thing of all.
If there’s one thing better than a healthy personal life, it’s a healthy combination of your personal and professional life. So if one isn’t going well, the other will also suffer.
The higher your mood, the more likely you are to believe in yourself while working. Imposter syndrome is a huge part of anxiety, so when we feel stressed, we start doubting our ability to work. Especially when we’re not sure about how to stop feeling stressed. So, how do we fix that?
1. Apply everything you know about home organization and wellness to your work life
There are some things we can’t change in life, but there are so many that we can. We can comfort ourselves when things go wrong and reward ourselves when they go right.
The art of manifestation will guide you. Writing down your goals, to-do lists, hopes, dreams, will make everything more real. Seeing it spelled out in a very visual and bold way will help you internalize them. Then eventually lead to an improvement in your mood, social skills, and ability to deal with tough situations.
This goes double for your work goals and tasks; seeing it visually and rewarding yourself for a job done will help you achieve them, and learning how to cope when things go wrong will save you a lot of stress.
2. Combat anxiety by finding good coping mechanisms
Any personal worries you have will undoubtedly hit you during work, and this will raise your stress levels significantly. Work stress is one thing, but adding personal stress into the miss is a recipe for disaster.
Keeping a written note of how you’re feeling each day will help you target negative feelings. Use your 1THRIVE Center to plan everything out; self-care days, self-therapy sessions, housework, work deadlines, everything.
The Henry is a great choice for scheduling any kind of personal goals. You can track your progress, set yourself assignments, and generally write down any tips or reminders that simplify your work schedule.
Note any bad coping mechanisms. Notice when you use substances to calm down, biting your fingernails, or when you take your aggravation out on someone else to vent. At the time, these may feel helpful, but when you cut down on them, your stress will actually fade, and you can get more work done.
There are several things you can do to keep your mental health in check, which will translate into your work life. Every day, tell yourself:
- I am good enough
- I can cope if things go wrong
- I am skillful and can achieve great things.
Things that are out of my control are not my fault. And if I can do well at home, I have the power to do well at work too.
3. Let the Five Areas clear your head
When anxious, use the Five Areas model to pinpoint why, and note the following:
- The situation that is causing you stress (you have a LOT of work assignments)
- Your thoughts while it’s happening (“this is terrible, I can’t do this!”)
- How you then behave as a result (procrastination)
- What physical symptoms are you experiencing? (crying, shaking, sore back)
- What are your emotions (stressed, sad)
Then the cycle starts again through your thoughts. It will continue until you turn the “this is terrible, I can’t do this!” into “It will work out alright, I can do this, and if I run out of time, it’s not the end of the world.”
Doing physical activities can also help. If you notice that you tend to worry most before bed, this is an excellent time to meditate. If you wake up feeling a lack of confidence, it’s a good time to listen to some motivational podcasts.
A confident mind doesn’t come out of nowhere. It’s something that comes with practice, and daily positive affirmations. With your 1THRIVE Center’s liquid chalk marker, write down any words of wisdom that help you get through the day. Soon these words will flow through your mind without prompt.
4. A cluttered home is a cluttered mind
Sorting out your personal life doesn’t stop at your mental health, but your physical home too. It’s a vicious cycle to leave an untidy unorganized house to go to work. All that anxiety about what needs to happen follows you.
When you get home from a long day of work (well, you move from one quarantine room to another) and you can’t stand the idea of tidying it up, you go to bed, and the cycle starts all over again.
Break the cycle before work starts is the key. Over a weekend or a few weekends (we won’t judge if you do this in increments), spend time organizing your home. Clean the living room, change your bedsheets, clean the kitchen, organize your storage, basically spend time on the parts of your home that have been bothering you.
Write down a plan on your 1THRIVE Center and set the date to get it all done.
The science behind the concept of feng shui, or the KonMari method, doesn’t lie. Research shows that organizing your home can help ease feelings of depression and anxiety.
So why not transfer that to your work? Make sure all your documents are in order, your desk is clean and decluttered, and all your assignments are neatly written onto a calendar. In turn, this will free up more creative space in your mind.
A cluttered mind can also equate to a cluttered home and workspace. Something that can stress us out without realizing it is keeping all our tasks, deadlines, and to-dos trapped in our heads.
You may think you’ll remember all those dates, but will you really? You’ve got to write them down somewhere and make them visual, then they become real goals to work toward.
5. Learn to balance work and play
The separation of life and work is important for setting healthy boundaries. If you think about work too much in your personal life, or vice versa, then finding a way to split them is key.
Avoid working in areas of your house that you associate with sleep, eating, and leisure time. Put your phone away while you’re working and try not to do any work out of hours. Even talking about work when you should be relaxing is a no-no. Creating boundaries will help you balance like a pro, and your mood will thank you for it.
You can also put a ban on checking your work email after a certain time. Say you usually leave the office at five, set your notifications to turn off at five, and enjoy your evening.
If you’re not worrying during work hours, you’re more likely to enjoy yourself and be more productive, too. No matter your profession, your newly free mind will have time to live in the moment. It’s a win-win situation, and you can start at any time!
1THRIVE creates beautiful, customizable command centers with interchangeable components that support your efforts to live a more organized life. Find your ideal 1THRIVE Center here and follow us on Facebook for more advice on living your best life.
