Switch Off. Lockwood Angela

Traditionally school children relied on paper and ink. Today's students learn using personal tablets, computers, interactive boards and live video linkups, starting as early as preschool.

      • A handwritten letter to a friend could take weeks to get to London from Australia; now it takes milliseconds to send a message via instant messaging to the other side of the world.

      • The most influential people were once politicians; now we look to business leaders, bloggers and celebrities for guidance.

      • People would send a letter or walk to a friend's house for a cup of tea and a catch-up; now there are social media platforms with millions (sorry, billions) of users, allowing you to connect instantly with your friends (and with people you don't even know!) all over the world.

      • According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, in 1915 just 498 divorces were recorded in Australia; today's annual figure exceeds 47 000.

      • Television, computers, phones, cars, air travel, the pop-up toaster, disposable nappies, ballpoint pens, batteries, aerosol cans, stereos and the internet, all now taken for granted in our society, were invented during the lifetime of my grandmother. It is mind-blowing to think that none of these things we so take for granted even existed when she was young. Now we cannot imagine life without them. (Think about the changes you might yet see in your own lifetime or 100 years from now.)

      We cannot deny these changes have benefited us in so many ways. It is our ability to keep up with the speed of change that is taking its toll on our health and wellbeing. So why haven't we learned how to switch off when we need to? It comes down to two factors: expectations and priorities.

      Life role evolution

      Life roles evolve. If we roll back a few thousand years, the chief expectations of our early ancestors were to eat and to stay alive. Life was based on survival, so daily actions focused on finding adequate shelter, gathering enough food and making sure you were not eaten – with social roles distinguishing, for example, hunters from gatherers. Not complicated perhaps, but life had its risks and stressors, like being taken by a lion or dying of starvation.

      Roll forward a few thousand years to the 19th century and expectations had changed significantly. By common practice men worked for pay to provide for their family while women were expected to run the household, raise children, and keep the family fed, clothes washed and needs satisfied. Days were spent working to provide a roof over the family's heads and put food on the table – not so very different from our early ancestors, albeit a little more complicated, and with the danger from lions much reduced. It was still a lot simpler than the complexity of life roles we know today.

      Move into the 20th century and life roles started to shift much faster. Women were speaking up, demanding equal rights, insisting there was more to life than putting a hot meal on the table, and looking for options beyond running the household. Men, in turn, started to resent how their long hours at work meant less time with their families. They were looking for ways they could both be the provider and take a more active part in family life.

      Part-time work was typically taken on by men nearing retirement age as a way to gradually step out of full-time work into retirement. How times have changed! According to a report released in 2016 by the Workforce Gender Equality Agency, an estimated 9 per cent of Australian men are now working in part-time employment across their working career so as to take on more family-focused roles. As national interest in gender diversity has grown, life roles and community expectations have significantly shifted for both women and men.

      People are looking for and creating opportunities that will allow them to work and have a life. Both men and women are making different choices about family, work and relationships. Purpose and passion have become greater motivators than pay, and success is measured as much by a person's ability to balance work and family as by financial reward.

      The challenge is to pursue a financially successful career while also carving out the time and energy needed to maintain a fulfilling life outside of work. In the early nineties the term work–life balance entered our vocabulary. Over the past ten years it has been a perennial topic of discussion in many forums. How can we achieve the ideal work–life balance? It seems as though, in acknowledging that finding the perfect balance is harder than we had initially thought, we have now moved towards a new concept: work–life integration .

      Work–life integration recognises that life cannot always be in balance, that sometimes we have to focus on work while at other times our family takes priority, and that at times these will merge into each other, as one affects the other.

      The nine-to-five, five-day work week most of us knew a couple of decades ago is now just one of a suite of work options that includes shift work, part-time, casual or contract work, and self-employment. The physical workplace has changed too, as more of us work from a home-based office or from a laptop in a car or aeroplane or even the local cafe. There is no longer one employment structure or type of workplace. Flexible work conditions and an ever-changing work environment present their own challenges for how we manage our time, our attention and ourselves. Whether written down formally or understood through unspoken agreement, whether we like it or not, we are now expected to make our work–life integration work. Technology allows us to work from anywhere and to be contactable at any time, making it hard to ever switch off.

      Switching off is hard when the boundary between work and life is blurred.

      Having work and life so closely connected can come at a cost. It isn't all doom and gloom though. The integration of the two sides of our lives has its benefits: it can feel good to knock off emails in the middle of the day while still in your pyjamas, or to leave work early to pick up the kids from school. On the flip side, people know they can access you whenever it suits them. You are most likely carrying your work with you in your pocket or handbag everywhere you go. Switching off is hard when the boundary between work and life is blurred.

      You may establish and communicate these boundaries with clear resolve, but when you hear the ring or feel the vibration of the phone you find yourself dashing off a quick response to a work email while having dinner with your partner, or taking a work phone call while watching your child at Saturday morning sport. The justification comes easily: you tell yourself it's important and if you don't respond now it will be there waiting for you the next day, adding to your workload, so you may as well respond now. The problem is this confirms to others that you are always ‘on'; they know they can contact you and you will respond, whatever nominal ‘boundaries' may be in place. These messages can wait; we just need to set the expectation and boundaries … and stick to them.

      It isn't just through work that we are constantly connected. We use the internet and all its capabilities in countless ways to help us zone out and disconnect from the busy reality of our lives, and it is taking effect, as the following chapter explains.