Super Stressed? Here’s How to Maintain a Healthy Work-Life Balance

For many of us, the COVID-19 pandemic has blurred, bent, and completely overtaken the boundaries between our personal and school lives. Attending classes in bed, on the couch, or in our bedrooms has left many of us wondering where school starts and our social/personal lives end.

Personally, this has left me with a really shaky school-life balance, where oftentimes success in school comes at the expense of my mental-emotional state and personal life. But I can’t place all the blame on COVID, because I struggled with maintaining a healthy balance when life wasn’t so unpredictable. Social media has glamorized hustle culture, pushing that the “grind” should always come first if you want to truly be successful. But no person can realistically or effectively manage school, work, a social life, physical health, and mental wellness without sacrificing at least one area—typically at one’s own expense. All of the above lead me to do some investigating; How can we maintain a productive and fulfilling work-life balance? I compiled a list of the best suggestions from Business News Daily, Forbes Magazine, Harvard Business Review, and the Mayo Clinic. 

Most importantly, it’s crucial to note that your habits and routines don’t have to be a set-in-stone system. While consistency is good (which I’ll discuss more later), it’s also important to allow yourself some flexibility. How much work you’ll have, what events you have going on in your personal life, and your mental-emotional needs will vary every day. To be effective, your system has to fluctuate with your circumstances over time. 

For example, during finals week, you’ll probably have much more work than you would any other week, but that doesn’t make your social-emotional needs any less important. It just means that you may have to work longer days earlier in the week and get ahead on studying so that you’ll have more time to relax later on. Or maybe if you get a rough night’s sleep and need extra time to recoup, you may relax now so you’ll feel ready to catch up later. 

Be Honest With Yourself When Something Isn’t Working

The first step, and probably the most essential to developing a healthy routine, is knowing when you need to re-evaluate the balance in your life. Identifying what’s not serving you before it results in total burnout will be more helpful to you in the long run than pushing on as you are. Listening to your body if you’re feeling extra tired, inexplicably anxious, or restless might mean you haven’t spent enough time sleeping, relaxing, or exercising. Feeling unusually short with others, unmotivated to socialize, stressed, or restless may be indications that you aren’t investing enough time in yourself or your social life. 

Some of the most common causes of a poor work-life balance include increased responsibilities at work or school, working longer hours, and increased home responsibilities, according to Business News Daily. Asking yourself the following questions may help you get to the root of what’s not working in your day-to-day life:

• What changes have occurred recently in my everyday schedule?
• Do I feel noticeably better or worse after a particular part of the day?
• What areas of my life am I prioritizing in my day?
• What areas of my life am I neglecting or sacrificing?
• What shifts have occurred in my physical and mental state?

Evaluate Your Options

Once you know what has become too overbearing or isn’t present enough in your everyday life, you can start looking for solutions to restore balance. While we may not have much power to change some things, like how long we’re at school, how much homework we have, what responsibilities we have at home, or how our mental health is at the moment, other aspects of our lives are more flexible than we might realize. For example, laying out clothes, taking coffee or breakfast on the go, and getting school supplies ready the night before may free up more time in the mornings to sleep in a little later during the school week. Other more flexible areas may be waking up before classes or work to exercise (and if you can, kudos to you because you have more willpower than I do). 

What areas have more wiggle room than others will vary by person, but sometimes working in some flexibility takes a little work, and that’s where the next tips come into play.

Prioritize Tasks and Schedule Time for Yourself

No matter how long your to-do list is and how big it all seems, some things will outweigh others in terms of importance. While they’ll most likely take the most time, doing them first or spaced-out over time will ultimately save you time later on. Admittedly, procrastination is a tough habit to kick, so for my fellow last-minute-panic workers, this may mean working in little chunks of time more consistently with intermittent breaks. But I can attest by personal experience that setting a schedule and making a plan to finish something a few days before it’s due saves a lot of stress and free time in the long run. 

The goal of prioritizing tasks is to ensure that you have time left over to spend with friends and family, take care of your physical health, and recharge. A common misconception about work-life balance is that there has to be an equal proportion of school or work time and personal time in your schedule to feel fulfilled in both areas. But the truth is, modern life isn’t built to accommodate a perfect 50/50 balance. Everyone’s minimum needs are different, but whatever ratio works for you is going to be what’s right. For me, I’m fine with having closer to 70% of my time dedicated to school if 30% is exclusively my own. For someone else, at least 60% personal time might be the minimum, and that’s totally okay. The key to making that work is arranging your schedule and commitments to accommodate that ratio. In my schedule, I allow more time in the mornings to be by myself and call friends around the same time every night to ensure that my minimum is met. 

Set Your Boundaries and Be Firm

Once you’ve decided how much time you can and want to delegate to each area of your life, you have to create conditions that allow you to stick to your plan. This is probably the area I’ve struggled with most but has the most immediate impact. I’ve set a private boundary—a personal boundary that you hold yourself accountable to—that all my school work stops after 7 pm; I don’t work on any homework or talk about anything school-related, and I try my best not to dwell too much on work I got done during the day or upcoming deadlines. Sometimes I slip up though, and that’s when it’s helpful to have friends and family there to remind you when you might be pushing a bit too hard. Other private boundaries might include not going out with friends if you have more than an hour’s worth of homework to do, joining class outside of your bedroom to keep your personal space sacred, or allowing yourself breaks after every hour of completing tasks.

Public boundaries are also equally as important as private ones. Public boundaries modify others’ expectations of you. A smaller, school-related public boundary of mine is that I don’t respond to emails after 5 pm. Another boundary is that I don’t ever miss The Bachelor, because although it’s kinda silly, that’s a priority in my personal life that makes me less stressed. For others, public boundaries may be that Friday nights are dedicated as family time, or that you don’t help friends with homework until your responsibilities are taken care of. 

That said, boundaries are only effective if you stick to them. Certain emergencies may require you to bend your rules, but otherwise, it’s crucial that you’re consistent. If you aren’t firm with yourself, you won’t really reap the benefits of your boundaries. And if you aren’t firm with others, areas of your work and school life will continue to spill over into your personal life. 

Don’t Expect Perfection, But Do the Best You Can

No routine is so flawless that it withstands all circumstances and changes. Over time—whether it be by the day, by the semester, or over years—what areas of life are most important and require the most time will fluctuate. On days where your mental health is struggling, dedicating hours to school isn’t going to feel as attainable. The important thing is that you do what you can, and make up for it later on. Or maybe if procrastination got the best of you again and you have piles of work to do in a short amount of time, you may temporarily have to sacrifice some personal time (under the expectation that you’ll make it up to yourself later, of course). 

An analysis of a research study by Harvard Business Review found that work-life balance “is not a one-time fix, but rather, a cycle that we must engage in continuously as our circumstances and priorities evolve.”

I used to really stress myself out when I couldn’t complete everything I planned for the day or when I wasn’t able to keep up my routine, because I worried it would throw off my whole schedule and snowball into some overwhelming, inescapable pit of behind-ness. And I still do from time to time, in all fairness. But if you think back to times in the past where you’ve felt that way, and look at where you are now, you’ll probably realize that every seemingly unsurmountable obstacle worked itself out one way or another. Sometimes, as hard as it is, you have to trust that one good night’s sleep or unplanned hang out with friends isn’t going to derail your whole life. Taking time for yourself and to be with loved ones when you’re feeling down is ultimately more important than getting an assignment in exactly at 11:59 PM.