Are you looking for ways to improve your life? Would you love to find out how meditation, mindfulness, and work-family balance can benefit your personal life? Are you looking for ways to improve your life and why is work-life balance important?
Meditation has been proven to be effective in helping individuals cope with stress, anxiety, and depression and generally obtain a more balanced way of living.
In this blog post, we talk about how meditation, mindfulness, and family life balance can boost your productivity at work.
What’s work-life balance?
Have you been labeled as a workaholic? Do you pride yourself in knowing you define as a workaholic?
What does workaholic mean?
What does work-life balance mean?
All these questions might be swirling in your head – and if you are asking yourself these questions in the first place it might be the first red flag that you are overworked and struggling to maintain a balance between your personal and professional life.
Having a work-family life balance helps you to achieve success both at home and at work. You will enjoy the satisfaction of doing quality work while being with family and loved ones during your free time. Your increased productivity will allow you to focus on what matters most while also benefitting your health. These benefits will enable you to create a healthy lifestyle that will support your physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual needs.
Although being busy is essential for business success, there must also be times when you can relax and enjoy your life. You should never devote all of your leisure time to work. Spend some time relaxing with friends, family members, or volunteering.
Having a work-life balance means having a balance between work and personal life. Many employees feel stressed when they do not have much free time and try to spend all their free time at work. On the other hand, working overtime can also be harmful to productivity. A better way to achieve a healthy work-life balance is to set boundaries like limiting email checking and setting up specific hours for work and free time.
We’ve long been told that keeping your work and life separate is crucial. Unfortunately, technology keeps making work easier to access whenever and wherever we are, which distracts us from our personal lives. The gap between our professional and private selves seems more narrow than ever before. Maybe now is the time to rethink how we balance work and life.
Many companies are moving away from strict 9-5 working hours in favor of flexible work arrangements. Some people choose to work at home while others use public transport or carpools to get to their jobs. Flexibility is a big part of modern life but does this mean we need to give up our idea of striking a work-life balance?
Many people experience issues with their work/home balance, often as a result of some kind of stress or pressure. Once we recognize how much we need balance, it becomes easier to see what needs to change, such as a career path switch or reallocating tasks.
We need to make sure that we’re taking care of our physical, emotional, mental, spiritual, and environmental health. If you feel out of balance in any of these areas, use your energy wisely.
We may be stuck in an unbalanced place, but we’re not alone. There are many others out there who feel as we do, though they may not know it or may not admit it. By acknowledging that we might be stuck, we open the door to possibility towards change and growth.
To grow as a person, you must be willing to look at yourself honestly. You need to get feedback about your performance, and then make changes based on what you learn. Your health and well-being depend upon having your priorities straight.
When we recognize a pattern in our life or work, we may choose to make changes. We do this by examining what is happening now and then planning to see how we want to change things in the future. As we consider how we want to show up in both our private and professional lives, we may choose to be more mindful and balanced.
How work-life balance can be reached?
As we evaluate our work and home balance, we may start to feel dissatisfied or even overwhelmed—our candles are burning at both ends. Our efforts to be present or to be fully available to others could suffer as well. These feelings and experiences might cause us to put off important tasks because we’re already too busy with other things.
This calls for a re-evaluation of your current work/home balance, taking stock of what you value most in life. What do you want to see happen more often? What activities do you need to put first? How might you make time for yourself? Perhaps you need to shift priorities and set aside time to do more meaningful activities, such as spending quality time alone, exercising, meditating, or going out with friends.
We need to recognize that there may be times when life gets tough. Through self-awareness, we can choose to face challenges with greater openness, clarity, patience, and equanimity.
So how do we become more self-aware?
Mindfulness and meditation – the solution to work-life balance
This can all be achieved by practicing a mindfulness technique such as, breathing exercises, meditation, yoga, tai chi, journaling, or even going for a walk… When we are tapping into the present moment and being diligent about staying connected to the present moment we are being mindful; otherwise, we’ll get caught up thinking about what could or should have been done differently in the past or worried about what may happen in the future. This is the role of mindfulness – creating awareness.
We must be aware of the choices we make to better understand what our life is about and reduce the work-life stress which occurs in our daily lives. Mindfulness is therefore a great stress management tool.
As we move forward, we may find ourselves reflecting on whether or not we’re showing up as the person we want to be. We might also consider what we could do differently to better support others in the workplace.
There have been numerous studies showing that people who work long hours tend to be more likely to suffer from depression than those who work shorter or normal hours. Workaholics may also experience physiological effects related to the heightened stressful situations associated with excessive working hours.
Weaving mindfulness into your daily schedule may be the best strategy for achieving a healthy work-life balance. Mindfulness can give you the perspective needed to make smart decisions about how much time you spend working, as well as how you spend the rest of your days.
To create an ideal work-life schedule, we often need to establish boundaries. For example, scheduling 8 hours per day for work and taking a break every 10 minutes is one method, but it may be impractical or even impossible. Our ability to evolve our schedules means that we may need to consider other boundaries, such as how we spend our free time.
With meditation practice, you can begin to notice when your time is being taken up with activities you aren’t passionate about. You might even see that there are things within your life that need attention before you get too distracted. These insights can help you manage the expectations you hold of yourself.
Meditation makes us more aware of our inner world. By understanding the inner world we can set better boundaries and habits, but we must be willing to take the time necessary to achieve this clarity.
Cultivating self-awareness, which is achieved through mindfulness, can be the key to being more productive. By accessing this moment awareness and regulation of attention we become less reactive when faced with stressors, so we’re better equipped to deal with them.
Meditation can help you channel this awareness and become more focused. You can learn how to focus better by meditating. This helps to improve your ability to perform tasks at a higher level.
Other benefits of mindfulness and meditation:
- Lower overall stress = Lower blood pressure
- Higher emotional intelligence
- Less reactivity = Better ability to handle difficult situations
- Positive impact on moods
- Better sleep quality
- Increased work-life balance
- Improved decision making, concentration, and creativity
Entrepreneur work-life balance
Remote work has become a new normal since the COVID-19 coronavirus outbreak. For many, the shift means going back to working in your home office.
Home office space is often more conducive to relaxation than traditional office environments, but there are some things you can do to make sure your home office experience is as satisfying as possible during times when you’re forced to work remotely.
Some people have even learned to search for working remotely from home jobs due to the decrease in the pressured environment and overall stress that comes with working in an office.
Furthermore, some employees have also actively changed jobs for work-life balance as they are realizing that their health has plummeted due to burnout and an inability to find that “moment of joy” in their lives. Seeking a company that is an advocate of mindfulness is becoming more and more popular through these realizations.
Many employers have also considered the question “how to improve the work-life balance of employees” as employee mental health, signs of fatigue as well as employee stress have become more evident due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Create work-life balance – 3 ideas for work-life balance working remotely from home:
Mindful management of our home office work-life balance involves using these three tactics in addition to daily mindfulness practices:
1. Routine or morning ritual
We should establish a daily morning ritual before starting work. This creates a mindset to be more productive during the day. Having such a routine helps you to feel less stressed and more focused on what matters most at work and allows us to easily prioritize and get organized for our day.
It also helps to relax us. Our bodies and minds respond well to relaxation. Our productivity as well as creativity increases when we follow a routine which results in a relaxed state of being.
2. Workspace
Designate a place as your “work zone.” You may want to consider having a dedicated space so you can get into a focused mode without distractions.
A designated workspace is important because it helps you develop better boundaries and allows you to establish a workspace that supports what you need as a professional space.
Leave the space uncluttered when you’re ready to switch gears towards your downtime and remove any items out of sight before resting. This simple design tweak can be used as a reminder to yourself of keeping your work and personal life separate.
This sense of separation between workspaces helps us better maintain a healthy work/life balance. When you’re working, it helps to create a space that feels different than other parts of your house. This compartmentalizes it in our minds too and makes it easier to “switch off” from work.
3. Replicate the “work commute” or set up
A commute can serve as a transitional exercise between home and the workplace. Since commuting between home and work is a common thing for most employees it plays an important role in the division between your personal and professional life mentally.
So now that you are working from home why not replicate this idea of commuting?
We can create a similar effect by scheduling an activity that takes us outside of the home, like a neighborhood walk, bike ride, or something as quick and simple as stepping outside for a 10-minute guided meditation as part of your lunch break.
As different as all of our work situations may be, striving to feel content, as we move between our personal and professional time, is something we all have in common. If it’s been a struggle to craft a balance that feels sustainable and fulfilling, using mindful intention and awareness throughout the day may be the key to finally unlocking a way of life that, up until now, has felt out of reach.
We can use the transitory nature of our commutes to help trigger a feeling of calmness once we’re back at our desks. In addition, commuting can help us learn how to deal better with stress.
To conclude… introducing mindfulness or meditation into your daily routine is not only very beneficial for your personal life but it greatly influences our professional, working lives too and in the long run, leads to an increase in job satisfaction. When we can learn to be self-aware through being more mindful we can create a life for ourselves that is abundant in success, joy, and balance between work and play.
