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Stress Awareness Day: Let's STOP Trying To Achieve The Work/Life Balance

Millions of Brits find balancing work and home life a huge stress - but is chasing the dream of a work/life balance doing more harm than good?

Just reading about stress makes us feel a bit panicked, and it sounds like we're not alone. This National Stress Awareness Day it's been found that one in five of us feels stressed every single day.

And it seems one of our biggest stressors is trying to achieve the fabled work/life balance, with 15 million people in the UK saying that they struggle with the concept.

Stressed? You're not alone (REX)
Stressed? You're not alone (REX)

But a third of people admitted that their work and home lives are equally stressful - so at least that's in balance, right? Er...

Worse for women

The research by Kalms discovered that fitting everything into the working day presents more of a challenge for women (42per cent said it was stressful compared to 31 per cent of men) suggesting that a gender gap still exists when it comes to balancing work and home life priorities.

So it's not surprising that the research found women are more susceptible to daily stress than men, though they are more proactive about tackling it.

The age when stress at it's highest levels for women is 36 - because of work and homelife pressures combining. Which means Katie Price, Alesha Dixon, Rachel Stevens, Maggie Gyllenhaal and Myleene Klass could all be experiencing their most stressful year ever.

At 36, Alesha Dixon is at her most stressful age (REX)
At 36, Alesha Dixon is at her most stressful age (REX)

Forget the work/life balance

But is the quest for a perfect work/life balance thwarting us from feeling like we really have one? Some experts have suggested that modern living doesn't naturally lead to a perfect split, and to actually feel content and reduce our stress we have to accept that work and home life with wax and wane and interact with each other over our lives.

Life coach Sophia Davis agrees.

"Stressing to achieve a work/life balance often cancels out us actually getting it!

"Often someone who has a really great work/life balance, who spends lots of time with family and friends and is really successful at work, might actually be the most stressed - even though on the outside they look like they're nailing it."

She explains: "Many people who are keeping all these plates spinning actually have really overactive minds and worry about things a lot, so they actually might feel more stressed than someone who doesn't look like they have a great balance, but who has a different attitude."

What is stress?

"It’s nothing outside of us that makes us stress," continues Davis. So if you're blaming your work or your kids or your high maintenance friends, you might not be identifying what's really going on.

"All stress is fear. Fear of the consequences of things happening. But remember - not everything that you worry about will actually happen.

"The emotion is born inside ourselves. It's created in the body so nothing outside of us can really cause it. Our thoughts are very powerful and they alone create everything that we're feeling. When we start to understand that, we can start to really tackle problem stress."

Nothing outside yourself makes you stressed, it comes from within (REX)
Nothing outside yourself makes you stressed, it comes from within (REX)

What can we do about it?

Davis has three recommendations for us to get started:

"The most obvious thing to begin with is to try to understand the nature of thought – understanding that thoughts aren’t facts. If you think about it, much of what we worry about never actually materialises so  we worried for nothing.

"The second great thing to do is observe your thinking without buying into it. Once you've understood that your thoughts are not facts, you can observe them without believing their perceived reality.

"And lastly, take 10 minutes a day to just allow yourself to think – dedicate an allocated amount of time for thinking only. When your brain knows it’s been given space to actually think it tends not to feel the need to overthink the rest of the day. Giving it the space it needs to think will it will be much calmer.

"In these 10 minutes you can focus on your breathing or just observe your thoughts, don't engage, just notice."

Davis assures us that just these simple things can make a significant difference. And judging from the stats, it's high time we started sorting our stress levels out.

[How To Reduce Your Stress Levels]
[10 Ways To De-Stress Before Bed]