Balancing work and life is hard. A 9-to-5 job fills most of the day. Most don’t realize the impact of these hours on daily life. Even being with family and friends, cooking, relaxing or sleeping isn’t always easy when you’re working most of the day. Simple activities start to become luxuries. That can be frustrating and exhausting. Here’s how a busy work life prevents these ‘good things in life’ from happening.
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Cooking Healthy Meals
You work for hours and that saps you of energy and focus. Cooking becomes an added stress after a long shift. And so fast food or frozen meals become your default. But those are often loaded with salt, sugar and bad fats. If you have this too often, it begins to harm your health. Fresh, home-cooked food can improve mood and energy. But if you’re tired, all that extra time in the kitchen is not realistic. And that means your diet falls short and in the long run – your health too.
Exercising Regularly
You can become stiff and tired sitting at a desk all day. You need to move, but exercise is hard to squeeze in. The idea of going to the gym – or even for a walk – is tiring after eight hours of work. Over time, you lose motivation to exercise and promise to “get back to it next week.” But the next week never comes. Without getting up and moving, your body gets weaker and your mood worsens. Eventually you’ll see symptoms like weight gain or back pain.
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Getting Enough Sleep
When you have a busy schedule, you might sacrifice sleep. Or you might stay up late trying to relax. But that eats up your sleep time. You wake up feeling tired, yet it just keeps happening. The sleep you don’t get accumulates, which makes you more tired and more stressed. This applies to both work and life. In time, fatigue becomes your new normal. You need good sleep to stay in a good mood and to feel energetic & alert. However, a busy schedule makes it hard to get enough sleep.
Keeping Up with Hobbies
Hobbies are supposed to be an escape, a time of leisure. But when you already have a limited timeframe, hobbies are not easy to schedule. You might even stop understanding what it is to make something just for you. Whether it’s painting, reading or hiking, hobbies are important for your mental health. They leave you grounded and in tune with yourself. But as long as work takes up the lion’s share of time, hobbies become a luxury, not a necessity.
Staying Social
A packed calendar doesn’t give you much time to spend with those you love. You will keep saying, “I’ll see you later,” – but that later never comes. Friends and family are important for emotional wellbeing. It’s calming to talk, laugh and share. But it’s all too easy to feel distant when working a 9-to-5. This can eventually result in isolation, or even dysfunctional relationships. Staying close takes effort, but work life can make that effort feel too big.
Taking Time for Self-Care
Self-care is small actions such as reading, meditating or sleeping. But with a busy schedule, this is hard to make time for. You might tell yourself that self-care can wait. But stress builds up when you don’t do it. Taking time for yourself helps you recharge your energy. Without it, you start to get exhausted, stressed and even irritable. When you don’t recharge, you’re left running on empty.
Keeping a Clean Home
A messy space can add to mental clutter. But cleaning takes time and you never have enough time when you work full time. Laundry, dishes and cleaning up are saved for the weekend (if they’re ever done). When you have a cluttered house, you are more stressed and groggy, even when you should be sleeping. And all of this stress and mess goes on and on and on until you become exhausted. A clean space can give a fresh start, but it’s hard to make that happen with a packed work week.
Disclaimer: This list is solely the author’s opinion based on research and publicly available information.
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