Science Today

Health and Work-Life Balance: The Key to a Fulfilling Life

Gabriel Ponzanelli was one of the sculptors of the most beautiful memories of my childhood. The scene stays with me as if it were yesterday. However, the day my father took me to The Blue House and Frida Kahlo’s work, my insolence made me think that her art was overrated... That sense stayed with me for many years because by then, I was extremely excited by the asymmetrical structure of Fernando Romero, the great Soumaya, and the wonders of MoMa.

I always found someone else to admire in my brief studies of painting and art history. Then, one day, I came across “My Broken Column” in the strict sense of the expression; then I understood what it was all about: art does not reproduce what is visible but makes visible what is not always visible.

As Frida Kahlo would say, “I suffered two serious accidents in my life.” The first was when a speeding car crashed into my car as I was leaving work, fracturing the osteosynthesis material of my prosthetic spine. The second one happened at my job, being by far the worst. Like most scientists, I have had my days of political persecution while trying to seek immortality through my contributions; a slip in my workplace led me to the operating room for the first time. I should have made it to safety back then. The Broken Column is a work where the artist portrays herself enclosed in a steel corset to support her spine. Her spine is depicted as an ancient pillar broken in several places, with many nails buried in her naked body. Suddenly, living with pain takes a back seat. The nails coming down the right side of the blanket that covered her lower body, and the fissured landscape, dry and bare, became a symbol of pain and loneliness.

Some things stand out in a daily exercise of gratitude, such as preserving life, movement, family ties, or social ties. Still, the term “interfacelife-work” becomes increasingly complex because one is faced with what are known as invisible disabilities.

The term work-life interface refers to the relationship between the work and non-work environments. This umbrella term includes three different facets: a) negative facet (i.e., conflict), (b) positive facet (i.e., enrichment), and c) integrative facet (i.e., balance). The first facet is the conflict between work and personal life that occurs when there is a perceived incompatibility between work and other areas of life. For example, work demands can interfere with family needs and vice versa. Both situations can negatively impact employee wellbeing and family functioning and impair employee job satisfaction and performance.

Therefore, the boundaries between work and family life are often blurred so that the behaviors and emotions of individuals from one realm can spill over into another. So, the overflow can be bidirectional. Most studies on the work-family interface focus on the negative spillovers between the two domains(2). A conflict perspective is adopted, which assumes that people in multiple roles often do not have enough time (i.e., timebased conflicts) to meet the demands of all roles (2).

Alternatively, they cannot meet the requirements of one role due to certain required behaviors (i.e., behavior-based conflicts) or tensions resulting from their participation in another role (i.e., tension-based conflicts)(2). However, the positive effects between work and family, assuming the benefits of multiple roles, may outweigh the disadvantages(2). As such, resources produced in one function can improve the quality of experiences and outcomes in another function, leading to work-family enrichment(2). Enrichment can be conceptualized as a two-way construct. It can lead to workers experiencing greater well-being, lower turnover, increased work engagement, and better family functioning.

How work is organized and divided is closely related to stress, which can affect employees’ mental health. Highlighting a culture of wellbeing is essential; let us remember that NOM-035 arises from different national and international agreements and regulations that Mexico has ratified regarding labor justice, competitiveness, and trade.

Work-family balance is associated with high psychophysical health, reduced psychological distress and burnout, high family satisfaction and functioning, and positively associated with engagement. Resilience is a crucial point for people to experience greater well-being, less burnout, decreased psychological distress, and lower risk of depression. Positive work-related outcomes, such as increased job performance and lower staff turnover, are also likely to be reported.

During the Covid-19 pandemic, 17.3% to 75.3% of health professionals presented mental health problems. It has been four years since then, and I’m still seeing the ravages of well-being that have gone unaddressed. Returning to Kahlo’s expression, art can serve as a powerful resource to understand the natural course of diseases; she conveys to us the enormous difficulties that prevent her from working, being necessary to wear a steel corset for months. Like a mime, she makes the invisible visible; Certainly, the pain is not seen.

Her surreal, profoundly, and even painfully personalized paintings fascinate art lovers worldwide. She captures in detail the physical, psychological, and social pain that would become the driving force and inspiration of many of her best works after the terrible bus accident she suffered in her youth and that, like me, left her with lifelong severe sequelae. To give an example, my husband can officially say that his wife “has a couple of screws off” without me being able to refute it.

In all seriousness, my tragedy is neither a oneoff story nor the first nor the last. Compassion is a valuable personal resource, facilitating the relationship between affiliative humor and decreasing secondary traumatic stress. Affiliative humor implies self-acceptance. High levels of this style produce a tendency to say funny things, tell jokes, and amuse others to facilitate interpersonal relationships and reduce tensions.

Therefore, fostering compassionate skills could benefit an optimal professional quality of life. Unfortunately, today, within public institutions, the vast majority do not have a genuine interest in the well-being of employees or respect for the quality of life or human dignity, which is closely related to the gaps in mental health care. In terms of wages and gender, segregation, stigma, and misinformation are still prevalent. There is no culture of well-being.

Worryingly, mental illness globally accounts for 32% of years lived with a disability(1) and has significant impacts on workplaces. In particular, healthcare workers experience high rates of mental health problems, such as burnout, stress, and depression, due to deplorable working conditions, including excessive workloads, workplace violence, discrimination, and bullying, which also produces adverse effects on patients, as well as the happiness and well-being of those who remain on the job(1). In high-income countries, organizational interventions include skills and knowledge development, leadership development, communication and team building, stress management, and workload and leisure time management.

All studies highlight the importance of employee engagement in developing and implementing the intervention. The literature review also supports the recognized need for more research on mental health and happiness in low- and middle-income countries and studies evaluating the longterm effects of mental health promotion in the workplace.(3)

Protective factors (resilience, perceived social support, and professional identification) and stressors (perceived stress and psychosocial risks in the workplace) influenced workplace well-being and perceived quality of life.

Frida Kahlo makes the days so brief that she incomparably teaches us that pain is nothing more than a symptom of our being alive.

Dr. Ana Villaseñor-Todd

Scientist, doctor by profession and Mexican businesswoman noted for her studies in minimal hepatic encephalopathy, oxidative stress, quality of life and social cognition. Certified by the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO) as a facilitator of MhGap; CEO VICOMMA Group.

References

[1] Timofeiov-Tudose IG., Măirean C. (2023) Workplace humor, compassion, and professional quality of life among medical staff. Eur J Psychotraumatol. 14(1):2158533. Recuperado desde: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/20008066.2022.2158533

[2] Bernuzzi, C., Sommovigo, V., & Setti, I. (2022). The role of resilience in the work-life interface: A systematic review. Work(Reading, Mass.),73(4), 1147–1165. Recuperado desde: https://doi.org/10.3233/WOR-205023

[3] Wong, KP, Lee, FCH, Teh, PL, Chan, AHS (2021). The Interplay of Socioecological Determinants of Work-Life Balance, Subjective Wellbeing and Employee Wellbeing. Int J Environ Res Public Health 18(9):4525. Recuperado desde: https://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/18/9/4525