"Work life balance" is a phrase that is bandied around by organisations that want to create the impression they care for their staff and their well-being, while in fact, it is just a meaningless phrase unless you take positive action to ensure you don't become consumed by your work and the feeling of growing inadequacy as you take on more and deliver less.

Betrand Russell in his Conquest of Happiness from 1930, said, "One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one's work is terribly important".

It is time to go home and think about changing your job when you start getting into the office earlier and earlier and leaving later and later. When you take your work home at the weekends and stop having time to see your family or meeting your friends. All simply because your feel your work is a major priority. However, unless you work in the medical profession, it is unlikely that anyone will die if you fail to meet a deadline.

The pressure to work harder and harder is derived from our need for security and the threat of losing out jobs if we don't work hard and succeed, which leads us to worry about how we and our family will survive if we don't have a steady income to pay the bills.

But sometimes we just need to take a step back and look at what we have become. A mindless machine that lives, eats and breathes work is truly not living a life that can have any pleasure or joy, there is simply no time for such frivolities. I heard a reading called "The Leap" at a funeral and it made me realise that if I popped my clogs at that moment, all everyone would remember of me, is I worked lots of hours. Nothing else. I had not allowed room for anything but work to exist in my life and it was a barren place to be.

I made a drastic decision to leave my job, and start enjoying life to the full. I work for myself, still doing what I love, but I work on a contract basis. I now work to live, not live to work. This last year has been wonderful, it was as if I had suddenly opened my eyes and started to see the world around me. Colours and people are real and vibrant and I have never been happier or less stressed.

Just take a step back are you living in a barren world of work and nothing else

Learn more about this author, Isabel Sacks.
Click here to send this author comments or questions.

---

Add your voice

Know something about Workaholism: When it's time to go home?
We want to hear your view. Write now!