Spilling Over – Hazard to Well-being

Oil spills can affect marine life and its related local industry for years after they had happened. The effects of oil spills are worse when the site is near coastal communities. It harmed species that flourish on the water’s surface, including birds, fish and invertebrates. When a massive amount of oil is spilled into these areas, it harms not only the health of marine life, but also local industries like fishing, shipping, and tourism.

Similarly, when our work spilling over to non-work can be a hazard to our well-being too. Do you remember the last time, even after leaving the office, work followed you home – some Items on your “to do” list lingered in your mind: a delayed project, a question someone posed to you, or a task you simply had no time to finish. At that moment when these thoughts arise, the natural tendency was to take care of them quickly! So we squeezed in a quick call to a colleague to discuss a project while playing with our children. Or grab an hour on Sunday to send an email to straighten out an unfinished task.

Many studies have shown that the lack of boundary for work-nonwork balance and mixing work with non-work life has an adverse effect on your well-being, feeling more stresses and experienced more conflicts between work and family life. More likely than not, you are more likely to suffer negative psychological outcomes when work- and home-life overlap.

One of the reason is because when you interrupted your non-work time to attend to a work task, it would cost you more valuable time and effort to get it out of your mind and get back to non-work state of being (physically, mentally and emotionally) . Hence, brief interruption for work tasks aren’t “performance or efficiency”; instead, the switching cost involved damaging the quality of attention and engagement you are supposed to devote to non-work activities, like having bonding times with your loved ones. The second reason for feeling stressful is that you are not really off work or fully detached from work. Your mind and consciousness need intentional time and space to recover and rest. These often resulted in poor sleep quality and putting the well-being on constant fight-flight mode. The final reason is that you are setting up this habit as a requisite for normal working life! It is not. Your boss might take it that you are okay with it, or as a boss, you are sending a message that “work is more important than your well-being”.

Let’s prevent such spilling over in your work-nonwork balance and keep your well-being in check!