- Your Attitude about Everything is Irritable ➞
- You’ve Lost Your Passion for Your Career ➞
- Your Body Begins Showing Signs of Pressure ➞
- You Can’t Tell the Difference Between Work and Down-Time ➞
- You Can’t Remember the Last Time You Enjoyed Time Off ➞
- You Feel Continually Exhausted ➞
- You Live in a World of Clutter and Disorganization ➞
- You’re Addicted to Your Gadgets ➞
- You’re in a Constant State of Brain Fog ➞
- You’ve Normalized Your State of Anxiety ➞
(Photo by Christin Hume/Unsplash)
Having a healthy work-life balance is an important part of your physical and mental well-being. It can help keep stress at bay and prevent your from developing overwhelm. But being out of balance can sometimes be difficult to identify because it can mimic other issues.
However, there are signs that can tell you when you’re struggling with this issue. Once you know how to recognize them, you’ll find the peace and happiness you deserve by implementing a strategic plan to help you find balance.
Your Attitude about Everything is Irritable
When you’re work-life balance is out of whack, it’s going to affect you. One of the first ways that it does this is through your attitude. You may be the most mellow person in the world, but when your life gets out of balance, it’s going to cause you to have attitude issues.
All the things that used to just roll right off your back suddenly become these big deals. This happens because the inner well that used to be filled with relaxation and self-care and all the good things that made you feel good is either low or empty.
You can’t give out what you haven’t taken in. One of the first attitude issues that’s going to develop when you’re having problems maintaining good work-life balance is irritability.
It doesn’t matter if you’re usually someone who has a long fuse or if it takes a lot to make you annoyed. That was when things were good. But now that they’re not, it’s almost life you’ve taken on a completely new personality.
You might feel like snarling at others. They get on your nerves just by being in the same space that you’re in. What used to go over your head can now set you off quickly. You don’t want to put up with anything about the other person or the situation.
You just want them to go away, or you just want the situation to end. You might find that you’re quicker to walk away in frustration than you are to stay and try to work through something like you used to be able to do.
Your life may have reached the point where you know you’re not your usual self. You feel bad about snapping at people, but at the same time it feels like it’s not something you can control.
And it keeps happening. Whenever you’re around other people, they’re starting to notice that you’re irritable. They may or may not comment on it because sometimes people don’t like to poke the bear.
So they just start tiptoeing around you or leaving you alone altogether. You might realize that your attitude is an issue. But what you may not realize is that the issue isn’t going to go away because it’s rooted in the frustration that you feel.
Having a personal and professional life that’s out of balance will always reveal itself. Usually it does present to other people first before you can recognize it about your own life.
Other people might notice that you’re feeling sad. They might see that you’re not smiling as often or even at all. You just look and act unhappy. What will also come out in your attitude is not having patience.
You might find yourself losing it over simple things. Someone could walk in front of you and it makes you angry. You just want them to get out of your way. When you lose patience like this as a result of poor work-life balance, it’s always a byproduct of stress.
When you get to the level of stress, you walk around constantly feeling like you’re on edge. It’s as if one more thing is going to be the card that brings the entire house crashing down.
Not having any patience even for small issues is a sign that you desperately need to regain your work-life balance. This type of attitude signifies that you’d better take a deep breath and examine what’s going on with yourself.
Because if you keep on pushing yourself without finding balance, eventually something will give and it might not be pretty. The stuff you have to handle in life can push you out of balance.
You can develop attitude problems. You might end up saying things you never would have normally said. Your boss, partner, or customer might make you mad and instead of listening and trying to find a solution, you might tell them to take a hike.
Or you might tell your business partner to grow a brain and do their share of the work. You just don’t act like yourself anymore. Because the pressure and the stress has built up, it can reach the point to where you begin to have consequences happen as a result of your attitude.
While people understand that getting out of balance can cause problems, even the closest friend will resent having to deal with it. Especially if you start to treat people unkindly.
No one wants to put up with someone who snaps at them or acts like they don’t have time for them. What will happen is that you’ll start to lose friends, but they may not come right out and tell you to your face that they don’t want to spend time with you.
Instead, they’ll start to avoid your calls, or they won’t answer your messages. You’ll get left out of group chats. In business, your colleagues might avoid including you or responding to your messages and email.
They don’t want to be on the receiving end of your irritation. You may not get invited to get-togethers. Your family might start to give you the cold shoulder because of the way you’ve treated them.
When you’re work-life is in balance, you would be able to see this and take steps to correct it before further damage is done. But when you’re living in the middle of the imbalance, you may feel like you’re powerless to stop it or to make any changes because the effort needed just feels too great.
So you do nothing. And if that happens, the odds of getting back the peace you once had can become more difficult.
You’ve Lost Your Passion for Your Career
Another sign you’re struggling with work-life balance shows up in how you feel about your career. When it happens, you lose your passion. Your attitude becomes, “Oh well,” because you just stop caring.
You go through the motions. You might get your work done, but your heart’s not in it. You’re trudging through just waiting for the day to end, and you feel caught up in a cycle.
A tell-tale sign that you’ve lost your passion for a career that you once loved and was flourishing can be that you no longer care about new ideas or new ways to get your projects completed.
Even if you know something could be done in a better way, you don’t speak up. It takes too much effort, and you don’t want to deal with the hassle or get burdened by having anything else added to your already full plate.
When there are issues at work, you don’t have the desire to try and work on it. Instead, you just let others run with whatever ideas they have, even if you know that idea is going to end up failing.
Thanks to having your work-life balance out of whack, you don’t think about things in your career as a group effort or teamwork. Instead, your thoughts are to let someone else screw up and they’ll have to deal with the fallout.
It’s okay with you as long as they don’t bother you. It could be that the field you’re in is advancing, and in order to keep up, you need to gain more skills or knowledge. But you don’t even worry about trying because you couldn’t care less.
You don’t have the energy it takes to spend any amount of effort on anything other than showing up, doing what you absolutely must, and then going home. A sign that you’ve lost your passion for your career is that you don’t care if you get things done on time or not.
Your attitude is that if it gets done by deadline, then great. And if it doesn’t, who cares. That’s okay by you. You’ve stopped accepting responsibility for anything, and if your to-do list gets longer every day, that’s someone else’s problem to deal with.
At one point, you did care about your career and you looked forward to growing in that position and even moving up the ladder. You were excited about the company and the role that you played in working to help that company succeed.
But now, you feel like whether they succeed or not, whatever. If they don’t, you’ll just move on. With the type of overwhelm that comes from poor work-life balance, it can make it hard to care about anything at all.
This is one of the reasons that the passion for your career is affected. When you have too much going on, it’s hard to narrow it down and focus on what you should care about. This leads to a lack of motivation.
You can take or leave your career without blinking an eye. You don’t care if you’re a leader or a follower at work. You don’t mind if someone else steps in and takes over. You don’t even care if you see opportunities pop up that you once would have jumped at.
You’ve reached the place where all you can handle is your current work, and you may not even have the passions to do that well anymore either. Being in a state of apathy is what happens when you lose your passions You get stuck in the day-to-day grind of just earning the paycheck.
Other signs that you’ve lost your passions for your career include not being able to focus on the work you’re supposed to do. You find instead that you’re staring off into space and daydreaming. Or the task seems like it’s beyond your ability even when it isn’t.
You start looking for ways to stop working, like pausing to engage in gossip or constantly breaking to get coffee or snacks. You find that a good bit of your time is spent on things like checking your email or sending memes or jokes to your friends rather than working. It might be forbidden to use the computers at work on anything non-work related, but you don’t care if you get caught.
You just don’t care if you get reprimanded or even suspended. It may have been that in the past, you were the first person to agree to work on something new. You were excited at the though of delving into something that may have challenged you. But now, any new projects just look like a headache you don’t want to deal with.
Losing your passion means that you drag your feet at the idea of getting to your work tasks. You live for the weekends when you don’t have to show up at the office or think about your job.
When it is time to head to work, you don’t mind getting caught in a traffic jam. You don’t care if you make it to work on time. If the boss tells you that you’re going to have to stay after hours, that sends you into a frenzy of anger, irritability, or depression.
Maybe you never used to take all your sick days. You always showed up at work even when you weren’t feeling your best, because it mattered to you. Now if you even think you don’t feel well, you’ll take a sick leave, and may even look for ways to stretch that day or two off into a week or more.
When you don’t have a proper work-life balance, it leads to a loss of passion for your career, but that in turn leads to burnout. You can find yourself walking away from a career that you really do love if you don’t fix what’s going on in your life. You want to take steps to fix it because you don’t wan to end up with regrets later on.
Your Body Begins Showing Signs of the Pressure
The bad thing about not having a healthy balance between work and your life is that it begins to manifest physically. Your body will start to show signs that you have this kind of pressure going on.
You’ll feel overworked. You’ll feel like you’re doing so much. This is sometimes described as burning the candle at both ends, or spinning your wheels and feeling like you’re not really getting anywhere.
The way that you eat might change, too, when you’re under pressure. Some people turn to eating as an attempt to deal with the stress. They might eat junk food every chance they get, or the might start binge eating, even if it was something they never had a habit of doing before their work-life imbalance.
Eating more than you should might comfort you enough to silence your inner turmoil for a while, or not eating as much as you should might help you feel more in control. But dealing with issues by misusing food never works. Any of these choices are bad for your body and will only make you feel worse in the long run.
You might start to manifest the pressure in other ways, such as insomnia. You might start to have trouble getting to sleep and staying asleep.
The tossing and turning can lead to more stress because you’ll feel pressured to get to sleep. All of the tricks or tips you’ve learned to establish a peaceful nighttime routine won’t work when you have insomnia cause by pressure, because you’ll have a harder time turning off your mind.
Sometimes, though, the pressure flips the opposite of insomnia, and you struggle to stop sleeping instead. All you want to do is sleep, and you may have trouble dragging yourself out of bed in the morning.
Being tired all the time is another sign. It doesn’t matter how much sleep you get, you’ll still feel like you just can’t get enough. As a result, you’ll have a lagging energy level.
But dealing with stress can also cause low energy. Nothing seems to shake this either. When you don’t have enough energy, this can start to affect your mental health, too. You’re tired all the time, and not having the right kind of rest can make you anxious and worsen your irritability.
Certain physical issues as a result of pressure can also make any struggle that you have with depression much worse. One thing that living with too much pressure seems to cause in many people is a headache.
When you get headaches that are linked to stress, these can become a cycle. You can get them for weeks on end. Though you can take over-the-counter pain reliever, the headache will always come back. It will keep doing this until the pressure is relieved. Once you deal with the stress so that the pressure disperses, the headaches usually dissipate.
Another cause of stress-related headaches is tension. When you’re stressed, you tense your muscles, especially in the neck. These headaches can vary in length, but they usually happen in a cycle until you find a way to lessen the stress so the pressure resolves.
Your body is only designed to handle the kind of pressure that comes from a fight-or-flight survival response. It’s not made to live under a constant stream of pressure. When that happens, the body will always react because it’s trying to alert you that something is going on that needs your attention.
Another sign your body gives you is that you’ll develop aches and pains. These can occur anywhere in the body. Your muscles will start to feel sore, and if you have any kind of health condition such as fibromyalgia, the pressure can cause it to worsen.
If you don’t restore your work-life balance and instead just continue to try and push through, what will happen is that your aches and pains can become chronic. Developing a weakened immune system can occur as a result of pressure.
You’ll notice that you seem to catch whatever is going around. You always seem to have a cold or a runny nose. You may experience just generally not feeling well overall, and your body can’t seem to get the upper hand when you do get sick.
When you get a cut or bruise, your body won’t be able to heal as quickly as it used to because it no longer operates at its best. Healing is part of your immune system’s job, but it can’t do the job it was meant to do when it’s compromised.
You may start to have infections. These may be skin infections like rashes, and you might be more prone to developing cellulitis. You might also struggle with ear infections. Any part of your body can be affected when your immune system is weaker.
Pressure can also cause your digestive system to get out of whack. You might feel miserable and deal with bouts of constipation or diarrhea, or perhaps stomach cramps with no identifiable cause.
Sometimes your stomach will bloat when you’re under pressure, and even heart problems can happen when your body is tense. Your heart will begin to race and can reach a state of tachycardia.
This is known as stress-related tachycardia. Though in most cases, this will resolve once your life balance is restore, there can be serious consequences as a result.
As you keep trying to live out of balance, your body has to adjust to all sorts of changes. One of these changes has to do with hormones. The stress that you’re under causes various emotional responses that can lead to your body being flooded with hormones that, over time, can cause damage.
For example, high levels of cortisol are released when you’re under stress. The longer your body is flooded with cortisol, the more health problems it causes, such as high blood pressure, weakened muscles, heart disease, mod swings, and more.
You Can’t Tell the Difference Between Work and Down-Time
Many people struggle to maintain the right kind of work-life balance because they often blur the line between the two. When that happens, you’ll stop being able to tell the difference between work and down time.
You can’t tell a difference because you don’t have a plan in place that determines what’s a priority and what’s not. Instead of choosing to work on things that really do need to get done, you just try to do it all.
It’s not a handful of things that seem urgent, but everything that does. That’s because you’ve given each task the same value. Not everything you do for work or outside of work is truly important.
Sometimes when there’s a lack of work-life balance, it’s because of avoidance. Some people overwork as a way to keep from dealing with issues outside of work. Others have this imbalance because they use their life outside of work to avoid issues on the job.
But if you don’t find that work-life balance, it’s going to take a toll on every area of your life. You can reach the point of blurring the line between work and life because you don’t have a solid quitting time that you follow regardless of what’s going on.
Remember that not everything is important. The world won’t end if at the end of your scheduled work shift you get up and walk away from whatever is left undone. It might feel like chaos will ensue, but it probably won’t.
If you do feel that way, it means your emotions – your feeling of anxiety or worry – are running the show. This emotional tie is what leads many people to forgo their personal time and let work time take over.
Once the lines are blurred, it can be extremely difficult to unblur them, because it turns into a habit. You can start to depend on the hours after work that you use to get your stuff done.
This can lead you taking on more than you should at work, or not changing things when you’re under too much pressure. Most people don’t easily recognize the signs that the lines have been blurred.
One of them is if you’re putting out fires or dealing with work issues when you’re supposed to be spending time with your family. But that situation can also be reversed. You can also have your life out of balance if you’re having to deal with family or personal issues while at work.
Whether it’s dealing with work issues at home or home issues at work, the reason is the same for both of them. There’s a lack of boundaries, and this has led to the imbalance.
If you’re taking work home and feel that you could use more hours in your day to get stuff done, that’s a sign you’re struggling. You have too much on your plate if you can’t get your work done during your working hours.
Most people don’t recognize that their life is out of balance when this happens because it’s become so commonly accepted to work overtime and shortchange your personal life for work.
Often one of the reasons people start to lose insight into these issues and become unable to differentiate between work and home life is because of how they construct their to-do list.
They have a list of things they need to get done, but instead of sticking to that list, they allow it become an ever-expanding one.
For example, you might have a list that only has three things on it that you need to accomplish at work. This might be to finalize the plans on a new project, have a meeting with clients, and lay the groundwork for a new project. These could all be things that take up your entire workday’s work hours.
But then you get an email where someone wants to know if the scope of a project can be expanded because they forgot to think of something they want to add in now. This might be a valuable client, so you agree to it.
However, what should happen in this case is that any deadlines needed to finish the project should also be extended. Lines get blurred when people don’t take into consideration events that change the parameters of their work.
Instead of trying to do everything on your to-do list to the point where you can’t tell the difference between work and home life anymore, have a to-do list that’s set in stone.
Of course, true emergencies are a different matter, but it’s extremely rare that there are ever any true emergencies at work. An emergency should be defined as something that could risk life or health, or creates a dangerous situation such as a fire, flood, etc.
If you’ve allowed your work-life balance to descend into chaos because everything is considered an emergency or urgent situation, you need to stop and accept that that’s not reality. Blurring the lines between the two will cause a never-ending to-do list and emotional upheaval.
You’ll feel stressed because you’ll feel like the weight of everything is on you. You’ll feel like you’re never going to get done, never going to catch up. You may also start to feel tired and run down from the weight of all you carry.
Those are all signs that you’ve blurred the lines too much. Until you correct the imbalance, you’ll continue to suffer, and either your work, your home life, or your health will pay the price.
You Can’t Remember the Last Time You Enjoyed Time Off
If you’re struggling to find a healthy work-life balance, that struggle may be subtle or it could be so blatant that your or others notice. One of the first things to go when you’re living a life that’s out of balance is fun.
You can’t remember the last time you had something that even remotely looked like fun. Instead, your life has become one big circle of working to keep the wolf away from the door and trying to keep up with your responsibilities at home.
Fun has become one of those things you used to do, but now you can’t imagine when you’ll ever get to it again. Even when you do have time off, you’re spending it working or taking care of something at home, because there’s never enough time, never enough energy, and never and end in sight.
Your life is so out of balance that taking a vacation is something that other people do. You’ve given up on deliberately taking time away to just go and have fun. Part of that may be because you are someone who’s so committed to your job that you can’t imagine spending even paid time off away from it.
It could also be that you’re so overwhelmed at work, you can’t enjoy time off because the work stuff is in the back of your mind nagging at you until you give in.
You might hear other people talking about all the fun things they did on their time off or the vacation they took. When you hear about it, or see their smiling photos, all you can think about is how it’s never going to be you. Or you think about what a waste it is when they could have been at work trying to catch up on stuff the way that you do.
When you get caught in an imbalance between work and life, you don’t even realize at first that you’re in a rut of striving and giving in to the same emotions and the same actions day after day until they’ve become your normal.
The stress might build, and you might be under a ton of pressure, but it feels like it’s just your life and that’s the way it is. You can reach the point where you don’t enjoy your time off because the way you live your life is so different now, you don’t even connect with friends.
Instead of thinking it would be a great time to hang out with people when you have time off, you think about what a waste of time it is or how tired you are. Looking back, you may not even be able to pinpoint the last time you went out with friends or the last time you just sat and did nothing but talk and laugh.
If you reach the place where you’re struggling to enjoy your time off, it means you’re overwhelmed to the point where you’re heading for burnout. Continuing in the cycle that you’re in isn’t healthy, and your body and mind are crying out for a change, even if you’re not listening.
When you get your life out of balance, one of the other things that goes besides having fun is practicing good self-care. Self-care means you look out for yourself. You take the time you need to meet your own needs so that you have fun and recharge.
There are four main areas of your life where you need to practice self-care. You need to take care of yourself physically. That means looking out for your health and whatever habits you can do to stay healthy.
You also need to practice self-care for your mental health. This is an area that is quickly overlooked due to an imbalance between work and life. You can become angry, anxious, irritated, and even depressed when you don’t have good mental health self-care.
Looking out for your emotions is also a necessary part of self-care. This might be doing things like journaling to let your emotions out. If you’re dealing with something, you need to express how you feel. By doing so, you help relieve some of the pressure on yourself.
Your spiritual health is another area of self-care that’s important. Spiritual self-care is something that helps restore peace and calmness, which enables you to better deal with the pressure or stress you may be under.
Some people assume that spiritual self-care means being religious, but it doesn’t have to be. This type of self-care can be found through meditation, or visiting a spot in nature that speaks to your heart, or spending some time reflecting on your inner self through mindfulness.
Establishing a self-care routing can help you to enjoy your time off, even if you don’t have your work-life balance fully restored yet.
You can practice yoga, which helps relieve pressure in the body and mind and emotions. Or you could go for a walk. A change of venue away from the office or from your home can calm you and helps the tension leave the body. You can listen to the birds or other sounds of nature as you walk.
Seeing the beauty in nature helps, too. Like looking at the way the sky changes as the sun rises or begins to go down. You can look at the flowers. If you can’t get outside, you can listen to outdoor sounds like rain, or whatever it is that soothes you.
You can also practice self-care by dancing. You don’t have to be good at it. Just play your favorite songs and get up and move. Being physical helps you get back to remembering when you used to have fun.
Do things like riding a bike or just going outside and sitting and soaking in the sunlight. Toss a ball or throw a frisbee. Do things that you find joy in, and it’ll relax you.
When you do something that relaxes you, it works to remind you of all the times that you used to have fun. It rebuilds your connections to those memories.
You Feel Continually Exhausted
Many people continue to push themselves when their lives are out of balance. They think the answer to making it is to just keep going. But this isn’t the answer, and it only leads to exhaustion.
The exhaustion is a by-product of one of the symptoms of imbalance, which is sleeplessness. There’s such a strong connection between the mind and body that when one of them isn’t doing well, the other also suffers.
Your imbalance stresses you and impacts your emotions, Then you can’t sleep, and you’ve used up all your resources. The difficult thing about sleeplessness is that while one of the root causes is stress, at the same time, when you can’t sleep your stress is worsened. So you get caught up in something that feels like you’ll never gain the upper hand.
One of the reasons why you’re struggling with constant exhaustion has to do with the way your body tries to “course correct” when something goes wrong. It doesn’t leave you to deal with the imbalance from the resulting stress alone. Instead, what you body does is alert the pituitary glad, which then reaches out to tell your adrenals to get busy making more cortisol.
Cortisol is a direct response to the stress of living life out of balance. What this cortisol is supposed to do is weaken as you go about your regular day. So then by the time night rolls around, the cortisol level is supposed to be minimal.
But what happens when you’re struggling with work-life balance is that your cortisol isn’t waning. It’s staying revved up because your glands have alerted the body that stress is going on and your body is preparing to fight or get you out of a situation.
Since there’s no real physical threat, you have unnecessary cortisol. You get amped up with no way to expend it. In the meantime, that cortisol has caused your blood pressure to rise and your heart beat faster, both things it’s naturally supposed to do in response to a threat.
Having your body flooded with this hormone leaves you feeling exhausted. When you’re dealing with an imbalance in your life that’s led to sleeplessness, the stress that led you to this point is caused by either acute or chronic stress.
Acute means the stress isn’t going to last, and once you get all your ducks in a row and fix the imbalance, all will be well for you again. The sleeplessness will go away.
Chronic means you’re dealing with long-term stress from the imbalance, and this kind is tougher to deal with.
It causes more mental and physical health problems, and can make overcoming sleeplessness more difficult. That doesn’t mean it’s impossible, just that you’ll have to put in more effort to reclaim your calm and be able to rest at night.
A way to tell if what you’re dealing with is sleeplessness is to pay attention to how often you’re dealing with the issue. Losing sleep once in a while is normal and happens to most people. However, if you’re struggling with it consistently every week and it’s been ongoing for several weeks, then it means there’s a definite issue going on.
There are some physical health problems that can contribute to sleeplessness when a work-life imbalance is present. That’s why it’s important to practice good self-care.
Sometimes people don’t make the connection between sleeplessness and the exhaustion they experience. They think the just had a restless night. But there are definitive signs of sleeplessness. Check yourself, and if you have two or more of the symptoms, then you should take steps to fix the problem.
While dealing with the constant fatigue you have, if you notice that you have problems focusing on what you’re supposed to be doing, that can be a sign.
If you’re struggling to recall certain events or situations, that can be a sign that your memory function has been affected by lack of sleep. You might be able to go through the motions and keep up appearances with work and your home life, but you’re not operating at full capacity.
Maybe you’re having trouble being yourself. You might mess up more when you try to do things. If you notice a lack of desire to want to do anything, even the activities you’ve always enjoyed, that can be a symptom of sleeplessness.
One of the keys to determining if the sleeplessness you’ve been experiencing is connected to a work-life imbalance is how it’s manifesting in your emotional state. Besides being irritable, most people will also experience bouts of anger for no apparent reason. They may also be less likely to walk away from a situation, and instead will want to stay to argue, often in an aggressive manner.
While it can be tempting to just attribute sleeplessness as something that’s not that important and believe that you’ll resolve it eventually, the problem is how your life gets impacted by it in the meantime.
Sleeplessness can cause you to have problems with work. You may find that you argue with your colleagues about non-important issues. Or you might say something you normally wouldn’t.
You can reach the place where you become so difficult to deal with that you could be banned from your networking groups, and then you’ll have the added stress to trying to deal with the consequences of that sudden upheaval.
You might lose patience easily with your family or friends. As a result, they might start walking on eggshells around you or avoid you altogether.
Sleeplessness also makes any physical ailment or medical condition worse. If you don’t work through the imbalance in your life, the exhaustion and the consequences it causes might never go away.
You Live in a World of Clutter and Disorganization
An imbalance between your work and home life will always leave clues. Some of the clues include clutter and disorganization. It happens easily. You may start out something with good intentions, but because you’re living with an imbalance, you can quickly lose control and order.
Then you get overwhelmed, and once that happens then anything that’s not immediate gets pushed to the side to deal with later. Only later never comes. So the clutter and the disorganization keeps growing.
One of the signs that this might be what’s going on in your life is you might feel like you’re trying to handle everything, but you feel so out of control. All the hours of the day are accounted for, and you’re busy from the time you get up until the time you go to bed.
But though you’re busy, you’re not actually getting anything done. It feels like you’re only shuffling responsibilities around. When you reach the point of clutter and disorganization, all the areas of your life will suffer.
Not only will your work and home life suffer, but you’ll have issues keeping up with your health, too. You’ll let go of things like trying to eat healthy or exercise in an attempt to “gain” time to try and tame what’s out of control.
The more you push trying to move forward without dealing with the heart of the matter, which is the work-life imbalance, the more chaos you’ll experience. You’ll end up hitting the point of exhaustion.
What ends up happening when there are these signs of imbalance is you’ll try to fix it the best way you know how, which is following tips on organizing and getting rid of clutter.
You might get a handle on things, but it’ll only be temporary as long as you don’t fix the work-life situation that caused it in the first place. The thing about all the clutter and disorganization is it never remains on the outside.
The outside is just a physical manifestation of what’s going on inside your body. A cluttered and chaotic life is a sign that you live that way inwardly, too, and that shows up as feeling anxious, irritable, and out of control.
Maybe you don’t believe your world is that disorganized. There are signs that you can check to see if they apply to you. One of these is you’re constantly forgetting appointments even when they’re written in your planner, because you forget to check your planner since you’re too busy putting out fires all the time.
You forget important things at work like a project deadline. Or you accidentally blow off something you and your partner promised to do at home like a date night or a dinner out. So you end up scrambling. Your work suffers and your relationships suffer, too.
Another sign of clutter and disorganization is you have everything you need to get through the week, but you don’t know where it is is.
You can’t find the new container of laundry detergent because you put it somewhere that you can’t now recall. Having trouble remembering what you did with stuff is a sign of a cluttered mind.
You might end up not having personal hygiene items because you were so disorganized that basic necessities never made it onto your shopping list. Or you thought you still hand things on hand that you really didn’t.
You’re always having to make a trip out to the store to pick up something. Or you’re having to rush to pay a bill that you forgot to take care of. A work-life imbalance will allow clutter and disorganization to permeate every corner of your life.
You can’t find important files on your laptop because none of the are organized. Or you have so many files tucked here and there that trying to find the one you need is an exercise in frustration. You feel like you’re going on a technological Easter egg hunt every time you need to get your hands on the information you want.
You miss important messages in your email because it’s overflowing with messages you “meant” to read and get back to. Important phone messages get missed because your voicemail hasn’t been cleaned out in months, so no one can leave a message.
However, all of the outward chaos of clutter and disorganization will end once you restore your work-life balance. You’ll be able to accomplish what you need to do both at work and at home. The reason that you end up in the state that you’re in with the outward mess is because you’re trying to do more than you can capably handle.
You’ve assigned equal value to all the stuff you need to do without prioritizing anything. This creates pressure and the drive to handle more than you should at any given time. You can’t truly focus on one thing when you’re trying to focus on everything.
Another reason is because you may realize everything’s a mess, so you put off even starting that project at work or dealing with that issue at home. It feels like it’s too much to deal with, so you keep putting it off. Which of course allows the situation to become a bigger deal with bigger consequences if you don’t accomplish it.
Finally, a big reason for clutter and disorganization is not understanding what steps you need to take to deal with the cause of the situation.
Most people look at all the junk in their work and home life and see it as a huge mountain to tackle. Then they get discouraged because they don’t know what to do or what to start on first.
Because they look at it as a whole, they fail to see that the mountain is made up of smaller rocks or tasks that can easily be handled if they’re broken down into manageable steps.
You can’t accomplish a big work project overnight if you’re striving to fix your work-life balance. But you can make a plan, put that plan into motion, and succeed. It’s the same as with any area of your life, your relationships, your health, your finances, etc. It only takes baby steps in a simplified process to start seeing changes.
You’re Addicted to Your Gadgets
Before the internet came along, most people didn’t have a problem maintaining proper work-life balance. There simply wasn’t the technology to check in on work-related issues at home other than phoning the office.
But now that everyone is plugged in, upsetting the balance between your work and the rest of your life is not only easy, it’s addicting. You might own a smartphone, a laptop, and various other devices that can connect you with work.
Because these gadgets allow you to stay checked in, you lose track of the line that divides your professional and your private life. By staying so connected even during your down-time, you stay tuned in to work.
The reason that so many people get obsessed with checking out work stuff at home is because they fear something’s going to crop up and if they don’t check on it, they might miss out.
Blowing off the boundary between your work and the rest of your life means that you’re never truly “off.” You just stay plugged in and can be reached even if you’re in the middle of sleep.
This means that your body never gets the necessary down-time it needs in order to stay healthy. It also means that your stress and anxiety can stay amped up. Most people don’t understand what’s at stake from an addiction to gadgets.
You can lose sleep with this type of addiction, or have broken sleep because you answer when someone calls or messages you. Or you get up in the middle of the night to check what’s going on.
You’re so tuned in to work that you’re only giving your family and friends half your attention, if that much. You’re not fully present. When you do this, others notice.
Having an addiction to gadgets shortens your attention span, making it more difficult for you to be able to focus. You might thing that with your gadget addiction affects your work-life balance, it’s not a big deal. But what you may not understand is that, just like any other addiction, gadget addiction has impacts on the brain.
Just like an addiction to drugs can cause harmful changes in your cognitive abilities, so can gadget addiction. It has the power to make you lose the ability to concentrate at work.
It can make memory recall difficult. Your emotions can change due to this type of addiction, and you may end up having a short fuse so you snap at other people.
You might suddenly feel angry or anxious for no reason. You might get hit with a bout of sadness. If you’re still hesitant to believe that your gadgets are one of the culprits behind your work-life imbalance, you can look at the following symptoms to see if any apply to you.
You often put off things you should do in order to check your business social media or website. You blow off plans to stay offline. You intend to check on work for “just a second,” and the next thing you know a substantial amount of time has passed.
Spending time on your gadgets makes you happy, and when you don’t get to then you feel down or irritable. You get the exact same reaction as someone who’s been on an addictive substance and needs a hit but can’t get it.
When you lose internet or can’t get online, you go through withdrawal. An internet outage at home feels like a big deal and you can’t just take it all in stride.
Other signs that point to a work-life imbalance due to your gadgets include checking all your notifications even if you just checked them a few minutes ago. You find yourself constantly refreshing to see what new message came in.
You may also not care to go somewhere or do something if it means you have to leave your gadget behind. Or you go out but find you’re not paying attention to the activity because you want to check what’s new online.
If you’ve tried to limit your access to your gadgets but just can’t, that’s also a sign that you’re addicted.
Spending too much time out of balance due to your gadget addiction can lead to health problems, like neck strain from constantly looking down. You can also experience problems with your wrists, such as developing tendon issues from overuse.
In order to restore your work-life balance, you have to find a way to break the connection. You need to have that time where you’re not plugged in so you can relax and let your body and mind recharge.
Most people carry their gadgets with them, or have quick access to them. They key to breaking the addiction is to limit your ability to use the gadget.
This may mean not having your cell phone on when you’re at home. Or it might mean leaving the house and leaving all the gadgets behind.
Be stricter about the work intrusions that you’ve allowed to go on. Don’t check in with the business email when you’re off work. Don’t call a colleague or client to “just check” how a project is going. It might be hard to believe, but it can wait until you return to work the next day.
If you have apps on your smartphone that easily let you check your office email, remove them. Set yourself free! Restore your life’s balance, and you’ll be healthier and happier for it.
You’re in a Constant State of Brain Fog
You might be able to handle a work-life imbalance for a short period of time. But as it continues, it begins to affect you, and one of the signs that it’s become an issue in your life is when you feel like you’re constantly dealing with brain fog.
There are many ways that people define this condition. What it means is that your mental clarity isn’t what it should be. You’ll notice this condition when you’re trying to think something through but you just can’t seem to gather your thoughts.
You’re struggling to easily accomplish tasks you’ve done dozens of times already. No matter how much knowledge you have on a topic, you can’t seem to understand what’s being talked about.
When you are working on something, you’re having a hard time keeping your focus on it, and sometimes you might be in the middle of working and forget what you were supposed to be doing.
A sign of brain fog can also be that you just can’t seem to find any appeal in the work that you do or in your life outside of the office. Nothing prompts you to care about either, not even the thought of losing your job or damaging a relationship.
The fatigue that you’ve been experiencing might be something that you’ve just chalked up to being run down, but being physically worn out can also be a sign of brain fog.
It’s the same with your emotional or mental capacity. You feel like you don’t have the focus or the ability to deal with another thing.
A major cause of brain fog is stress. And stress is a common factor among people who are struggling with work-life balance.
There’s so much going on in your mind, and you can’t turn off your thoughts. Your responsibilities have piled onto you with such weight that it’s become too much, and no matter how much you try you can’t keep up with your normal routine and activities.
Sometimes narrowing down the reason you’re experiencing brain fog is pretty simple. It could be a matter of not getting enough sleep. When you don’t get enough sleep, it can cause you to feel like you’re moving in slow motion all day.
You feel like your brain is trying to think through mud. Once you get some sleep, this type of brain fog is eliminated.
You can also experience brain fog when you don’t get enough to eat. If you’re pushing yourself at work because of a poor work-life balance, your eating habits can change. You might forget to eat lunch, or you might be rushing out the door in the mornings because you have too much to do so you don’t take time to eat breakfast.
Skipping meals not only leads to nutritional deficiencies, but it also leads to brain fog because your body needs food as fuel in order run physically as well as mentally. This is another cause of brain fog that’s easily dealt with once it’s recognized.
But most people who are struggling with brain fog don;t have it because of something so simple to fix. They’re dealing with it because of stress buildup.
There may be a project they’re in charge of and they were already in over their heads. They were staying late at the the office, taking work home, and working on weekends.
Having more than you can feasibly deal with can trigger brain fog. Once you lighten the load, things start getting better.
For many people though, brain fog isn’t short term, because they deal with things for a long time. The stress builds because their way of life, the work-life imbalance, has become a habit.
It’s so ingrained in them, their way of spinning their wheels and living out of balance, that they don’t even realize what’s going on. They think they’re just under the weather and if they just keep on trying, it will eventually get better.
It won’t. Because brain fog rooted in stress doesn’t go away until the cause is identified and dealt with. With brain fog, you may be putting off doing the very things that could help you.
When you’re stressed because of a poor work-life balance and you have too much on your plate, the answer isn’t to work harder or faster to try and get everything done. That only worsens brain fog.
The answer goes against the ingrained habits that led you where you are in the first place. When your personal and professional life gets out of balance, you probably give up doing what can make a difference in your life to keep brain fog at bay.
You cut your sleep short. You give up sleeping the necessary amount of hours you need to stay healthy and mentally alert in an attempt to try and gain time. But you never gain time when it’s robbing you of something else.
You may have tried to use a substance to deal with the brain fog, such as drinking excessive caffeine in an attempt to get back your alertness. But too much caffeine keeps you up at night. You lose sleep and then you’re right back where you started.
During a work-life imbalance, you may have given up healthy habits because you thought you didn’t have the energy. For example, you may have stopped exercising, citing both lack of time and lack of energy. But exercising actually gives you energy. You gain more time in productivity when you exercise than when you don’t.
It’s the same with all the other good habits you need to stick to, like eating healthy and taking time off. All of these things help beat brain fog.
You’ve Normalized Your State of Anxiety
Just because you’re doing something doesn’t make it normal. Just because you live a certain way doesn’t make that normal either. But what happens when you have anxiety due to a work-life imbalance is that cortisol begins to flood the body.
Normally, that cortisol level returns to normal when the situation that triggered the anxiety is dealt with. But living in a state of imbalance where you’ve blurred the line between work and life, the cortisol level remains consistently high.
If you’ve learned to live like that, then you’ve normalized your state of anxiety. This is a sign that you’re struggling and you need to take action to fix your life.
When you have anxiety as a result of the way you’re living day-to-day, it impacts the adrenal glands to keep giving you more cortisol. You can get used to the elevated amount of cortisol. So used to it that you have trouble functioning without it.
You might realize that your state of anxiety is a direct result of stress and blow it off as normal because everyone has stress in their life.
You know that there’s no such thing as a completely stress-free life. This is true, that you can’t live completely stress-free. But you can deal with the stress so that it doesn’t negatively affect your health.
Not only will untreated anxiety cause you mental distress, but it’ll also make you sick if you don’t address it.
You might think that all anxiety is the same, which is why you’ve normalized it. But the problem is that it’s not all the same, and there are different states of anxiety, and these states are progressive. Each state of anxiety you go through causes a reaction not only in the brain but also in the body.
Your body learns to adjust to these states. The first state that you experience in normalizing anxiety is what everyone goes through when faced with something that causes them stress. This is the fight-or-flight event.
For example, if you have to get on-screen to give a presentation, it’s normal for there to be a physiological reaction because you’re stressed about the speech.
The fear revs up the anxiety as a result of the adrenaline your adrenals pump you full of. This adrenaline is given to you in order to enable you to “survive” the situation you’re facing that’s caused you to feel stressed.
Once this state subsides, your body begins to return to normal, or its “pre-anxiety” state. It gets busy working to bring down the level of cortisol you received. At the same time, signals are sent between your parasympathetic and sympathetic nervous system that everything is okay and you’re not in danger.
Your heart will stop pounding and will return to its regular level. Your blood pressure will, too. You’ll stop sweating and fearing about what might happen.
At the same time, while your body is going into chill mode, it’s still ready to react at the first sign your life may be at stake.
All of that is normal and won’t affect your health long term. However, when you normalize a state of anxiety, the normal reaction after a stress event doesn’t happen. No cool-down period takes place.
Instead, the body stays tense, ready to defend you. As a result of you living with the anxiety without addressing it, your body and mental responses change to accept the anxiety.
You may not even realize that your body never returned to normal pre-anxiety state because you can’t always feel these changes right away. But this is your body’s reaction to trying to deal with the anxiety that you won’t or haven’t dealt with.
It tries to do this in order to protect you, but the opposite is happening. Harm is being done instead.
Trying to help you with the anxiety, your body keeps the cortisol coming. This means the organs that react when you’re stressed are going to continue to live as if you’re in fight-or-flight mode. They’re not going to level back down.
While you might reach the place where you feel like you can function normally with the elevated cortisol, your body can’t. At this point, living in a high cortisol state, your body begins to wear down.
You reach the point of extreme fatigue. The fatigue shows up in the way you can no longer deal with things without getting angry or irritable. You lose patience and may have emotional outbursts.
It’s common to develop deeper anxiety as well as depression as a side effect of high cortisol. During this state, the body has exhausted itself. You begin to experience noticeable physical problems.
When checked, your blood pressure or heart rate will be too high. Your immune system will be weak. Because your immune system is now weakened, you’ll be more likely to develop infections, and you can also set the stage for more serious health problems.
In the final state of living with high cortisol, you’ll reach burnout. You’ll no longer be able to cope mentally or physically. This is something that must be addressed or it can take a toll on you over time.
Finding and achieving proper work-life-balance is essential to finding and maintaining personal satisfaction in life. Before you can enjoy it, you have to be open and willing to recognize the signs that something is causing a breakdown in the system so you can address it and put yourself back on a path to happiness and contentment.