Work-Life Imbalance is Causing You Stress

Stress and Work-Life Balance

During the question and answer at a recent workshop, a gentleman asked what he should do about his four-hour daily commute. Let’s call him Mr. Fourhour.

Two hours each way to work.

He felt that God had given him his job. The work was a good fit, the pay was excellent, and it seemed to be a platform for spiritual as well as professional impact.

He also felt that he could not uproot his family and ask them to move.

After some more dialogue, it was clear that he also felt that he was letting his family down.

He asked me what I thought he should do.

What would you say to Mr. Fourhour?

We’ll come back to our friend, at the end of this piece. His question raises the work-life balance dilemma, the third leading cause of work-related stress according to our current poll.

The Wrong Question as Soon as it is Asked. 

Work-life balance challenges are the #3 cause of work-related stress in VOCA’s research (VOCA is the agency where I serve). But as soon as we ask about work-life balance, we have asked the wrong question.

Work-life balance assumes your life is neatly divided into two categories: work and life. I now have a work self and a life self.  Different rules. This bifurcation opens the door to all sorts of dehumanizing abuse of ourselves, by ourselves and by others.

Framing the conversation as work-life balance also falsely implies that work is not part of my life; it is not a domain where I experience a sense of being alive. I grind it out at work so I can live elsewhere. For most of us, there are times at least when we do feel alive at work—when we’re in the zone called flow.  For all of us, there are grinding dimensions to the life side of the equation: filing your taxes, cleaning your apartment, getting in shape.

So if not work-life balance, how should we frame it and how do we push past the underlying stressor reflected here?

Proportionality is the Question.

Instead of what to do with “poor work-life balance,” let’s ask, “what should I do when work consumes too much of my life?” It’s a question of proportionality, not balance. Work is part of your life. In most cases, work will always be a big part of your life. The balance issue comes in when work is too big.

When Work is Too Big

Stress caused by “poor work-life balance” is stress caused by work being too big in our lives. How do we discern what to do about this feeling?

1. What is common in your industry, role, and season? We tend to romanticize the past. But certain professions—soldiers, sailors, artisans, shepherds, and even religious clerics, have spent months away from home as part of their vocations.  In today’s knowledge worker economy perhaps we had unrealistic expectations about how easy it would be to work less and be just as productive. I meet people regularly who tell me that they want to start their own company so they can have more flexibility. There’s some truth to the notion that being your own boss offers creative options with your schedule, but it is overblown. If you want to start a company that will provide you with a real income, then you will have to work hard over long hours, especially in the beginning. If you know this is normal, you can also start to understand how many hours are necessary. Then you can make a decision about whether or not you need to stay where you are or alter your career trajectory.

2. How much of your overwork is caused by misaligned talent and poor productivity habits? We will come back to productivity in a forthcoming post. Suffice it to say, if you don’t manage your schedule, other people will manage you. The other issue is talent.

At VOCA we believe we can provide an objective measure of your talent.  Clients who work with us discover two things: 1) talents they did not know they had, and 2) misalignments between their jobs and their talents. So you have a people-impacting, creative, problem-solver, filling out forms and checking boxes.  She’s bored. No kidding. Her work isn’t energizing and it takes more time to get it done. This leads to more hours at work, and this makes work bigger than it needs to be.

3. What values are you compromising?

It’s important to ask what values you are compromising by letting work become too big. Mr. Fourhour is compromising his commitments to be an active and engaged father and husband. This incongruence is calling to him. For you, it may be keeping time for friends, for some sort of community beyond work, for a hobby or sport that gives you life.  There’s nothing wrong with sucking it up for a season, but long term compromise creates deeply embedded stress.

4. How are your structural commitments exasperating work-bigness stress?

Structure commitments have to do with the “givens” we create in our lives. Where you live, how much you pay for housing, and how much debt and the length of your commute are examples of significant obligations that define how “big” work is in your life. For instance,  I’ve always made decisions to keep the commute low. Tons of research verifies that shorter commutes correlate to less stress.

And moving several times in our lives has shown us that you really can start over, grow roots, and your real friends stick with you no matter where you are.  As parents, we bought into the myth that staying in one place for raising our kids was good for them. When we moved to New York City four years ago, we did an experiment—moving with teenagers into a completely different school system and environment. We found out that this was actually good for our kids.  Staying has advantages, but going does too.

So I challenged Mr. Fourhour to think about moving if the job was so good.  Either that or find a new job.  Stahing in the fourhour lane seemed unsustainable to me.

5. What risks are you willing to take to make this better?

The last question has to do with risk.  You have to let go of the trapeze you’re hanging onto to reach the next one, which hopefully will be better. New York City is a revolving door. Some people come here and love it. Some people come here and hate it. Understanding that the density and the pace are not for everyone, and that’s ok—colleagues, clients, and friends have elected to move on. The balance issue is often easier in other places, so they say.

Either way, moving is a risk. Leaving a high-profile, pedigree job is a risk. Staying at a job that is filling every corner of your life is a risk too. Ask yourself, “Is this really a problem?” If so, what is the downside of doing nothing?

Fighting Stress With Clarity of Calling

Clarity of calling can help you assess the place of work in your life. Work is one calling of four that we have in our lives—we are summoned and invited into God’s design for our work, our family relationships, our core or spiritual community, and our relationship to our neighbors. They overlap and yet they are each distinct.

When we know who we are and what we’re called to do in all these areas of our lives we can: 1) assess the proportionality of work, and 2) make wise decisions about seasons when work will be temporarily very big. Ambiguity creates stress. And clarity sends ambiguity running for the exits, decreasing stress, and increasing peace and productivity.

How about you?

1. What is the upside of replacing the “work-life balance” question by asking instead,  “What is the right proportion of work in my life to achieve balance?”

2. How do your answers decrease your work-related stress?

Take Our Job Stress Poll:

Tell us about what causes stress for you on the job.

About Your Author

Dr. Chip Roper writes Marketplace Faith from New York City, where he is the Founder and President of the VOCA Center. Chip is passionate about making work better by empowering clients with a keen sense of vocational identity.   In service of this vision, Dr. Roper provides coaching, training, and consulting to individuals and organizations in NYC and beyond. Download information about his work as an executive coach and VOCA’s Calling Discernment Program, and visit our faith-based website at vocacenter.org and our market-facing menu of services at www.vocacenter.com.