Mixing work and personal life leads to exhaustion

Blurring the boundaries between work and personal life can lower people’s sense of wellbeing and lead to exhaustion, a study warns. “Employees who integrated work into their non-work life reported being more exhausted because they recovered less,” said Ariane Wepfer, from the University of Zurich in Switzerland.

“This lack of recovery activities furthermore explains why people who integrate their work into the rest of their lives have a lower sense of well-being,” Wepfer said. For the study researchers recruited 1916 employees from a broad range of sectors to take part in an online study.

Most were married (70.3 per cent) and their average age was 42.3 years. Half of the participants (50.1 per cent) worked 40 hours or more per week, while 55.8 per cent were men. They were asked how well they were able to manage the boundaries between their work and non-work lives. To measure a person’s well-being, the researchers considered participants’ sense of physical and emotional exhaustion as well as their sense of balance between work and non-work.

They found that employees who did not organise a clear separation between work and free time were less likely to participate in activities that could help them relax and recover from career demands. The participants were therefore more exhausted and experienced a lower sense of balance and wellbeing in the different key aspects of their lives.