Make your mental health a priority in this busy corporate life
“Life is a race, if you don’t run fast, you will be like a broken andaa”
- Viru Sahastrabuddhe, aka Virus from 3 Idiots
The famous dialogue dictates the competition we have been taught to strive for especially in an South Asian context. We are told we must be at the top of the class, and must get that promotion but what for?
What does top of the class or that promotion bring to us and mean to us. What impact does it have on our lives both in the long and short run? Is it all positive? Will we be satisfied by achieving this?
The root pursuit for most people are life-satisfaction, happiness, and wellbeing. These have been defined by many philosophers and psychologists and are subjective concepts but research studying these pursuits has found that it is strongly correlated with health both mental and physical.
When it comes to Mental Health it is affected by and affects all spheres of life and that is why if we want to have a balanced life it is integral to make health including mental health a priority.
Often in the hustling world of corporate life we tend to become hyper focused on one goal and tend to forget other aspects of our life that are important to us. Life isn’t unidimensional. We don’t live life in air tight containers. Our relationships, work, hobbies, passions, health, beliefs, education tend to all affect each other and are affected by each other. Being extremely involved in one may lead to tipping the balance of things and cost us in other areas of our lives. For example, obsessing on excelling at work and beating all the competition might lead us to not being able to give our resources (time, effort, money, energy etc) to life outside work.
An exercise that you try out to realise if you're hyper focusing on one and neglecting others areas of your life : Make your life’s pie chart of the priorities in your life and and the space each priority occupies on your pie chart describes the amount of resources you're using doing each of those priorities. What does your pie chart currently look like and how would you want it to look?
Explore your other priorities too! As much as busy corporate life might be one of them, that you actually enjoy, think of the others that might help you relax and are a priority for your mental health. We made that easier for you with our journal.
work-life balance for mental health work-life balance for mental health
