You can be dedicated and passionate about a job without overdoing it and burning yourself out. In addition to keeping stress low and balancing your time well, attaining work-life balance is important for many reasons:

• It maintains your mental health. Too much stress is bad for your mental health as it can lead to anxiety, depression, insomnia, and more. By maintaining a proper work-life balance, you’ll reduce stress and start each day refreshed and happier.
• It’s good for your physical health. Chronic stress is bad for your body, too. It can cause weight loss or gain, skin problems, high blood pressure, a greater risk of heart disease, and even chronic pain or carpal tunnel. You want to ensure you’re getting proper rest, exercise, downtime, etc.
• It makes you more well-rounded. Work experience isn’t everything and it doesn’t define you. Hobbies and extra-circulars give you additional experience, help you build skills, expand your network, and more. These come with creating time in your schedule for other things.
• It increases productivity. It seems counterproductive, but working less can actually make your work better. This is because when your life is balanced, you go into everything with energy, focus, and a strong mindset.

If you’ve been overworking yourself for a long time, it can sometimes be hard to tell when you’re overdoing it and close to burnout. The following are some signs that your life and work balance may be off:

• You’re bringing work home often
• You cancel social plans to work instead
• You’re struggling to sleep, and/or grinding your teeth in your sleep
• You’re short-tempered with those around you and it’s affecting your relationships
• Regular tension headaches
• Upset stomach
• Digestive issues

While work-life balance is important for everyone’s day-to-day life, it becomes even more relevant when you’re working to recover from addiction. Once you return to your regular home and life, it can be hard to move forward and you’ll need to be mentally strong. You’ll need a proper work-life balance during recovery for stress management, and focus on things that help you stay sober, such as:

• Mindfulness and meditation. Meditation is one of the many things we offer here at Lily Recovery, and it’s a great habit to maintain once you leave. By engaging in mindfulness practices, you’ll stay calmer, more focused, and stronger mentally.
• Good sleep. Your mental and physical strength relies on good sleep, which is even more important when in recovery. A good work-life balance will help you regularly get adequate sleep.
• Good nutrition. The food you eat fuels and heals your mind and body, and preparing good food often takes time and effort. The opportunity for good nutrition is more accessible when work-life balance is found.
• Self-care. Whatever self-care looks like to you, you must make time for it during recovery. Good self-care routines keep you centered and focused while helping you value yourself and see your self-worth.

At Lily Recovery, we offer a residential recovery program for women, made by women, and staffed only by women. We believe this creates a safe and comfortable environment for women in vulnerable places.

We offer a wide range of services and therapies in addition to our work-life balance occupational therapy. Work-life balance physical therapy offers a variety of physical and occupational exercises to help clients gain more independence from cognitive or sensory issues that may make balancing work and life more difficult.

It can be hard learning how to balance work and life, which is why we focus on a range of things in our work-life balance stress management therapy sessions:

• Learning how to set boundaries and limits with those around you
• Deliberately scheduling social and personal time
• Reviewing and revising work and life goals
• Helping you learn when and how to ask for help
• Determining what matters to you most in life and how to incorporate them into your regular schedule

These sessions can be combined with other forms of therapy such as CBT, solution-focused therapy, acceptance and commitment therapy, and much more.

We also offer a variety of holistic practices such as yoga and meditation. These things offer healing to your mind and body while helping you stay grounded and centred. They’re also excellent habits to maintain once you leave our program and are trying to maintain a work-life balance on your own.