9 to 5 Wellness
Do you have the knowledge you need to help your organization get the best return on the time and capital invested in employee wellbeing? Are you a busy professional or C-suite leader looking to introduce wellbeing program at your work?
Discover the art and science of helping organizations grow their most important resource, their people. In this podcast we discuss how organizations can utilize the potential of wellbeing programs to deliver high return on investment (ROI) to employers. We talk about the radical impact that holistic employee wellbeing programs can have on overall quality of work and productivity. We will be sharing insights on investing in human capital. Such as:
🌟 What has helped their organizations gain a competitive advantage?
🌟 How they see the future of employee wellbeing?
🌟 Misunderstandings that are out in the corporate market today
🌟 Advice to other leaders to create a happier, healthier, and more productive workplace
Our guests are C-suite leaders, and wellness innovators across the value chain: HR managers, wellness champions, community wellbeing ambassadors, service vendors, and wellness consultants.
9 to 5 Wellness
How many hours in a day are under your control?
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In this episode I'm exploring the concept of 'time under our control' and investigates how many hours in the day are truly within our control outside of work, sleep, and mandatory obligations.
00:00 Introduction to the Nine to Five Wellness Podcast
00:37 Exploring Time Under Our Control
01:27 Patient Experiences and Health Impacts
02:29 Survey Insights on Free Time and Happiness
03:45 Breaking Down a 24-Hour Day
06:46 Challenges of Balancing Work and Personal Life
08:01 The Importance of Downtime for Mental Health
08:43 Potential Solutions and Future Research
09:15 Conclusion and Call to Action
🌟 🌟 🌟 If you liked this episode and would like to learn more about wellness training and workshops offered by 9 to 5 Wellness, email us at info@aeshathair.com. You can learn more about our programs at: https://toneandstrengthen.com/workshops-trainings/. 🌟 🌟 🌟
My passion is helping organizations create a culture of wellness, and I do this by setting up health programs that prioritize the most important asset they've got – their employees. Cheers to a healthier and happier journey ahead!
🌟 🌟 🌟 You can learn more about ME- the host at https://www.aeshatahir.com
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Welcome to the Nine to Five Wellness Podcast, a show about corporate wellness solutions with innovators and forward-thinking leaders who are at the forefront of the workplace wellness movement. I'm your host, Aisha Tahir.
Hello and welcome to the nine to five Wellness Podcast, episode number 105. So today I wanna talk about a concept which is time under our control. I've been pondering upon this question like how many hours in the day, are actually under our control. And this is something that I became more aware of after working with my patients.
And I wanna be completely transparent. It's an episode where I highlight an issue. I honestly don't have a solution to it yet. I'm. Planning on looking more into it and to see, what would be a better way to have more time under our control. And I'm open to comments from you guys.
So the way this started was my patients often comment, we don't have time for exercise. We don't have time to eat healthy, we don't have time to find a hobby, and they aren't making excuses. They actually work upwards of 65 hour weeks, which includes travel away from home.
One of my patients spent 155 nights away from their home last year, and guess what? Their health biomarkers were tanking with fatty liver disease, obesity, and a very high risk of cardiovascular disease. And quite honestly, many of us often feel we'd be happier if we had more unscheduled downtime.
Maybe we find ourselves fantasizing about lazying the days away with pina coladas in hand. So I've been wondering would lots more leisure time. Really leave us more fulfilled while needs vary among different people. A recent survey found that overall people were happiest when they had a mix of effort and relaxation each day.
And the sweet spot is four to five hours of downtime daily. I guess that all makes sense, but the next finding of this survey is a bit of a surprise. This survey also found that most people would rather have more free time than more money and wouldn't give up one second for 1 cent.
The survey found that people would much rather get home by 5:00 PM than after 6:00 PM. Getting home after 6:00 PM made people feel twice as unhappy than arriving home by 5:00 PM.
Okay, so across the board, the least popular way to spend free time according to this survey was cleaning. Well, I get it. Why that might be the case. I actually don't mind cleaning, but probably don't like it on a daily basis. Just quick. Touchups are fine.
So while the 24 hour day is objectively fixed, the amount of time under personal control can vary significantly based on our obligations. That being said, it is generally a much smaller portion of the day than we often think. I'm talking about the discretionary time, which is the time remaining after accounting for work, sleep and mandatory obligations, commuting chores, et cetera.
For many, this leaves only a few hours of truly free time per day.
So I'm going to break it down for you. So we are gonna try to take account of all the hours in a 24 hour day. There really isn't much time in the day to do what we want to do.
Once we have taken into account the typical. Eight hour working day, we can add at least one hour on either end for commuting to and from the office. This means that the number of hours in work mode is made up of eight hours at the office and a minimum of two hours in transit equating to a minimum of 10 hours.
Now most workplaces require an hour of lunch, so it's 11 hours total with 24 hours in the day. We are left with a maximum of 13 hours outside of work mode, which is where the life slice of the work life pie kicks in.
Sleep is an essential piece of the life slice. As healthy adults, we should be sleeping for between seven and nine hours a night. Let's assume we aim for the minimum of seven hours of sleep per night. If we take the 13 hours when we are not in work mode and deduct seven hours for sleep, we are left with a maximum of six hours of awake time and non-work mode.
Those six hours of awake time need to cover a few normal activities such as showering and getting changed at least one hour, preparing and eating breakfast and dinner. I would say it amounts to about an hour. Kids pick up and drop off.
Is another hour cleaning, maybe 30 minutes. What am I missing here? I'm sure I'm missing stuff like doctor's appointments and haircuts and all that good stuff. Oh, I'm missing manicure and pedicure, which is my favorite, but okay. It's not on a daily basis, but these things take time. So we're left with two and a half hours in the day.
Well, if you have very young kids this time is going to get eaten up, you can easily spend another two hours getting them to bed. A routine that involves dinner, bathing, reading stories, and getting heads on pillows.
So how can we take care of our health and learn new skills? Weekends is one answer, but then who will do the groceries and meal prep and drive kids to their tournaments? Honestly, I'm trying to figure this out myself. No wonder we have a sleep deprived society. One of the problems with working too much is that people are trading sleep hours for work hours.
Researchers from the University of Pennsylvania, Perman School of Medicine found that people who reports sleeping six hours or less per night are also working an hour and a half more than those who sleep closer to the recommended eight hours per night.
Lack of sleep and piling on of undue stress, lack of sleep, and piling on of undue stress leads to health complications like high blood pressure, unhealthy eating. Other actions that negatively impact health.
In fact, a study by Stanford and Harvard Business School found that working long hours can increase mortality by nearly 20%. You need downtime for mental health. There is more to downtime than just empty hours of the day. Trust me, our bodies and brains need breaks. Free time allows us the opportunity to socialize, exercise, or get some extra rest.
All known mental health boosters, and even if we feel bored by excess time, a little boredom has been shown to have major benefits on the brain, increasing creativity and helping us build neural connections so I think something's gotta give.
Either we need to find employment, hobbies and routines that give us the flexibility to accommodate more family time and more me time, or we need to come to terms with which days of the week, different bits of the work-life balance pie chart will take priority. Maybe hybrid work or a four day work week is the solution to this problem. I'm gonna do more research and get back to you about that on another podcast episode. Thank you so much for listening . Bye for now.
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