There’s a key to not letting your mental health suffer for the sake of a job.
Recently I’ve put my two weeks in at work. This decision wasn’t easy but as a college student still trying to figure out a lot about the world, I had to do what’s best for me. A lot of what led up to this decision wasn’t even necessarily the job itself but finding the balance between work, school, a social life, and spending time with my family. Something extremely important that I learned this summer is that family is super important, whether they be blood related or relationships that you have formed through life. Taking time for the people we care about and separating our work life from other aspects of our life is super important. Otherwise we become burned out, non-motivated people and that sucks worse.
Some of the biggest things that I’ve learned is that it is okay to say No. and that no is a full sentence on its own. Establishing boundaries within your workplace and with those around you can help establish the work-life balance needed. Not being overworked and being taken advantage of for your work is extremely important. At the end of the day a company has a business to run, but you also have the rest of your life to be able to work. Finding this balance early is extremely important because it helps you to establish those boundaries and be able to handle these situations.
One of the biggest challenges that I also faced was being new at a company. I felt that I needed to prove myself to this company and so in a sense I did overwork myself. I ended up taking a lot of shifts when being asked to because I felt indebted to this company in a sense. At the end of the day this company signs your checks and at the end of the day, they don’t really owe you anything (This is different for every company, this mostly applies to corporate companies). When you stop feeling indebted to your workplace, establishing boundaries is a lot easier and allows for you to hold your ground and clearly communicate these boundaries.
Another challenge was also finding the balance between work and school and sadly getting my butt kicked on assignments because of how many hours I was working. This became an issue because soon enough it felt like I didn’t have enough time to study on my weekends and that studying also meant sacrificing my sleep schedule to get assignments done. It created a vicious cycle that was bound to continue until I ultimately crashed. This was not going to be sustainable in the long run and I knew I needed to make decisions about how I was going to manage and handle this. Ultimately what I learned was that working the amount of hours that I was on the weekend was not going to be sustainable and decisions needed to be made. Sometimes we need to do what’s better for our mental health and put other people’s opinions aside. This is what I’ve learned about work-life balance.