Challenging Stress, Burnout and Rust-Out

Finding Balance in Busy Lives

Teena J. Clouston

• Publisher: Jessica Kingsley Publishers
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781849054065
• eBook ISBN: 9780857007865
• Topic: Medicine
• Subtopic: Occupational Therapy

A balanced lifestyle enhances health, happiness and wellbeing. With practical techniques and strategies, this book explores how this balance can be found and how stress and anxiety, which are linked to being overworked and over busy, may be alleviated.

It begins by examining the state of work-life imbalance in our everyday lives and discussing real life examples from a group of professionals working in health and social care. Their stories and experiences illustrate the problems caused by our modern, work-driven society and resonate with how many of us are living today. The author then provides practical tools and techniques to address this overwork culture and achieve a more balanced lifestyle. These simple, yet effective, strategies can be implemented quickly in everyday life.

This practical resource addresses a problem affecting many professionals worldwide. It will be of particular interest to helping professionals, including occupational therapists, counsellors and therapists, and will allow them to apply the theories of work-life balance to real life in straightforward and tangible ways. The stories and techniques will also resonate with anyone interested in transforming their overworked or overburdened lives.

PART 1

UNDERSTANDING LIFESTYLE BALANCE AND ITS LINK TO WELLBEING

CHAPTER 1

WHAT IS LIFE BALANCE?

INTRODUCTION

Asking the question ‘what is life balance?’ is an interesting one, because there are a variety of different views on it. As described in the Preface, this book sees life balance as a complex and interconnected web that includes the social and natural worlds in which we live, which link together to achieve a meaningful sense of personal fulfillment, harmony and wellbeing in life.

Whilst this kind of complexity and vision of life balance may be relatively unique, some of the concepts, such as the need for spending time in meaningful activities and the integration of life domains (especially paid work and life) are not. These kinds of perspectives are found in a variety of diverse theoretical backgrounds such as occupational science (the theory and knowledge base of the profession of occupational therapy), sociology, psychology and feminism, to mention but a few of the interested parties.

Occupational science encapsulates its theories of life balance into a philosophy it calls occupational balance. This philosophy pertains that wellbeing can only be found in a personally meaningful balance across a variety of different life domains. For others, the term work–life balance is frequently used as a euphemism for balancing the demands of paid work with family commitments, thus excluding a more complex vision of life’s myriad activities; whilst personal choice and preference are considered in their ideas, personal meaning is less clearly articulated than in the notions of occupational balance.

Strangely enough, although these various theories do differ in perspectives, they do also share some common themes, so to simplify for the reader I am going to discuss them under the two broad headings of first, work–life balance and second, occupational balance and personal meaning, because this will facilitate discussion of both the differences and the commonalities in the ideas held about life balance.

WORK–LIFE BALANCE THEORIES

Work–life balance theories, as the name suggests, tend to be concerned with the balance between the paid work domain and, specifically in this context, family and caring commitments. At the most basic level, the theory goes that people cross the borders (Clark 2000) between the domain of paid work and the home, trying to meet the demands to participate meaningfully in both, but are challenged in achieving this because they call on the same pot of time and energy reserves. This suggests that supplies are insufficient to meet demands and begs the question, why are we doing too much?

The idea of conflict or tension between paid work and the home domain is, in many ways, quite culturally specific, shaped by the fiscal models of Western neoliberal capitalism. As discussed in the introduction, neoliberalism is a branch of capitalism that drives economic growth and productivity through global markets (consumerism and consumption of resources); that, in turn, intensifies pressures in paid work and this means workers become ever more busy and have even less time for activities outside of paid work, including the essential family domain, fuelling the conflict between these two critical aspects of daily life.

Now whilst this conflict may, at first, seem surmountable (for example through support networks) the problem is that this same social structure intensifying working practices also promotes the adult labor model, which means that people of working age, irrespective of their caring responsibilities, are expected to participate in paid work. Now again, this seems fair: if we can work, why not? But when you consider a third driver expects an ethically and morally sound investment in family life, you have to begin to wonder how all that can be achieved effectively by one person.

Under these circumstances, it is notable that neoliberal labor markets do recognize reciprocity or mutuality between life domains, because they maintain that moves to increase flexibility in the workplace are there to support the conflicts employees experience from the home into the workplace and vice versa. However, in reality this kind of market concerns itself only with the former, and the overflow of pressures from paid work into the home is less considered. Thus flexible working is more a tool of employee efficiency rather than one to promote employee wellbeing (we will return to this point throughout the book). By the nature of the need for growth and productivity, neoliberalism favors participation in paid work above all other life domains, and consequently creates work–life imbalance. Sadly, as a consequence of global markets, this kind of fiscal and human productivity model is no longer exclusively a Western phenomenon and has become an approach applied to economies and labor markets across the world. This leads us nicely to the categories of occupational balance, personal meaning and choice.

OCCUPATIONAL BALANCE, PERSONAL MEANING AND CHOICE

Theories promoting occupational balance, meaning and choice believe that participation in meaningful activities and a balance between multiple life domains (differing from the two-dimensional notion of paid work and family/caring found in work–life balance theories) can promote a sense of identity and enhance personal wellbeing: ‘To live is to enfold multiple occupations [or activities] which provide enjoyment, payment, personal identity and more’ (Townsend 1997, p.19).

Debates over the number and complexity of life activities (or occupations) proliferate, recognizing myriad ideologies stretching from the simplistic triads of self-care, productivity and leisure common in occupational science (e.g. Creek 2003) and the work, rest and play scenario made famous by the Mars bar confectionary advert, to the more complex, which includes research by Cummins (1996) identifying over 170 life domains, including paid work, financial resources, leisure, dwelling and neighborhood, family, friendships, social participation and health, to mention but a few.

At this juncture it is perhaps important to note that whilst I do make reference to different domains of life and activities or occupations in the book, using terms such as paid work, family, domestic, leisure and social pursuits to clarify points, I will introduce and promote a model found in occupational science literature that avoids the categorization of life activities in this way by describing life as the purposive or active doing types of occupations in life (like paid work); the being activities, which are those that are more restive, recuperative and appreciative in nature; the becoming activities that promote self-actualizing and self-identity; and the belonging activities, those that are relational in nature or create a sense of belonging. I will describe these categories in more detail later in the chapter.

WHAT DO WE MEAN BY PERSONAL MEANING?

Theoretical underpinnings in occupational science also identify a specific interest in the personal meaning and subjective experience of the individual. Explicitly, these investigate what the value and meaning of activities (or occupations) are for the individual and a belief that personal wellbeing, balance and harmony are found through creating the space and time to incorporate these key occupations into everyday life.

In a similar vein, sociologists Thompson and Bunderson (2001) have argued that the subjective meaning people assign to activities is imperative to finding a sense of balance because when these preferences match or are congruent with our personal interests and who we want to be, so they promote a personal sense of self (a congruent and coherent self) and are identity-affirming because we are living our lives the way that we want to, feel happy about and therefore gain personal fulfillment, harmony and wellbeing from.

Following on from this kind of thinking, theorists like Csikszentmihalyi (1997; 2002) (mentioned in the introduction) identified the value of engagement and using psychic energy, that is, giving one’s full attention and focus to an activity to facilitate personal pleasure, fulfillment and subsequently wellbeing in life.

The problem with these theories is that to spend time in activities that achieve a sense of personal meaning requires an initial investment of time and energy in order to kick-start the process. This requires surplus energy, initiative and drive, something very hard to find for the exhausted, overworked, over-busy or de-motivated individual who tends to migrate towards the less challenging, passive or mind-numbing pursuits of watching TV, consumerism (shopping or browsing… you know the one… retail therapy), or the virtual worlds of computer games and social media.

If this is not you, how many people do you know that use one or more of these mindless (in the sense that you do not have to engage or think) activities in their lives? In this book I argue that achieving and sustaining a personally meaningful life balance requires time and energy to be reserved and given to pursuits that are engaging and can capture your attention, passion or interest because this can facilitate a sense of creativity, fulfillment, wellbeing and meaning in life. But, as I have already intimated, finding the time and energy to do this in neoliberal market economies is more than a little problematic, and one of those problems is personal choice.

THE QUESTION OF CHOICE

The option to access personal meaningful pursuits raises the question of making choices about what we do or at least the issue of free choice in determining how we spend our time. In the development of her preference theory sociologist Catherine Hakim has argued that people in affluent market economies have been given greater space to make active choices about how they form a salient work–life balance because of greater flexibility in the workplace; but she also notes that an individualized approach to worker efficiency and a growing sense of personal responsibility for performance in the workplace means:

Men and women not only gain the freedom to choose their own biography, values and lifestyle, they are forced to make their own decisions because there are no universal certainties or collectively agreed conventions, no fixed models of the good life, as in traditional or early modern industrial societies. (Hakim 2006, p.286)

Now whilst Hakim uses the word ‘forced’ in terms of people having to make decisions about how they live their lives, and illustrates how neoliberalism has increased uncertainty and consequently vulnerability in the labor market (I will talk about this in depth later), she interestingly suggests that the choices we make about life balance are freely chosen. In particular, she describes women as having more choices than men in how they manage paid work and family commitments because they can choose to be work-centered (i.e. place work as their most important activity and build a career); to be home-centered (put the home domain as the priority activity; this tends to be the full-time mother or carer but is not exclusively so) or to be adaptive, which means that you choose to participate in both paid work and home domains without giving a fixed priority to either. The latter, Hakim (2006) believes, is the most common choice that women make in modern affluent societies. Alternatively, men are described as tending to be relatively homogenous in their decision-making about work and to be generally adopting the more work-focused pattern, because this of course is the traditional patriarchal model of the male breadwinner.

In many ways Hakim’s theory is common sense and offers few surprises to those who work in the more affluent of Western economies, but even in these settings choice is on a sliding scale and consequently I cannot agree that the choices we make are necessarily freely chosen because these choices are limited by the options available to us in the fabric of the society in which we are embedded. In neoliberal societies the norms expected of all working age adults is to be in paid work, to perform in paid work and to support fiscal growth or production. The problem with this is that this kind of system may offer more choices in terms of when and where we work (because this supports flexible working patterns) but it has done little to accommodate the relational or family concept of society, or indeed the concept of individual wellbeing through the sustainable use of the human resources of time and energy; rather, it drives a performance orientation.

Of even more concern is that we have known about these pressures for years and yet have done little to address it. Take for example this comment from Adolph M...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Of Related Interest
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Acknowledgements
• Contents
• List of Figures, Boxes and Tables
• Preface: What is this Book About?
• Part 1 Understanding Lifestyle Balance and Its Link to Wellbeing
• Part 2 Moving from ‘Doing’ Too Much to Reconciling Being, Becoming and Belonging
• Glossary
• References
• Subject Index
• Author Index
• Also available