8 Ways Nurses Can Achieve a Work-Life Balance

The benefits of maintaining a good work-life balance are well documented. Taking the time to nurture and maintain your work-life balance can, of course, have a positive impact on you, but it can also significantly impact your place of practice, your family and your relationships. That being said, work-life balance remains more of an ideal than a necessity in most people’s’ minds. For nurses especially, though, a lack of balance between these two worlds can lead to burnout, depression, poor patient outcomes and poor performance. Even when the balance is off, fostering an enjoyable and balanced way of life is always possible if you know how. From making work more fun by getting a unique new scrubs uniform that fits flatteringly and hits fashionably to finding some organization in your life by asking your spouse at home for help — no step is too small, and it’s never too late to balance the scales!

What Will Knock Your Work-Life Balance Off?

As a nurse, your altruistic nature may make it difficult for you to find a work-life balance. From not being able to say “no” when someone asks for your help to offering your help when nobody’s even asked for it, it’s likely that you find yourself pouring out the energy and time that you were saving for your own personal use. Aside from this, things like heavy workloads, understaffing, unachievable and unrealistic scheduling, unclear boundaries and much more can all result in an unbalance as well.

How to Achieve (and Maintain) a Work-Life Balance

• Familiarize Yourself with Your Goals

You’ll want to familiarize yourself with your goals and always keep them in the back of your mind. A work-life balance is essential to your health, yes, but also a great way to ensure that you keep yourself on track to your goals and from getting sucked too far into the realm of work or the pleasures of life — so make sure that you have goals, and use them to keep you from slipping too far off balance. 

• Set Your Priorities

Aside from the priorities found in your workload, your priorities should always align with your goals or needs. Do you want to further your education? Are you trying to get more time with your loved ones? Do you NEED some peace and quiet on your break to recharge? Acting in support of your goals and needs will mean asking for help sometimes or saying no at other times, but setting these priorities also means setting your schedule easier, sustaining a balance easier and experiencing more enjoyment and fulfillment from both areas of this balance. 

• Establish Boundaries

You may be exceptional at scheduling and planning … but do you respect your schedules and plans? Do the people around you respect your schedules and plans? From telling yourself that you’re worth it and that your plans are important to telling your colleague that you don’t have time to stand around and chat after your shift, it’s important to establish achievable schedules, yes, but it’s ESSENTIAL to establish clear boundaries to back them up.

• Invest In and Practice Self-Care

Nurses are experts when it comes to care, but they are notorious for not practicing appropriate self-care in their own lives. Along with destroying your work-life balance, though, a lack of self-care can lead to a whole host of health concerns and conditions, so it’s important to focus on your own wellbeing whenever you get the chance. Whether you indulge in a special bath with your favorite soaks or you upgrade to an antimicrobial laundry additive and give your favorite scrubs a good soak, the time that you need on a daily basis to indulge in self-care activities doesn’t have to be excessive — but if you do it right, the positive impact on your work-life balance will be.

• Cultivate Relationships

Good relationships at home and at work will only serve to improve communication and collaboration and, in turn, improve your ability to express your needs and take initiative when it comes to the stability of your work-life balance. Along with this, those with whom you keep good relationships will generally see the signs of burnout within you or a lack of balance for you (sometimes even before you notice) and will likely offer support in some form without you even having to ask.

• Ask for Help

You know that you can take on a lot, and so do the people around you — but nobody is expecting you to do it all, all the time. From asking a colleague if they could cover a couple of tasks to lighten your heavy workload to asking your spouse if they could tidy up around the house so that you can tidy up your mind, asking for help sometimes is a simple and significant step to take when you’re trying to regain a work-life balance. 

• Make Work and Life as Enjoyable as Possible

It’s hard to maintain a proper work-life balance if you love one half of the pairing and not the other. Of course you’re not expected to love going to work every single day, but you shouldn’t dread going there, either, and you definitely shouldn’t dread going home. 

Make sure that you’re always entering clean spaces, and try adorning these spaces with things that have a positive impact on you. From lighting candles when you get home that make you say “mmm” and “gah, this smells so good” over and over all night to slipping into your best jogger scrub pants for a long shift in order to make yourself feel (and look!) good the whole time you’re there — no effort is too small in this initiative.

• Be Realistic

As an ambitious person, there’s likely a lot that you WANT to do, but it’s important to be honest and realistic with yourself and those around you in terms of what you can and should do. You may want to work that double shift, but can you handle so many hours without a negative impact on your health and wellbeing? You may want to cover your coworker’s evening, but should you cancel your desperately needed home spa recovery day that you’ve been looking forward to all week? 

Don’t Let Yourself Become a Balancing Act

Achieving and sustaining a work-life balance shouldn’t leave you balancing so much that the people around you are watching in awe. When it comes to balancing, it’s all about the weight distribution — so don’t overload yourself in one area or the other, and don’t try to take on more than you can work with!