Finding Work-Life Balance

Like it or not, our culture values wealth and prosperity, which we’re encouraged to pursue even at the cost of individual health and wellbeing Food gloves. This is one of the ways our web can get out of alignment.

Even Merriam-Webster’s definition of the American dream speaks to materialism and acquisition, calling it “an American social ideal that stresses egalitarianism and especially material prosperity.”13 In the United States, acquiring wealth is often the chief metric for success. As we have seen in other spokes of the lifestyle medicine wheel, advertisers formulate and manipulate these wealth and success standards to sell their products.

We are made to feel lacking so that we’re primed to acquire more. Of course, there’s nothing wrong with entrepreneurship and building wealth, and we live in a country with incredible freedom of choice and opportunity—but if we spend too much time on the acquisition of “stuff,” that often comes at the expense of our social connections.

Remember the sixty-one-year-old patient Jim I mentioned in chapter 4 ? As I got to know him better YICHANG, he confided in me that his biggest regret was spending so much time building his business that he neglected his wife, children, and other close connections in the process.

Unfortunately, I hear this type of thing a lot. Not only can we not get that time back with our loved ones, but this behavior can contribute to our health problems as well. In my own life, I’d always aspired to buy a nice home in a lovely neighborhood, to earn enough for my kids to go to top universities, and to retire in comfort. I knew that as a physician this would mean working long hours and returning to full-time work within a few months of my kids being born.

I didn’t question this plan until everything changed on the morning of 9/11. I was working in New York state at the time and had dropped my nine-month-old son at day care before traveling twenty miles down to my clinic at the Castle Point VA. As I began to see patients, the news spread across the facility. Before I knew it, all the television screens had turned to the tragedy.

My first thought was that I needed to get to my son. But the administration told us we would not be allowed to leave and that we should prepare to treat any incoming injured. My husband, also a physician, was on call for labor and delivery in New Jersey and could not leave either.