Recently I spent a weekend watching an all-time favourite Bollywood flick. In one of the scenes, the male protagonist strums his guitar in office while a soothing background song plays, leading to interesting conversations. In real life, the scene would play out very differently. Workplaces are simply not what are seen on celluloid screens. People often come back late at night from work, have a hurried dinner and crash into their beds. The pattern continues as deadlines of important projects keep coming up. There is practically no time to catch up with loved ones and work is all you are thinking about all the time.
In recent times, work has become even more self-absorbing, leaving us with very little time to chase our passions or have a decent social calendar. Taking holidays too prove to be challenging, toppling our work life balance further. Such a long-drawn slogging proves detrimental to our mental and physical wellbeing, leading to burnout in extreme cases.
So it is time to pause, think and reorganize ourselves so that work does not take over our entire life. Self-care at work is as much important as it is in our personal life. Often work takes the biggest chunk of our daily life. To meet deadlines or surpass productivity expectations, we commit to more work than what our body permits. The resultant stress creates havoc on our physical as well as mental health. Remember, there is more to life than being neck deep in work.
There are studies which substantiate that self-care is not just a fad, it is a necessity born out of our stressful lives. A study in 2020 found that 73% Americans have become more conscious about practicing self-care whereas 69% responded that they plan to incorporate more self-care into their routine than before.
Self-care not only induces quality and efficiency at work, but it also starts affecting other spheres positively – like healthy relationships and mutually beneficial behavioural patterns. So, join us in exploring 5 ways of practicing self-care at work.
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