Teacher Health and Wellbeing – Having a work/home life balance

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By Nicki Allman

How can we successfully balance our work-life with our home-life?

Life in education is busy. Stress is an increasingly large part of an educator’s life. An increased workload is often highlighted as one of the main causes of illness and increased stress. Whilst there are many things that we can do to alleviate workload during our working day, we also have to look at the things we can do to help us to have an equal work/home life balance. By finding a balance between the busyness of work and the ability to switch off at home, we can become much more productive and efficient in our daily working lives.

It is important to make the connection between an unhealthy work/home life balance and the detrimental effects that this can have on us. The following behaviours can be indicators of an unhealthy work to life balance:

Being less tolerant of dealing with day-to-day issues such as behaviour management
Tiredness, leading to anger issues and ‘snapping’ at colleagues, family members and friends
Increased negative thoughts, allowing ourselves to become critical and negative about issues
Finding that we can’t ‘switch off’ and that our minds and thoughts are continually thinking about what we did, how we did something, how it felt, leading to a downward spiral of negativity
Finding that our self-esteem and morale has fallen, leading to a feeling of not being good enough