Finding Work-Life Balance One Task at a Time

[Sam Staples]

Since COVID 19, the way our world interacts with maintaining a work-life balance has shifted. In the article Finding Work-Life Balance One Task at a Time, Bianca Jones Marlin recounts her experience as a "recovering multitasker" balancing work, family, and activism. 

As neuroscientists, how have you adapted to balancing work and life? Similar to the idea of "coming back to the basics", share with us what techniques make you feel more balanced. 

 

[Hugo Sanchez-Castillo]

I learn from the COVID-19 pandemic that our hippocampus could be so confused... Let me explain it, it supposes that the hippocampus is related to the identification of the environment, we can distinguish the differences between a concert hall versus a restaurant, and as a consequence, we behave differentially in both places. But, what happened during the COVID-19 pandemic isolation?... suddenly the university and our home were the same places (the same as the work or elementary school, etc) at the same time in the same place we had to take our classes, in our bedroom, kitchen, study or whatever place in our house. That was the difficulty for our hippocampus, the main expectative was, "It's home, the place for rest, watching TV, playing video games, etc" However in the pandemic, we change that to; "Now is the office, the university, the seminar hall, etc", Huge change for processing!!. Consequently, our behavior started to change, and we tried to adapt, but sometimes our hippocampus failed. For example, the guy who was walking in underwear while somebody was having an interview; the guy who was having a meeting with a kitty filter;  the students in pajamas in class. All these examples are a sample of hippocampus failures, at the beginning, we were having trouble in adaptation, concentration, in attention, because the context said it's a place to rest, but the reality said is your workplace now!!.

Nowadays, we have to understand that the new forms of communication, interaction, and participation will be with us forever. In my case, I use the new technologies as a tool for better communication, and for a new form of interviews, but only as a tool. In my work, I'm learning to separate my private life, some times is easy to say: "We zoom on Sunday" "We zoom at night" etc, but it's not ok, we need our private spaces and our family deserves their spaces with us.

[Mathew Abrams]

As neuroscientists, we will drop/cancel/arrange life around experiments, grant proposals, manuscript submissions, etc... without hesitating; but we stop and think about the impact of participating in a passion outside of work will have on work. For me, working from home during covid helped me to see the imbalance and provided me with the time and opportunity to address the imbalance. I have given myself permission to pursue my passions outside of work with the same commitment and dedication that I have given to my career. It was not easy, and I felt a lot of guilt at first (almost like I was having an affair on work if I chose prioritise another passion).

[Julia Araujo]

Dear Hugo and Mathew, you two just have provided us with such incredible points. The sudden literal and metaphorical transformations within the hippocampi's analysis. As well, from addressing an issue to addressing change (perhaps solutions). There were both so relatable! I'm going back to them in a paragraph.

Personally, I usually see balancing as something greater than simply sequencing. Once we incorporate the multi-dimensions of our lives (work, college, hobbies...) into one piece, there's the possibility to come up with better methods on dealing with such uniques complexities that live from the inside out of our brains. Exchanging from "single-tasking" to multitasking might seem to be the path I'll use to introduce a reversed participation into this forum - mostly when one has read Dr. Marlin's post. In fact, I state that dealing with one single personality might be even easier than labelling the need to control so many aspects at once, mostly when they represent a single thing: our lives. I don't want this to sound redundant, though, every single face of our own polyhedron is dependent to another. For an instance, a task you fail impacts on your entire schedule. These tasks don't need to be done along (together). Simply, one links A and B to C and D coordinately, dependently and adverbially until the "alphabet" becomes complete. By the end of the letters, everything is complete.

Back to where I begun writing, I'll share personal experiences that were able to get my dear colleagues' posts so relatable. First, by the time of the pandemic years, both of my parents were still working at University. Home definitely looked different! The kitchen had accounting classes, the living room, computing classes and my bedroom, a study hall... Us three (my parents and I) would sit on the space between the sidewalk and the door to have lunch and talk about (guess what?) education throughout the pandemic! Dear Hugo, there were three hippocampi very confused. Secondly, I admire how brave your were, Mathew! Certainly, the guilt was a feeling I experienced whenever I tried a new hobby in the midst of days passing by, me getting older while not being able to feel like I was actually interacting with the world... Internet didn't even help! It made things worse multiple times. 

[Mathew Abrams]

Hi Julia,

Your story highlights an important point that I didn't get into in my first post. Being an academic is like being an athlete in many ways: we both dedicate our lives to pursuing excellence. While that athlete may pursue strength, endurance, techniques, we pursue knowledge with the same vigour. Just like in athletics, academics can also over "train" leading to similar issues: exhaustion, anxiety, and illness. Like the athlete, we, academics, must provide ourselves with time to "heal" by disconnecting.