Spouse. Parent. Employee. Student. How do you manage the stress of multilple life roles?

Playing just one role (whether a spouse, parent, employee or student) is hard/stressful enough. However, chances are that you need to play more than one of these roles everyday and you want to be the best that you can in each role. In an ideal world, you’d have a list of activities that you’d like to engage in/complete and you would get to tick-off all of them. However, that is often not possible and you need to make trade-offs, set priorities and go through just a few of the activities. Quite a balancing act isn’t it? And it can be quite stressful and overwhelming as well.

According to a recent study (Tracy Hecht at Concordia University, Julie M. McCarthy at the University of Toronto. Journal of Applied Psychology), most of us employ one of three coping strategies to deal with opposing demands on our time, energy and emotions.

• Engaging actively with our problems in order to solve them (problem-focused)
• Reaching out to others and vent about our problems (emotion-focused)
• Ignoring our problems altogether and distract ourselves with other activities (avoidance-focused).

Typically, dealing with problems head-on (problem-focussed) is seen as the best approach and the avoidance-focussed approach is looked down upon. However, the study suggests that the laying too much emphasis on solving problems can lead to more problems. If you are facing a problem, not satisfied with something or worried about a certain responsibility, adding another task/activity to deal with it can just increase the burden and cause other problems. “Problem-focus is good to a point, but you can overdo it,” says McCarthy. “If you’re worried about your studies, and you study obsessively without taking a break, you’ve got no time to recover. This can cause serious resource depletion. People need time to refocus in order to learn or study well.”

The emotion-focused technique is also used a fair bit by people, but in the study it was found to neither help nor hurt conflicts between life roles. The most surprising conclusion, says McCarthy, had to do with the third coping strategy: Avoidance. “Avoidance was actually negatively related to conflict,” she says. In other words, people experienced a reduction in conflict between life roles when they simply put some of their issues on the backburner for a while. “This technique is traditionally seen as ‘running away from your problems’,” says McCarthy. “But maybe by backing off and taking breaks, people are able to replenish their resources.”

The conclusions of the study, do resonate with my own experience. I am always juggling several things everyday, which include raising my son, being a good husband/son/brother, having some resemblance of a social life, staying healthy, managing household duties, delivering results for my clients, working well with team mates, developing new products and marketing/sales. It is simply not possible for me to do everything that I want to in a day. When I try to squeeze too much in and keep doing things till late in the night, that usually get me stressed, keeps my mind too active, lowers the quality of my sleep and then I can’t do anything properly after a few days. Never works. What works for me is the following:

• Taking a step back and lowering the number of activities
• Think about my priorities, with a clear and relaxed mind
• Setting an approximate time, after which I will not do any activities and just relax/unwind
• Deciding which activities I want to engage in during the time that I have and coming to terms with the fact that the other activities will just have to wait

I like doing many different things in a day - its keeps the day interesting and satisfying. On some days it’s draining but on others I feel like superman . Know the feeling?

Topics: Stress, Work life balance, Family, Job