Work Life Balance and Mental Wellness

Improving the quality of work life balance is quite important for mitigating the risk of both mental and physical illness and helping individuals attain holistic wellness. As individuals spend fairly a large percentage of time at work, the workplace is crucial in determining the wellbeing or overall health of an employee. If one wants to survive in the corporate world, one should be able to maintain work life balance. In the corporate world, employees get stressed out easily due to high expectations and demands from their superiors. If one does not perform well within the frame work of given time, he/she is considered incapable. This produces a lot of stress among employees. Stress can be painful and a hindrance to performance for both junior recruits and the most senior executive in the organization. This is a real life case study of a young woman, which illustrates how a break up in a relationship affected the personal as well as work life of that woman and how the inability to maintain work life balance impacted her overall health, leading to eating disorder. It also describes the devastating effect it had on her emotional wellbeing. Her eating disorder seemed to have no medical evidence of any physical problem. Instead, it was found to be solely psychosomatic. People develop eating disorders as a way of dealing with emotions that they experience but are unable to express. Apparently, they use food to deal with feelings such as anger,frustration, hurt, loneliness etc. This young woman sought consultation with a psychologist for treating her eating disorder. This case study delineates how counseling therapy helped the client to overcome her eating disorder and maintain work life balance which in turn led to professional growth and development of the client.