How Busy Office Hours Affect Your Well-Being and Balance

People are working longer hours than ever before. The amount of time people are spending at work is negatively impacting most of their lives.

Work is something people are actively trying to avoid nowadays, which was not always the case in the past. If you have found that your job is making you feel overwhelmed, this post is for you.

This article’s intention is to explain how busy office hours can affect your well-being and then explore a few different strategies for overcoming exhaustion and improving overall mental and physical health.

Excessive Exposure to Screens

One of the main reasons why office work is ruining people’s lives is because workers are exposed to computer screens for eight or nine hours a day.

Overexposure to blue light, the type of light that’s emitted by computers and mobile devices, can be very bad for your health. The experts from blockbluelight.com make clear on their site that blue light exposure can be remedied by investing in eyewear that’s specially designed to block blue light.

You can wear glasses made to block blue light at the office and at home. It’s likely you are not only being exposed to blue light at work. More than likely, it is something you are exposed to everywhere that you go, as you probably carry a mobile phone around with you.

Studies suggest that exposure to blue light can cause some very serious health problems, ranging from mild eye strain to severe migraines.

In addition to wearing eyewear that’s designed to protect your eyes, you should also consider cutting back on screen time. While you cannot necessarily do this at work, you can use your mobile phone less.

People forget that a decade ago, mobile phone usage was not as widespread as it is today, at least to the extent that it is in 2023. People used laptops instead of mobile phones back then and the exposure to screens was much lower.

There are lots of other things you can fill your time with, from reading to sports.

Sitting Down for Long Periods of Time

Office workers tend to sit down for long periods of time, which studies show can be detrimental to overall health. When people sit down, their leg muscles weaken.

In addition to weakening muscles, sitting down for a long time can also have a negative impact on heart health and how sugar is processed by the body, increasing your risk of developing diabetes, a very harmful condition that’s becoming much more common in society today.

One remedy to sitting down for long periods of time is to stand up when you are working, which you can easily do by convincing your manager to invest in a stand-up desk.

But in addition to trying to stand up more when you are at work, make sure that in your spare time you exercise. Regular exercise is one of the most effective ways of remedying the harm that’s caused to the human body when most of its time is spent sitting down.

There are lots of different exercises that you can do to improve your health. If you do want to get more exercise, make sure that you choose a type of exercise that’s right for you and that suits your personality.

Finding an exercise that is right for you should not be difficult as some will stand out to you more than others.

Working Yourself to Exhaustion

People who work in offices tend to work themselves to exhaustion. This is because office managers often push workers to work harder than they might if they were managing a warehouse floor, where physical exhaustion is a lot more obvious.

Office workers tend not to suffer from physical exhaustion though; they usually suffer from mental exhaustion. Mental exhaustion is arguably a lot worse than physical exhaustion, as it builds up over a long period of time and usually leads to people having breakdowns, which can stop them from being able to work and function normally for a long period of time.

If you work in an office and find yourself suffering from the symptoms of mental exhaustion, you need to reach out to your supervisor or manager and explain this to them. Companies are a lot more concerned with the mental well-being of their employees these days.

If you approach your manager and explain how you are feeling, they might be able to make certain allowances for you or even give you a few paid days off of work, allowing you to recover.

Good mental and physical health is something you need to take very seriously. Unfortunately, many people do not think about either of these things. You can use the guidance given here in this post to improve your overall health as an office worker.