Re-Thinking Work-Life Balance
For years, messaging about navigating tension between roles has been dominated by the mantra of “work-life balance.” But, the concept has some baggage.
This post is meant to share a perspective shift that could help you in times when you’re experiencing tension between your priorities or within your relationships.
It was inspired by a recent conversation I had with Psychologist Dr. Yael Schonbrun. Yael is a professor at Brown University and an expert on helping busy professionals - specifically parents and couples - thrive. She literally wrote a book called Work, Parent, Thrive.
When we spoke, she and I discussed how, for years, the messaging about navigating tension between roles has been dominated by the mantra of “work-life balance.”
Yael acknowledges that work-life balance started out as a well-intentioned concept.
But - she points out - there’s an unhelpful side to the idea of work-life balance.
Instead of encapsulating the dynamic yin and yang concept of balance, modern work-life balance can feel more like an exhausting game of whack-a-mole.
Yael emphasizes that a certain level of tension in our lives and relationships is healthy.
It’s the necessary push-and-pull of trying to get different needs met.
If we can open our stance to become curious about tension instead of reflexively seeing it as bad or a sign of “failing to find balance,” we’re better equipped to deal with it.
To illustrate, here’s a story.
Consider Paula.
Paula is a client of mine.1 She’s a 39-year-old mother to a 10-year-old and an 8-year-old.
She works full time. Despite instituting good boundaries with her work, there are inevitably times when she feels overwhelmed or “not fully caught up,” both at work and outside of work.
She perpetually feels like she should have spent just a little more time on that task at work. But when she does take extra time on something, she feels guilty and like she’s prioritizing her work over her family.
She also feels like she’s coming up short as a friend. Last week she had to skip a friend’s birthday dinner and she “selfishly” spent that time “doing nothing.”
At home, she’s bombarded by the feeling that the meals her and her husband make for the kids aren’t quite good enough. She even gave the kids Goldfish for dinner one night and proceeded to get into a seemingly unrelated argument with her husband over an upcoming family event.
She was on the verge of tears as she told me all of this.
Paula has read books on work-life balance, listened to podcasts on work-life balance, and even led a presentation at work on work-life balance! So why does she still feel tension and fatigue? Why can’t she “figure it out?”
The Power of Beliefs
It turns out that Paula’s anxiety, guilt, and fatigue have more to do with her beliefs than her behaviors.
I worked with Paula to highlight some of the beliefs that were contributing to harsh judgments of herself:
A belief that “successful” parents “always” prioritize their kids.
A belief that “achieving” work-life balance means little-to-no stress about work.
A belief that stress is toxic and that if her children saw her “stressed” it could “damage” them.
A belief that the more time she spends with her kids and her partner, the better.
A belief that needing personal down time away from her partner and family is a sign of failing.
It’s not Paula’s fault that she developed these beliefs. These beliefs are common, and in many ways they’re the unfortunate consequence of unhelpful messaging about work-life balance.
The Real Problem
Dr. Schonbrun helped me pinpoint the real issue with common messaging about work-life balance.
The issue is that it’s framed as a problem to be solved.
It’s a trap that my client Paula fell into. Instead of seeing herself as an engaged, hard-working, professional woman who is an example of strength and resilience to her children, Paula saw the tension between roles as a sign that she was “losing” the work-life balance game.
Dr. Schonbrun points out that when we think that one day we’ll get work-life balance “right” and the conflict will disappear, we’re setting ourselves up for an exhausting, unwinnable battle.2
This framing gives the message that tension between our work life and home life is both bad and avoidable.
It tells us that if we have to make sacrifices for work, we’re somehow failing to achieve balance.
We’ve become so used to hearing that tension and stress are bad that we’ve developed limiting beliefs that cause us to get stressed about stress and tense about tension.
Beliefs about Stress and Tension
Do you view the fact that you have some tension and stress between your multiple priorities as a sign that you’re living an engaged and enriching life?
Or, do you see stress and tension as signs that you’re failing or weak?
Consider the implications of research by Dr. Alia Crum.3 Some of Crum’s most impactful studies go something like this: Participants are randomly divided into groups and are told (e.g. through a series of very short, simple videos4) different messages about stress. For example:
One group views videos portraying stress as debilitating, emphasizing its negative impacts on health and performance.
Another group watches videos that frame stress as enhancing, highlighting its potential to improve immunity, creativity, and performance under pressure.
The results are often striking.
When compared to the “stress is debilitating” group, people who learn about the healthy and useful side of stress not only report better mental health and work performance but also tend to show more adaptive physiological responses, like cortisol optimization, improved blood pressure, less fatigue, and even weight loss.
This research underscores the power of mindset in shaping how we experience and respond to stress.
What’s more, similar mindset interventions suggest that fostering a work-family enrichment mindset versus a work-family conflict mindset can change our experience of working parenthood. But we have to make the mindset change deliberately since much of the common messaging around work-life balance is akin to putting ourselves into the “stress is debilitating” and “work and family life are in a conflictual relationship” modes.
By telling ourselves that we shouldn’t experience role tension (and that we’re somehow failing when we do experience tension), we set ourselves up for lower mood, heightened anxiety, and more fatigue.
Balance = Tension
The next time you experience stress or tension, become curious about it.
Reflect on your orientation towards it.
Try saying some of the following to yourself in response to it:
Yes, I’m tired and frustrated today. This is an opportunity to show my kids that hard emotions are a part of life, and that we can tolerate them and listen to them. Pretending to be perfect isn’t helpful.
Ah tension, there you are. This is a sign that I’m a busy, engaged human working hard to live my values.
Ah stress, there you are. Of course I have stress about that meeting tomorrow. It’s something I care about. This is a sign that my body is getting ready to perform.
Holy, it’s hard to choose between a work project and seeing my friend. Of course it is, I’m a busy professional. This tension is normal. What do I need most right now?
Ah, tension. This is a sign that I’m navigating multiple roles that I care about. It’s pretty good that I can to contribute to more than one thing in my life. I must be doing something right.
Wow, I’m feeling overwhelmed right now. Of course, I am. I have a lot on my plate.
Wisdom for Moving Forward
Don’t get us wrong. We’re not saying that all stress is great and that you should gladly “plow forward” through whatever stress you’re experiencing.
In addition to reflecting on how you relate to stress, of course you want to check in on things that can contribute to feeling unnecessarily overwhelmed, like:
Practice expressing your needs at work and in relationships.
Re-evaluate your relationship with common time sinks like email and your phone.
Reflect on how you prioritize various roles and goals – ensuring that you’re not trying to be an all-star in multiple domains. Is the time you spend aligning with what you truly value?
Getting reasonable sleep and nourishing your body with healthy food.
You also need to give yourself credit. What you’re doing is probably objectively hard. If you’re reading this, you’re probably the type of person who is balancing multiple values and priorities. Sometimes doing hard things is just plain hard, and that’s OK. The trouble happens when you’re doing hard things but you don’t give yourself credit or you judge yourself for the fact that it’s hard!
The reality is that living an enriching, values-based life inherently brings tension between different domains. Instead of striving for a perfect balance, embrace this tension.
And a special note to parents. Your job as a parent isn’t to show your children that you never experience stress but, instead, to model how to navigate it with resilience (not perfection). When you feel guilty about not being perfect, remember what your child gains from having a parent who is working hard to support the family. This perspective allows you to befriend tension and demonstrate to your children that tolerating frustration and handling stress is part of a healthy life. The goal, after all, is to help children navigate and tolerate tough emotions, not to shelter them from these experiences.
Embracing tension as a necessary part of living a meaningful life allows you to move forward with self-compassion, preserving your energy for what truly matters.
And, what matters = doing a reasonable (not perfect) job of living your values across the competing domains that are of importance to you.
Details have been modified to protect confidentiality.
For more on Crum’s research see studies such as: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17425538/ and https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23437923/
You can watch these and related videos here: https://mbl.stanford.edu/stress-mindset-manipulation-videos
Main image credit: https://media.istockphoto.com/id/1034787020/photo/vintage-image-of-a-family-on-the-roads.jpg?s=612x612&w=0&k=20&c=iL8fRAXKYy6esfEvGeT1Jcp8yY1m69LrtZKifpUp1WI=
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Exactly what I needed to be reminded of today. Living with ease is not always easy (and deemed the feminine way to handle things). This was a great reminder that tension can mean balance and that living your values takes work and effort. I love the spin on how to look at challenges as opportunities for parenting/teaching. And most of all, I love the samples of how to change the self talk - especially from a lens of self compassion, which is a inner voice I struggle to find. Thanks for this!
It reminds me of the Viktor Frankl quote: "What man actually needs is not a tensionless state but rather the striving and struggling for some goal worthy of him. What he needs is not the discharge of tension at any cost, but the call of a potential meaning waiting to be fulfilled by him."
I found this to be true in my life. It's a similar concept to Schopenhauer's Pendulum that swings between boredom and chaos.
Lastly, it reminds me of DeYoung's plasticity and stability meta personality traits.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1KcUIPzmsshLeGncj8EMDiZKiJBiolxhS/view?usp=sharing