ALT-1 How being Overworked can Interfere with your Social Life
Overworking affects your life in many ways. It diminishes your home life, health and can render your social life non-existent. If you constantly over-work, you may suddenly find that you have no social life at all, and no friends outside work.
When you overwork, and perhaps your boss constantly asks you to work late with little notice, you may have to continually cancel social plans at the last minute, or just not turn up at all. Your friends will get tired, when you keep letting them down and may just stop asking you to social events. They may also believe that you are hiding in your work and deliberately avoiding them.
When you overwork, you have little time to pursue your hobbies. Whether it is attending a soccer match on Saturdays, a round of golf or walking the dog with friends, hobbies can be social events too. You lose touch with those, who follow the same hobby, when you overwork. You also lose the relaxation and social interaction that hobbies bring.
When work takes up the majority of your time, with little social life, or experiences of life outside work, your only conversation must necessarily be about work. This subject is boring after a while and may drive people away from you.
If you are constantly working long hours, when you do have some leisure time, you may prefer to sleep, or to watch television alone rather than socializing by going out, inviting friends to your house, or pursuing hobbies.
If your social life is being affected in this way, you may also not be giving your best effort at work. That may seem a strange thought, but to give your best efforts at work there must be a happy balance in your life between home, family and social life on the one hand and work on the other. When this balance becomes skewed one way or the other, both sides of your life suffer. People’s best work ideas and innovations often come to them when they are at home or doing something very different to work.
Overworking over a long period affects your family and social life, your hobbies and, since these are how people relax, in turn, affects your well-being too. Feeling too tired to bother socializing is a warning sign that you should think about cutting down on work.
Conversing with others stimulates a person and broadens the mind. When a person concentrates only on work, they become one-dimensional, blinkered and narrow. Such a person is unable to undertake the creative and lateral thinking that result in the best work. Socializing with other people helps you to relax and is part of the happy balance that enables you to give your very best efforts at work. When work takes over your life, your family, hobbies and social life suffer but so, too, does your work.
