Your Happiness Factor

Are you stressed-out by your poor work-life balance? Y ou know you have a work-life balance problem when you Don’t have enough time for everything and spend what time you have handling scheduling conflicts, Feel stressed and overwhelmed by trying to balance your different roles. Research for Health Canada indicates four main factors lead to work-life balance problems and stress: Role overload: you don’t have enough time or energy to carry out all the activities required to perform all your roles properly and without discomfort. Work-to-family interference: work demands make it difficult to fulfill family-roles and to provide what family members need from you, for example; Long hours at work prevent you going to the school open-evening   You are so preoccupied with what is happening at work that you can’t enjoy or take part fully in family life, Pressure at work spills over at home and you get into arguments with your partner, your mother or the ch...

Changes in life like redundancy affect us all deeply. They change us and they change our relationships. Redundancy is like bereavement and can leave you with the same gut-wrenching sense of loss, the furious “why me?”. Everyone says it’s not personal, but of course it feels that way to the one who has lost their job. But that sense of loss isn’t just felt by us, it is felt by those close to us as well. Their lives have been changed and probably in ways they would never have chosen for themselves. Sometimes in mass redundancies you can turn that anger outwards and on to the employer or the perceived cause of the problems for example the Bankers. Then the group binds together against the world. If a whole community is facing difficulty, there is likely to be lots of support from within that community – think of the pit villages in the North East of England between the thirties and the seventies. Under siege you pull together. But most of us live in communities without that kind of tradi...