Katy Hahn

Today feels like a Sunday. It’s a Thursday as I write this, but as I lounge in my backyard and look around – I notice a blue jay land on the fence line in a way that I typically only do on Sundays. Sure, I might see the bird and appreciate its beauty on any old weekday, but on Sunday, I have enough peace and presence of mind to feel a deeper sort of kindredness with that blue jay. I have closer access to a sort of slowness, ease, and flow that doesn’t come as naturally on say, a Wednesday or a Thursday, or God forbid – a Monday.

Weekday Woes

This Thursday feels like a Sunday because I’ve been off from my day job the whole week, and tomorrow I return to work. While it’s technically going to be Friday, tomorrow is effectively my “Monday” too. It feels like a Sunday because, much like after a particularly well spent weekend, I’ve been granted enough time and space to have rested enough that I feel centered in myself again. I feel like myself again. That deeper connection with myself enables me to connect better with the world around me, a feat which can feel difficult to achieve on a weekday with the previous workday so fresh on the mind and the next workday looming so closely overhead.

On a weekday, there is typically a running to-do list on my mind after I get off work, and half of the list items don’t even belong to me. They belong to the company I work for – I’m only borrowing them. Despite having no interest in carrying them on into my evenings, they’re still there lingering – taking up my time, energy, and space. They hang around creating mental clutter and making it more challenging for me to find peace and clarity – to find that Sunday sort of stillness that feels so darn good.

The Centralization of Work

It is a sad fact that the structure of our society causes many of us to end up working in jobs that bring disharmony, stress, and dread into our lives. At the same time, we are trained to center our entire lives around our jobs – letting our employers dictate not only when we work or play, but when we eat, what we wear, how we present ourselves online, when we rest and for how long we get to rest, when we can take time to care for our physical and mental health, and more… Despite the fact that there is so much discontent for many of us involving our jobs, our jobs can end up sort of running our lives.

The Need for Compartmentalization

In this capitalistic state, we’re expected to be able to effortlessly compartmentalize those working lives and our home lives. At the end of each workday, no matter how stressful or unpleasant it may have been, we are supposed to pack up any work woes we have into neat little boxes and put them up on a back shelf until we show up for our next shift. We’re supposed to drift on smoothly into our personal lives each evening with the full capacity to access joy, peace, and contentedness despite anything in that box. At least, that’s the ideal…right?

Unfortunately, the reality is that the stresses and rigors of our jobs cause many of us to build up far too much mental and emotional momentum during the workday for us to be able to screech the impacts to a clean, abrupt stop the second it hits 5 o’clock. Those residual thoughts and feelings tend to overflow into our personal lives day to day, as well as in a broader sense. This overflow reduces the amount of energy we have to use on things that truly bring us fulfillment and continuously perpetuates the placement of our jobs as the central focus of our lives – the central focus which can end up dictating or at least influencing virtually everything else.

The Struggle to Cope

As a corporate employee, for years, I struggled with the ability to compartmentalize in this way, allowing the overflow stresses from work to pour outside of business hours without any true awareness of the impact it was having on my mental health or my power to put a stop to it. This kept me in a near-constant state of fight or flight for a long time.

Eventually, I recognized the pattern and was able to begin a process of reclaiming my off-the-clock time from my employer, freeing myself up for greater access to joy and peace no matter what day of the week it may be – and empowering me to be the one to set the central focus of my life.

Strategies for Decentralizing Work

In a perfect world, we wouldn’t need to work jobs that inspired stress and dread throughout the week. As for me – I’m working towards creating a life that is more aligned with my passions and joys, but in the meantime, my reality today includes a corporate job. I have to strive every day to make conscious decisions to maintain better patterns for myself that do not position my job as the central focus of my life, and I still catch myself slipping from time to time. However, by and large, I’ve drastically improved my balance and happiness through the implementation of a handful of meaningful changes.

There are five major things I did that have helped me to decentralize my day job from my life and reduce its impacts to my mental health.

1. Reframing the Days of the Week
2. Establishing Better Boundaries in Relationships
3. Creating a Post-Work Transition Routine
4. Creating Pathways to Achievement Outside of Work
5. Recovering From the Addiction to Time

After making these changes and shifting some mental paradigms, I no longer feel like I’m just living to work. I don’t feel like my job is my focus, broken up by the tiny spaces in between shifts where I get to squeeze in my real life. Now, I feel like my life outside of work is my true focus, and my work is just a tool to pay my bills with rather than a tyrant that runs my entire life. This massive shift has freed me to consistently spend more of my energy on designing a more fulfilling life that is authentic to who I am.

Stay tuned to our next posts in this series on Decentralizing Work to explore the use of these specific strategies to make powerful changes in your life too, reclaiming your time and creating more space for you to pursue the things that bring you joy.