Worrying about work-life balance is throwing your health off-balance.
People who spent time thinking over and over again about conflicts between their professional and personal lives had more health and emotional problems, the journal Stress & Health reported.
And this comes at a time when 1 in 3 full-time employees in the world’s largest economies say that the 24/7 global marketplace makes a healthy work-life balance harder to find.
Oregon State University surveyed 203 adults in romantic relationships, roughly two-thirds of which had at least one child at home. They looked at each subject’s repetitive thought, or how frequently they agonized about clashes between work and family — such as whether to attend a meeting or a child’s baseball game.
Frequent repetitive thought was linked to negative health outcomes such as less satisfaction, feeling more fatigue, perceiving one’s health to be worse, and 22 actual negative health conditions, including diabetes and stroke.
The problem comes from dwelling on the divide between work and home, the experts say, because mulling over it keeps the stressor active, which gets in the way of recovering from it.
“Stay in the moment and acknowledge what you are feeling, recognize that those are real feelings, and process them, putting things in perspective,” suggested lead author Kelly D. Davis.
So if you miss your child’s game for an important meeting, “the person could acknowledge the disappointment and frustration he was feeling as legitimate, honest feelings, and then also think in terms of ‘these meeting conflicts don’t happen that often, there are lots of games left for me to watch my child play, etc.,'” said Davis.
This backs a previous study published in the American Sociological Review that found employees who were allowed to make their own schedules — as long as their projects were completed on time and their goals were met — not only performed their jobs as well as the control group working a regular schedule, but they were also healthier, sleeping better and experienced less stress. The health benefits also trickled down to their children, who slept and behaved better.
Study authors noted the work-life dilemma is a problem shared by both men and women, as well as by workers without children, but who might be caring for a sick relative or aging parent at home.
The writers called on workplaces to better support employees, such as by offering mindfulness training or implementing a more supportive culture that recognizes that workers have lives outside of the office.
“There can be a good return on investment for businesses for managing work-family stress, because positive experiences and feelings at home can carry over to work and vice versa,” wrote Davis.
Problem is, there’s a disconnect between what employers and employees see as the perfect balance. A 2015 study found that while 67% of employers felt their workers had work-life balance, 45% of their employees disagreed. And 1 in 5 of the employees surveyed said they spent more than 20 hours working outside of the office, during their own personal time each week.
That doesn’t sound very balanced.
“We need changes in the ways in which organizations treat their employees,” Davis added. “We can’t deny the fact that work and family influence one another, so by improving the lives of employees, you get that return on investment with positive work and family lives spilling over onto one another.”
