Chill Out…

To Create A Work-Life Balance is the concept of ‘self-love’, and now its more relevant

In France, there are certain hours of the day where people are legally free from sending or responding to work emails. It’s the first piece of legislation seeking to establish a work-life balance since the invention of the smartphone eliminated the ability to clock in and out. “Employees physically leave the office, but they do not leave their work,” explained French lawmaker Benoit Hamon to the BBC of the country’s decision. “They remain attached by a kind of electronic leash—like a dog.” But drawing a line in the sand of when you walk away from work is not as simple as it was for your parents’ generation. Modern careers require a recalibrating of scales. “We’ve reached a point where technology has outpaced our capacity to manage the speed at which we’re progressing,” says Arianna Huffington, founder of the Huffington Post, who, after a collapsing in a wave of exhaustion in 2007, has very publicly spent the past 10 years focused on finding and creating tools to establish happy, healthy boundaries. Most recently, she launched Thrive Global, a website dedicated to making wellness as integral to the definition of success as professional advancement has been. For Huffington, taking “sacred time” away from screens is absolutely vital to resetting for better in-office decisions, personal relationships, and physical and mental health. The Internet scion’s phone is never within view if she is “having a meal with loved ones, working on a project, [or] sleeping.” In fact, she puts her phone in what she calls a phone bed to charge at night 30 minutes before she herself goes to sleep, to allow her mind time to unwind. “We’ve learned that your day starts the night before—meaning getting enough sleep is essential to how we start our day,” she explains.