Portfolio Sample Article #1 -
The Importance of Work/Health Balance
Your work isn’t worth your health.
I can say this from personal experience, in the distant past and in much more recent times. In fact, that’s what led to me starting my search for a computer based job that I could do remotely, which led to freelance writing.
We all have different genetic predispositions… that is, health conditions and/or personality traits that we are much more likely to have just because of our parents, grandparents, and ancestors. For some people its heart or cholesterol problems, while for others its arthritis, cancer or a bad back. While not everyone is born with the same genetic propensities for this or that trait (physical or psychological), we can all most likely recall times in which our health and our jobs butted heads with one another, and one had to suffer to accommodate for the other.
Here is a scenario that many may find relatable. Let’s say you were recently unemployed and were getting down to your last dollar, and you desperately needed to find work… anything that you could get and do. After many weeks of full time job searching, the only job opening you find that you are able to qualify and get a job offer for is working in a loading dock at a local supermarket. It’s not what you’d hoped, the pay and the hours aren’t great, but it’s better than nothing and you have no other options at the moment.
So, you start the job, and you’ve never done this level of physical labor before. Soon after you start the job, you find that for some reason, you are experiencing insomnia every night for months on end. You’re not consuming caffeine close to bedtime, you’re not staring at a computer or phone screen for long periods of time close to bed time, and even melatonin doesn’t seem to help. You think you’ve been doing fine at this new job, but then one day the boss calls you into his or her office. Your boss tells you that you are working too slow, and you haven’t been meeting your production quotas, and that if you can’t pick up the pace and meet the production quotas, you’ll be let go. Your boss says it will be your only warning.
Well now you start panicking, and desperately scrambling for a solution. You turn to energy drinks, energy shots and even pills that are supposed to help with productivity. You even buy some protein powder from Walmart, the cheapest that you can possibly find, just in case that may help, but you’re so poor, only making about $900 per month at this part-time job, that you’re quite limited in what you can afford to try to boost your job performance.
Let’s say you find that these energy supplements work great at boosting your productivity at work and your performance skyrockets! However, after the first week of this, you notice you’re starting to get more drained at work even after taking your energy stuff, and you’ve made sure you’re eating enough, so that isn’t the issue. Come to find out, your body began to develop tolerance to those energy supplements, and you had to increase your dose a little bit in order to get the effectiveness back to what it was at first. The fact that you’ve still been having insomnia doesn’t help either.
You continue this pattern of boosted performance, weakening performance, raising the dosage due to tolerance, on and on. Let me tell you, if you consume stimulants in ever-increasing dosages, every day for months on end, while experiencing poor rest and recovery, all of that stuff will eventually catch up with you, and you may find yourself stopping and panicking, light-headed and trying to catch your breath in the middle of a shift at work!
It is in that moment that you realize that something has to change… you’ve got to fix the problems that you’re experiencing right now or you could end up in the hospital, or even die! However, at the same time, you’re in dire financial straights, and you’re barely making enough money to eat and keep a roof over your head. You go and talk to your boss and explain what happened with your heart, and with the insomnia problems over the last few months. You tell them that you want to try to find a different position within the store to switch to that is not so physically demanding because you can’t keep relying on chemicals to force your body to perform beyond it’s natural limits anymore, that you still want to work but you value your life much more.
Let’s just say for the sake of this story (and workers’ faith in the humanity that still remains within their bosses), that instead of telling you “tough luck pal”, that he or she instead asks you if you’d be interested in being an administrative assistant in the stock room office, where you’d do data entry on a computer and also help organize printed documents. You jump at the opportunity, and you find that even though your insomnia doesn’t go away, you’re able to do this work without having to shovel stimulants down your throat all day. You stick to just 2 cups of coffee throughout the day and that does the trick. You eventually do so well in that new position that your boss gives you full time hours and a $1.50/hr raise, while adding additional office responsibilities on your plate… but you can handle it, and your quality of life finally starts to go uphill.
Now you are an assistant store manager and will probably become store manager in the coming months once your current boss moves on to another location. Your income and working conditions are still not ideal, but they’re a lot better than when you first started. You found that your insomnia suddenly went away about 2 months after you started working in the office. You’re making your way up now in life, and it’s all because you recognized the importance of finding work that fits with your body’s specific strengths and weaknesses, instead of trying to force yourself to do well at something that you’re just not cut out for, even if you were doing it out of perceived necessity in the beginning.
The above story is based in part on my own personal work experience back in 2015, and in part on some things that I’ve experienced in more recent months with my last job. When you choose what kind of work to do based on whether you’re capable of doing it without worsening your health or likely experiencing a serious injury due to one of the core job duties, it can mean having some lean times. It can mean having some brief periods of unemployment if you have a current or prospective employer who is uncaring about your situation, or who simply can’t accommodate for your medical needs. However, having to endure that temporary pain in your finances and living situation is much better than what the outcome would be if you ignored what your body was telling you and tried to keep forcing it to push past it’s own limits and you end up in the hospital having to have surgery and a $500K medical bill. To add insult to injury, in the second scenario, you would most certainly be told by your employer when you finally got out of the hospital that they had to let you go and replace you because you were gone so long.
Learn a lesson from my past experiences and those of countless others… be willing to have a good work ethic, but choosing an “alright paying job” that is kind to your health is much wiser than choosing a high paying job that will destroy your body and mind in the process of trying to do good enough to keep it. And if a job is low paying and destroys your health in the process, get the heck out of it as fast as you possibly can! Commit to yourself and to your employers that you will only do jobs that you’re sure you can do well, and you’ll all be happier because of it! Who knows, it might even pave the way to landing your dream job!
