Sustaining a work-life balance is related to separating your professional and personal lives, so you don’t deprive one or the other. Both of these aspects are vital to our happiness, as you will see below as we outline four main reasons why work-life balance is so important.
- Grow Your Interests
If your life rotates around work, then you miss out on all the different ways to experience life fully. Maintaining interest outside of work improves your quality of life and increases your skills, making you well-rounded. One of the real pleasures of life is learning new things and then sharing those with others. When you have a balanced life, you have time to investigate fresh ideas and learn skills that you can share, improving other lives as well as your own.
- Build Healthy Relationships
No one would claim that the relationships in our lives aren’t important. But we see people behaving as though they weren’t all the time. It’s nearly impossible to build and maintain healthy, loving relationships when we’re always at work or thinking about work. Our bodies and minds aren’t designed to live in isolation or to work 24/7. We all need to take breaks and spend time with people we enjoy being with and who love us. When we don’t allow room in our lives for that, we can’t be truly happy and fulfilled.
- Maintain Your Health
All work and no play makes for both short-term and long-term health issues. Studies show that people who live consistently out of balance have higher rates of health disease, diabetes, and strokes. That doesn’t even touch the mental health issues that come about by enduring constant stress and extended work hours. Nothing is more important than your health. If you don’t have good health, it’s impossible to have a high quality of life. Ignoring your health now by staying in the office will have consequences later on that you won’t be able to ignore.
- It Increases Productivity
Your company needs employees who are productive and hard-working. But that doesn’t mean you should be expected to work long hours every week. You may feel that by staying for unreasonably long hours, you’re contributing a great deal. But the value of work is undoubtedly inferior since we are built to focus and work for certain amounts of time. Those employees who maintain a work-life balance are more productive both in the office and in life than those who don’t.