Mental health is often easy to ignore. You might be aware that people struggle with it, but you might not consider your own issues to be worth the same kind of consideration. However, everyone has their own unique relationship with their mental health, and part of that learning curve is understanding how to best look after yourself.
The balance between work and your personal life can sometimes cause some friction. Without work, you likely don’t have enough money to support yourself, and that can cause stress in itself. When your whole life is about your career, you don’t get any time to yourself, and you can start to question what you’re even working for.
A Simple Reprieve
So, what’s the solution? Different people have their own preferences concerning the form that this balance ultimately takes. Some might feel as though they need the structure that comes with it to feel fulfilled, and many of their personal ambitions might align with the professional. Others, though, might want enough money to sustain themselves through a career that they find enjoyment in to serve their personal life and the comfort that they find within it.
Regardless of which side of this that you ultimately fall on, part of finding this balance involves taking the time to address the stress that you might feel due to any imbalance. Again, this might be something that you pursue in a way that is unique to you, but some find value in focused techniques like meditation or breathing exercises, while others could achieve the same end with a walk through areas of natural beauty. Spending time with your friends can work as a good de-stressor, but that might not be something that you’re able to arrange so easily and spontaneously. Knowing that you have options gives you a good place to start, allowing you to explore these suggestions at your own pace to see what works.
A Happier Career
It’s easy to think about the only benefit to this being that you’ll enjoy a more relaxed day-to-day life, but fine-tuning this arrangement might leave you with a more satisfying career as well. If you’re currently looking for a way to optimize your work, you might be interested in looking for something more freeform and flexible to your schedule. This could lead your eye towards freelance work, an option that you might typically think of covering areas like writing and video editing, but there are more practical options too. Carpentry and other trades are examples of this, but as are 7class A truck driver jobs Kansas City, and you might find that these better suit the skills you have and the line of work that you prefer.
Understanding that you have options in terms of how you construct your working life can shake away some of those preconceptions of work having to be something that is doomed to be a strain on your life. That realization can be beneficial for your mental health in its own right.
An Open Schedule
If you do manage to move away from a situation where you feel as though you’re spending all of your time at work, you might initially struggle with the additional free time that you have. This is a time for you to explore hobbies or reconnect with past activities that you used to gain enjoyment from. At first, this might feel unnatural, and you might experience a sense of guilt for not focusing on work all the time. While this is natural in the beginning, if you find that it’s not passing, you might be interested in talking with a professional that can guide you through why you might be feeling this way in order to develop a healthier attitude towards this free time.
As touched on earlier, one advantage of this additional free time is the ability to spend time with your friends or family members. If you find that you haven’t been able to do so in recent times due to conflicting schedules, you might find that this small additional bit of leeway gives you much greater room to work with. Spending time with the people you love can have a massively positive impact on your mental health, but the problem might not just be conflicting schedules. It could also be the distance between you. In this case, being less overwhelmed by work might mean that you find the time (even if it’s just a distant free weekend that you can pencil in) to have a reunion that can mark the beginning of more regular visits.
