Whether you’re juggling your on-the-clock hours with family time, caregiving, personal hobbies or just social life, it’s easy to become stressed when it feels like work is taking over your life! Many of the most common concerns voiced by working adults relate to “work-life balance” or finding a balance between career and outside efforts, goals, and obligations.
Are we just working too hard? Workers in the United States spend an average of 1787 hours a year on the job. If you could work 24 hours a day, that’s about 75 full days annually. According to the OECD Better Life Index, around 11% of employees work very long hours, with 16% of men working very long hours compared with 6% for women. Moreover, evidence suggests that long work hours can impair personal health, jeopardize safety and increase stress. However, it doesn’t have to be so. Just a simple as a shift in perception can change the way we experience every part of our lives, including our work!
In the below article, Sadhguru reminds us that work and life are not different. Instead of “working” five days a week and “living” two days a week, isn’t it time we lived every day?
Not “Work and Life” – Just Life!
“People whom you work with and what kind of relationships you hold with them is extremely important because you spend a larger part of your life with them. Most people think, this is work, that is life. That means, a large part of your life is not life. A large part of your day is spent with people whom you work with, and when you come back in the evening, maybe you are just a half a human being, you’re already done, that’s when you’re with your family.
So why is this not life, why are we not looking at this also as an important part of life? Why are we just looking at it as a way to earn something as a means towards something. The moment we look at work as a means towards something else, slowly our mind concludes that this is not something you are supposed to enjoy as such, this is something that is supposed to be done with. You’re looking, when it’s time to leave. So do not divide your life into work and life. It’s just life. Every waking moment of your life is just life.
How does one balance work and life, especially family and children?
Sadhguru: If your work is not life, I don’t see why you should do it. Your work also is life. Would your life happen if there was no work? – don’t think of only the economic aspects. So work is very much life. Do not ever make this demarcation that there is something called as work and life. There is life and life. Different aspects of life need to be dealt with.
One of the important things that people should do is – I know people are trying to keep it away but I would say that’s a mistake – if family conversations also revolved around various things that you are doing as a part of work, it builds a completely different level of trust and you do not know what insights may come from people who are outside observers to your business and activity, who are trusted people and not some other commentator. People you trust and people who love you and who want you to succeed, their input may be extremely valuable. It may be your wife, it may be your five-year-old child, you don’t know.
So I think there should be no such demarcation. Why can’t work conversations be very interesting if you are creating something? Family could get involved in it and when you are at home, though you may not be actually working hands on, you could be still thinking and evolving things for tomorrow or for the future. I think it is very wrong for people to work for five days and live for two days in a week. It is a horrible way to live. You must live all the seven days.
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