Small Ways to Balance Self Care
Plenty of professionals have been told if you work hard and grind it out, you’ll eventually become a success. It’s an age-old lesson: hard work will be rewarded, either financially or psychologically. Hard work will distinguish you from others and demonstrate your value.
What isn’t taught in that particular lesson is that burnout and exhaustion come with working yourself to the bone.
Never taking a sick day, personal day, or vacation isn’t just a recipe for implosion — it’s a bad influence. Plenty of studies have proven unlimited PTO just leads to fewer days taken off from work.
Why? There are as many answers as there are experts who came up with them. And it leads to some bigger, maybe more uncomfortable questions.
With all of our connectivity through smartphones and Slack, are self-care and work-life balance possible? How does someone even achieve that without feeling guilty? It doesn’t have to be as grand or extreme as shutting off your home WiFi after 7 pm to avoid your inbox. With small steps, you can find your own ways to achieve balance through self-care.
Daily Timeouts
Self-care, for as much of a buzzword as it is, is valuing yourself and your time. Top performers may burn the midnight oil, but that’s all you see. For as many hours as you spend with your coworkers, managers, and even clients, you only get a very narrow view of how they find their own balance. These top performers may not even be able to find balance themselves and struggle in their own rights.
If you don’t use your time, you lose it. You lose it to the demands and expectations of productivity or work for the sake of itself. Take your own time for yourself whenever you can. A walk around the block, a meditation playlist in your car, or a lunch out at a restaurant you’ve never tried before — whatever it looks like, commit to it as your timeout.
A mental break can bring you clarity that will help you tap into your focus and flow when you actually need it. Even if you can only spare a few minutes at a time, those minutes count for a lot.
(Small) Digital Detoxes
The digital detox isn’t necessarily a new idea, but it can work in the right moments. You might think of social media as the first to go on this list of “digital don’ts”, but it can really depend on what you look at on a daily basis.
If looking at pictures of cats on Instagram helps you and makes you laugh when you’re stressed, you probably don’t need to cut it out of your life. But if reading work emails after you’ve left the office does, leave it at the door. You’re only supposed to do your job for a set amount of hours; anything more than that should get consideration.
If Slack is going off late into the night, you might feel pressured to answer. Being “always on” and available for anything at any time creates a creeping expectation that your time isn’t actually your time. And that will inevitably sap your energy and burn you out.
Delete those intrusive work apps from your phone for a day. Turn off Slack when you’ve walked out of your office. Try one small thing to draw in a line in the sand between you and all the digital junk that piles up in your life. If it’s not earth-shatteringly important, it can wait until you’re in a better frame of mind. The problem will find a better solution that way.
Doing What You Love
“Do what you love” is a platitude, but it’s still valuable to remember. Doing what you love doesn’t necessarily mean work. It can mean making time for hobbies or passions that don’t only excite you but also recharge you.
Think of it as like mental recovery time, the same as you give your body after a hard workout. Your brain is a muscle that can get overextended and needs to rest. The Maslow Hierarchy of Needs shows exactly where you become satisfied and more motivated. It’s when all your needs are met, and when you deprive yourself of simple enjoyment by devoting yourself to work, you can’t meet your psychological needs very easily.
When you’re satisfied, you feel validated and actualized. That, in turn, can lead to hitting your creative flow and being better at problem-solving later. Your creative flow is a moment when everything syncs up and you feel great. Your brain kicks into high gear and you can even train your brain to get into this mode more often. Taking time to follow your passion, unwind, and enjoy yourself can work you into a state of flow.
Be Honest When You Need Help
The hardest thing you can do is speak up when you’re drowning. But it’s also the smartest and bravest.
You may want to go it alone when the work piles on and starts to take up far more space in your brain than it should. But isolating yourself into a bubble of work-work-work leads to loneliness, which can manifest in a slew of unpleasant ways.
Change is inevitable, usually sudden, and rarely something that takes your mental wellbeing into account. But asking for help, especially in jobs that depend on critical thinking, can lighten the load that change brings.
A sudden pivot that throws all your work out the window and leads to a 24-hour deadline would be cause for alarm in most workplaces. It’s also the time when a team can rally together so one single person isn’t bearing the brunt of all that work. But if you don’t ask for help, you can end up isolated and exhausted. Asking for help, in itself, is a way to find balance.
Work Curfews
Self-care takes discipline. You have to practice it until you know where your boundaries are and what crosses them.
If you’re in the habit of checking your phone when you wake up and before you go to sleep, work messages are probably one of your top “to check” items. Fight that urge. Your time off the clock is yours to use as you’d like. If it’s almost irresistible to check Slack one last time before bed, put your phone on Do Not Disturb an hour before you sleep. Shut off your email. Put your phone in a drawer. Do whatever you have to in order to find a healthy boundary and then enforce it.
Your goal is to find balance, and that may take some time. Workaholism can be a bad habit or a curse, depending on how you let it dictate your waking hours. But you can’t let it win, for your own health.
Self-care and work-life balance come down to essentialism. It’s picking the pieces of your life that matter the most and cutting out the chatter that tries to distract you. These tips are by no means the be-all, end-all ways to find balance. Everyone finds balance in their own way, but in this writer’s personal experience, they worked.
Say yes to opportunities, sure — but say yes to things you know you value. It’s not a crime to put your foot down and care for yourself. It’s actually one of the most responsible things you can do to be a top performer. Burnout isn’t a good look on anyone. Self-care and work-life balance are the only things standing between you and total exhaustion.
