A lot of people find that taking care of their general wellbeing can be quite tough, even at the best of times, and this is something that looks unlikely to change. In order to keep yourself well, you ideally need to look at the various elements in your life and make sure that each of them are helping you rather than hindering you. And one of the most important elements, for everyone, is work.
In order to determine whether or not your work is harming your health or getting in the way of your wellbeing, there are a few things you might want to look into in particular. In this post, we are going to take a look at what you can do to reduce the impact your work has on your general wellbeing. As long as you work on these, it should make a considerable difference.
Long Working Hours
This is one of the main ways in which your work can affect your wellbeing. If you tend to work long hours, it will mean that your work is having much more of an effect on your health, that you are much more likely to get stressed, and that your physical and mental wellbeing in general might suffer a lot more. There are of course some jobs which are particularly likely to have long shifts, but regardless of what job you have, you should try to ensure you are not over-working on a regular basis.
Sometimes this requires putting your foot down with your manager – which can of course be challenging, but is nonetheless necessary if you are going to take good care of yourself. Sometimes it could be as simple as swapping jobs, however. If you think that you generally feel very overworked, it’s certainly something to fix as soon as you can, and before it affects you too much.
Improper Manual Handling
For a lot of jobs, there is some manual handling and lifting that you need to do, and if you have such a job, then this is definitely something you need to make sure you are doing right. The vast majority of injuries at work are the result of improper manual handling techniques, so this is something you should make sure to focus on if you want to look after your body properly. How can you make sure you are doing this right?
First of all, there will be training in manual handling that your manager should provide for you, and which it is your legal obligation to attend. The right manual handling training program can help you to learn exactly how to lift items, regardless of what they are or whether they are heavy. This is important if you want to make sure you are looking after your body right at work, so it’s something you should think about.
Once you start to lift and move things properly, you will find that you are taking much better care of yourself at work – and you will soon feel the difference.
High Stress Levels
In general, anything you do to become stressed at work is going to harm your wellbeing. Stress, in constant or high quantities, will cause cortisol to flow through your veins, and over time that actually has quite a profoundly negative effect on your body and mind’s wellbeing. So anything that helps you to manage your stress is certainly going to be worth your while, and that could mean taking a whole new approach to your work on the whole.
If you think your work might be stressing you out, it might be that you are working too much or too hard, or that you don’t have enough breaks and down time. Or it could be that what is being asked of you is beyond what you feel capable of – whether you are actually capable of it or not. If you feel this way, you might need to ask for less or easier work, or you might merely need to find a way to try and manage your stress a little better.
As for that, there are actually a lot of ways you can do that. Sometimes it’s more to do with looking after yourself outside of work too – such as getting plenty of sleep and keeping a good diet.
Poor Work-Life Balance
That also ties in with your work-life balance in general, and this too is something that you need to try and keep an eye on as best as you can. If your work-life balance is not what you ideally need it to be, that can lead to a severe reduction in your general wellbeing, as well as high stress and many other issues besides. So how can you make sure that your work-life balance is as it should be?
Mostly this comes down to knowing how to say no to things, and making sure that you are keeping your workload as it should be. If you can do that, you are probably going to have a better balance already. Beyond that, you might also want to think about spending your time outside of work in a way that you really enjoy, which means engaging in leisure pursuits that suit you as well as getting plenty of rest, as we discussed above.
However you do it, once you get this balance to where you need it to be, that is going to lead to a much better sense of wellbeing, and one that will likely sustain for a long time. That is going to be a really important part of all of this in general.
Those are the main ways to make sure that you are not allowing your work to get in the way of your wellbeing. As long as you manage to do this, it’s going to help you to have much better health and wellness, and you will find that life becomes easier and more enjoyable.