We’re letting perfect be the enemy of the good.
First, Americans worked too much. Then, we began craving work-life balance. Now, one expert says, we’re trying to hard to have it all, we’re nearly as stressed as we were to begin with.
Jeff Karp is a professor in the field of biomedical engineering at Harvard and MIT — he’s written a book called LIT, which is an acronym for Life Ignition Tools.
He’s calling for a whole new approach to walking the fine line between being too committed to career — and not being focused enough.
“It ends up being very frustrating and can lead to anxiety, because we’re constantly feeling like we’re not in balance. There’s a state we should be in [and] we’re never in that state,” Karp told CNBC Make It.
Instead, he advocates for something he calls the “pendulum lifestyle,” something he began to think about after noticing how difficult it could be to find balance in his own life.
“I realized that if we start to look at everything in life, like our energy levels, our motivation, our hunger, our sleep…like everything is on a pendulum, and you start to step back and visualize that, I think it can be incredibly empowering,” he told the outlet.
Embrace the ebb and flow, Karp encourages.
“Like the pendulum, [there are] these natural rhythms in life,” he points out.
The expert recommends a number of practical ways to practice the pendulum lifestyle — starting with finding more patience with yourself and the process, and being less goal oriented, taking one step at a time.
The advice comes as younger employees are becoming notoriously fixated on the concept of working to live versus living to work, setting them apart from the older generations.
Gen Z employees, for example, see sick days as a necessary way to recover from stress or burnout, Dr. Kyle Elliott, a California-based career coach, previously told Fox News.
And a whopping 62% of Gen Z respondents to a Dayforce survey said they’d accept a lower salary in exchange for — you guessed it — better work-life balance, the outlet reported.
