Your relationships, mind and body are far more important than work will ever be

“How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives,” wrote author Annie Dillard. And if you think about it at the highest level, we can distill down all the different ways we can spend each waking hour into four main buckets: work, relationships, mind and body. 

Work: We labour for several reasons. Of course, the money work brings in to fund our lifestyle is at the top, but we also work for personal accomplishment, and to feel like we’re part of something bigger than ourselves. For a typical worker on a standard schedule of five days a week, work takes up about one-third of our lives.

Relationships: When we’re not working, we spend time with other people, like our family and friends. This might include your partner and kids, parents or siblings, or anyone else you consider to be in your unique family. Your friends also fall into this category, from those you’ve known your whole life to the new acquaintances you want to get to know better. An important aspect of forming and keeping relationships is the communities you’re a part of.

Mind: You are the only keeper of your mind, so it falls squarely on your shoulders to do whatever you can to maintain the best mental health. This includes anything that you do to keep yourself engaged, busy, fulfilled and happy. It might be playing cards every week with your friends, reading books or watching documentaries to learn more about the things that interest you. Your mind also includes your spirituality and beliefs, like organised religion or meditation.

Body: We each only have one vessel we use to live, breathe and move. What we feed it and how we use it is individual for everyone, but health, nutrition and exercise are key factors in our lives. Some would argue that how long our body will last, and the condition it’s in, are the only factors we should care about, as these supersede everything else. You can be firing in every other category but if your body gives out, nothing else matters.

Relationships, mind and body

Most of us tend to focus on work too much by default, so let’s look at the other three ways of spending time in an attempt to rebalance them: relationships, mind and body. 

Our relationship with our family, friends, neighbours and community is an area that we don’t tend to plan. Most of us assume that healthy relationships are something that just happen during the ‘in-between’ times, and that they will sort themselves out naturally. However, if we don’t actively set aside time to nourish our friendships, family ties and connection with other people around us, they can be easily pushed to the back of the queue of our priorities.

The Harvard Study of Adult Development is the world’s longest running study of wellbeing. It has tracked thousands of people for 85 years (and counting), looking at which factors contribute most to living happier and longer lives. Their sample size began with a cohort of 725 white men from Boston – it was 1938, after all – but has since expanded to include over 2000 people from diverse backgrounds.

Every two years the participants answer detailed questions about their lives, covering everything from how much they exercise, what they’re doing at work, how content they are, how much money they earn, and what they spend their time doing.

The research, now led by study director Robert Waldinger, showed that physical health has an obvious direct correlation to how long people live. It also found that the strongest predictor of who would be happy and healthy as they grew older boiled down to one primary factor: whether we have good relationships with other people. In other words, the sheer strength of our connections with other humans has a direct correlation to the quality and quantity of our years on Earth.

“It stands to reason that you’d be happier if you had good relationships – those two things go together,” Waldinger said. “But how could good relationships predict that you’d be less likely to get coronary artery disease or type 2 diabetes or arthritis?”

The answer is that relationships protect our health by helping us to manage stress. “Stress happens all day long,” Waldinger explained. “What we believe is that if I have something upsetting happen, and I have someone to talk to at home or call on the phone, I can literally feel my body calm down.”

In short, there is a strong relationship between deep relationships and wellbeing, and we should be doing everything we can to actively prioritise positive relationships in our lives.

The second way of spending time is on our own minds. This broad category encapsulates everything you can do to keep yourself mentally healthy. This is the category that your hobbies fall into, whether it’s watching films or completing complicated puzzles. Your mind includes your spirituality too; that might be religion for some people, meditation for others. 

It’s important to recognise here that these activities should be thought out and planned. Some experts, like Professor Cassie Holmes from the University of California in Los Angeles, believe that you should track your time. Just as you record your spending if you want to get out of debt or keep a food diary in order to lose weight, she proposes that we should track every half hour of our time so we use it more intentionally.

Her research found that we tend to have a ‘sweet spot’ of happiness in our days, which is around two to five hours a day. If you have less than two hours of free time a day, you generally feel unhappy, while at the upper end, if you have more than five hours of free time each day, this begins to erode your sense of life satisfaction. 

“We often don’t realise how critical time is for our happiness,” Laurie Santos, Professor of Psychology at Yale University, explains. An awareness of the impact of how we spend our time is gaining increasing traction with scientists, with several terms now used to describe how we feel about the time that we have.

There are two ends of the spectrum: time affluence and time famine. Time affluence is your subjective sense that you have some free time for yourself. This is when you feel like you’ve got time in each day to do the things you want to do: go to the gym, cook a good meal, or spend quality time with your family.

The opposite of this is time famine, which Santos describes as “where we are literally starving for time”. This is a familiar feeling for many parents, carers, busy workers and anyone who fills their plate with too many demanding mental items. The negative effect this has on us is immense. “We don’t realise that time famine can cause such a hit to our happiness, and so we often don’t invest in time,” she says. “If you self-report as being time famished, that’s as bad for your wellbeing as if you self-report being unemployed.”

The final, and perhaps most important area, is our body.

Many would argue that our bodies are the most important part of our life equation. Without a healthy body, none of the above elements even matter.

Fortunately, some of the growing workplace trends like flexible working have been positive in this area, like the ability to fit more recreation time into our day.

Research from Stanford University that looked at geolocation data near 3,400 golf courses in America found that there were 278 per cent more people playing golf at 4 pm on a randomly selected August in 2022 than on the same date in 2019. In total, there were 83% more golf games played on weekdays in August 2022 than in the same period in 2019. That’s a lot more people taking advantage of flexible working hours to hit a small white ball around a park.

In recent years there has been a tangible, genuine global shift away from prioritising work as the most important thing in our life. For years we’ve been told that work should take the lead and it takes a lot to undo that wiring.

But making work your number-one priority means sacrificing spending time on your relationships, mind and body that are, arguably, way more important than work will ever be.

This is an extract from Work Backwards by Tim Duggan, published by Pantera Press.

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