Striking a healthy work-life balance has become increasingly difficult to achieve in the world we live in today. With the overbearing demands and stress that your job can provoke, work can easily begin to affect your relationship with your partner and even with your children. A lack of energy, sleepless nights, feeling short-tempered and irritable are all common attributes that work-related pressure can instigate when at home and within your relationship. Learning to control your emotions, thoughts, and behaviour is imperative, not only for the health of your relationship but also for your own health and well-being.
If you’re wondering what you can do to combat this pressure and chronic stress, here are some proven methods that can help you push that pressure aside so you can get back to feeling great without having stress dominate your life.
Learn To Leave It At The Office
Your job doesn’t pay you to stress and think about the issues that are happening in the office beyond your end-of-day timeframe, so stop working for free! Once you leave the office, make a promise to yourself to quit working for free by not allowing any work-related issues and stress to encroach on your personal time.
To help switch off, you’ll need an effective substitute to distract you. So on your commute home, give yourself that time to diffuse the stress and get back into a feel-good state. If you’re driving, line up your favourite music or audiobook. If you’re taking transit, try solving the crossword, reading a feel-good book or jamming to your iPod. Have some activities lined up and ready to dive into once you step away from the office to keep your thoughts away from work.
Understand The Power Of Your Thoughts
Switching off your mind from the hectic chaos that you might be enduring at work can be a challenge, but you need to understand that your thoughts control just about everything you do and say. So learning to control them is a must. Without doing this, your mind goes into auto-pilot, and you simply succumb to it. Our thoughts are extremely powerful, and by learning to change them, you, in turn, begin to alter those stubborn neuro-pathways in the brain that lead to negative and repetitive ideas.
So, if you’ve been focusing on a deal that fell through at work and replaying it over and over in your mind, that’s a neuro-pathway that needs to be chipped away at and altered. You can do this easily by interrupting your negative, stress-inducing thoughts whenever you recognize them. By literally stopping in mid-thought and focusing on something else – maybe the way that your partner makes you laugh – you begin to break down those negative patterns. Each time you feel your mind slipping into those stressful thoughts, have a few feel-good images and memories that you can whip out and think about instead to help change those neuro-pathways to something positive.
Combine this with your feel-good activities, and together they will be extremely powerful and effective exercises if you just keep at them.
Expel Your Energy
When you arrive home from a bad day at work, do you find yourself deflecting your anger and irritation at your spouse or even your dog? If you’ve been sitting all day and absorbing pressure and anxiety, you probably have a lot of pent-up energy inside. And without a healthy way to release it, you could end up releasing it in ways that you regret, like excessive drinking, eating, or yelling. Instead, find a physical form of exercise you enjoy – swimming, tennis, running, heading to the gym – to let it out.
Exercising is a great, therapeutic method for expelling negative pent up energy and helping our body and mind get that dose of feel-good endorphins to relax and feel better.
If work is affecting your relationship, you need to use proven and effective methods such as these to alter your thought processes and release that pent-up energy in a healthy manner. Tuning out from work-related stress is easy to do once you’re committed to it, so find some feel-good ways to alter your state of mind, make time for exercise, jam out to your favourite music, take a walk through the park, and bring home the love that you have for your partner instead of the stress and negativity that you feel for your job.
At Vaughan Relationship Centre, we have professional counsellors available to help you gain back control of your emotions so that you can get back to enjoying the time spent with the ones you love.