Reframing ‘Work / Life Balance’ The Tradi onal Model ‘Work / Life Balance’ has existed as a buzzword for many years now. A quick Google trends search shows that the use of the phrase has been steadily rising in the last two decades, and anecdotally, the phrase has creeped slowly into the Lexicon of workplaces to the point in which it’s now an everyday phrase. It refers to managing the separate resource of our working and non-working lives, with only a finite number of hours in the day. One thing is becoming increasingly obvious - the 92 europeanbusinessmagazine.com
current way of thinking simply isn’t working. All major mental health bodies have online sec ons devoted to coping with this balance and how to deal with it, and figures from recent years have shown that only ⅓ brits feel happy about their current ‘work / life balance’. So why is ‘Work / Life Balance’ so difficult? And why do we feel so negavely about it? It may sound counter-intui ve, but I firmly believe a lot of this stress comes from the fact that we see them as two separate en es that we have to juggle.
Our culture conditions us to separate our different roles, iden es and ac ons into different contexts - like work and life. It can feel overwhelming when we try to juggle lots of different things at the same me. In reality, we’re just trying to shi between our ‘roles’ in quick succession - our working role and our non-working role. Now that both roles have become largely digital, it’s more difficult than ever to switch off from them. It requires a lot of effort and is incredibly hard to get right. Over the past 50 years, cogni ve scien sts have closely studied mul tasking and role
