Quit Your Way to Wellness
by author Grant Passay, BEd

When was the last time you met someone under the age of 60 whose plan for achieving wellness involved quitting work? For some individuals, quitting work commitments—or at least trading them in for more desirable pursuits—has greatly contributed to their overall health and happiness.

We’ve all deliberately quit things in the pursuit of well-being—smoking, drinking, eating meat, self-criticizing, loafing—so why isn’t work normally listed among them? Before we can answer that, we need to define what we mean by work.

A working definition of work

Each of us has a different work situation. For the sake of this article we’ll consider work to be an activity that demands physical, mental, or social effort—paid or unpaid—which occurs on a regular basis. Using this definition, work could mean mowing the lawn, volunteering at a soup kitchen, or showing up at a nine-to-five job.

It’s important to note that this definition also means your wellness could be enhanced by quitting work that you love or find to be of great benefit to others. But that doesn’t mean you need to quit such work, or any work for that matter. The goal is to simply identify options for improving your wellness that you may not have considered.

A real-world example

Consider the case of Vancouver-based Jonni O’Connor. Her work took the form of studying for her PhD and seeing clients by day. In addition she was a single parent of a child in kindergarten. But despite her full workload, O’Connor was aware of her limits, so she was able to maintain a healthy balance.

That is, until her father and sister both died unexpectedly within two weeks of each other.

“The death of my family members pushed me beyond my capacity to continue to care for my son, myself, my clients,” says O’Connor. So she quit her PhD program with no plans to pick it up again. “There was an immediate sense of relief as I freed up much-needed mental, emotional, and physical energy in order to better manage the rest of my life.”

Quitting before a crisis

O’Connor found herself in a crisis that could be resolved by quitting one particular work commitment. And while many of us might have made the same choice, quitting work commitments is a strategy fewer of us might consider when there is no crisis. In other words, unless it gets really bad, we usually don’t quit work to enhance our wellness.

This reluctance to quit work is not surprising, since from childhood many of us have been taught some form of traditional work ethic that takes a dim view of leisure. Then there’s the assumption that quitting work commitments will leave us without adequate physical activity, social connections, or funds.We may have heard about studies that showed this situation is exactly what happens when people retire. These reports add to the belief that our health can take a turn for the worse as soon as we stop working.

Retirement and wellness In 2007 John Bound and Timothy Waidmann from the University of Michigan Retirement Research Center reviewed existing studies of the impact retirement has on health. They found many of these studies reported that retirement has a negative effect on physical and mental health, because they compared general health trends before and after retirement.

Bound and Waidmann point out this approach seriously exaggerates the negative health effects of retirement in cases where already deteriorating health was the reason for retirement.

In contrast, Bound and Waidmann compared subjective and objective health indicators immediately before normal retirement age with those after retirement. Their findings suggest that, for men at least, retirement seems to have a small positive effect on physical health. Women showed some similarities to those found in men, though generally not as statistically strong.

Bound and Waidmann went on to note that their findings were similar to those of a 2004 study published in Research in Labor Economics. It examined psychological well-being following retirement and also concluded that retirement has a positive effect on health.

Grant Pasay, BEd, is a Vancouver-based copywriter who creates marketing and educational products for clients worldwide. He’s also a corporate trainer who’s delivered courses at UBC and Simon Fraser University.

Source: alive #333, July 2010