Work-Life Balance is a recurring topic in the news and on various social media. Perhaps we can narrow down the issues and alternatives.
One definition of Work-Life Balance is “the ability to manage one’s personal and professional life while maintaining well-being and self-care.” It seeks to minimize stress and maintain sustainable work and home responsibilities.
There are likely as many ways to do this as there are people needing to do this. Certainly there is no lack of advice from family, friends, co-workers, associates, doctors, and busybodies.
Discussions of Work-Life Balance are often coterminous with Burnout. This is where it overlaps with mental health and the insistence of the psychiatric industry that they can help. Unfortunately this is a red herring, since psychiatry also maintains that no proven general approach exists.
Examining various resources, the bottom line consensus seems to be the mitigation and elimination of Stress. Rather than providing a list of stress-reducing techniques, of which there are many, we focus instead on the topic of Stress itself.
One might observe that the more highly placed a person is, the more stress that hits them. While this is neither here nor there in the methods of handling the stress, it does bear noticing. A liability of stress is that persons under stress can react with momentary flashes of antisocial conduct.
A person under stress is actually under a suppression in one or more areas or aspects of his life. In this sense, suppression means a harmful intention or action against which one cannot fight back. We might also call this a “stressor”, which may be a person or persons (either present or past), a persistent thought, a harmful drug, something mental, emotional, spiritual, medical, physical, biological, environmental, or any combination thereof.
We’d like to emphasize that stress is not a mental illness. It may be promoted as such by the psychiatric industry, but that is strictly so that it can be diagnosed as a mental disorder (“Acute Stress Disorder” in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders) and prescribed some psychiatric treatment for which insurance will pay; usually a harmful psychiatric drug such as an antidepressant, antipsychotic, or anti-anxiety drug.
Stress can only be permanently fixed by finding and eliminating the stressors of the condition. It cannot be fixed with a drug. What’s keeping people from handling their stress? Well, there are vested interests who want the general populace immobilized by stress; the psychopharmaceutical industry, for example, who create patients for life.
How do you find these stressors? And how do you fix them? Pain is the main indicator of stress; that should give one a clue about where to look. Pain can be mental, emotional, physical, or spiritual in nature.
While there are myriads of advices on handling various aspects of stress, and one should pursue any of these that indicate, we’d really like to find just one thing to focus on that could lead anyone to some improvement. What is the most basic thing we can find that lies beneath anyone and everyone’s stress?
Here we find the dichotomy of Cause and Effect. In this Universe, all actions can be viewed from the gradient scales of cause and effect. A gradient scale is an increasing or decreasing degree of something. Any situation, then, is made up of degrees of causes and effects. A worst case example is when one is being the total effect of external and internal forces, another word for which is “victim.”
This leads us to the one thing common to all methods of handling or eliminating stress. It is moving from being the total effect of something, gradiently toward being cause over that situation; not necessarily all at once, but starting with slight gentle cause and moving gradiently toward more cause and less effect.
So the questions become, “How can one take some slight gentle cause over the situation?” or “What part of that situation can one take some responsibility for?”
Keeping in mind, throughout, that psychiatry and psychiatric drugs are not a method for handling stress of any kind.