Work-Life Balance in the Salon- Preventing Burnout

Work-life balance and self-care are hard to prioritize. Especially if you’re always taking care of other people.

What is work-life balance?

Work-life balance and caring for yourself don’t look the same for everybody. Which is the beauty of it.

There are many ways to care for yourself, by taking time to rejuvenate your soul, emotions, your body, and mind. This happens at home and at work. But finding a balance between the two can be hard to find, but it’s really not. It’s a mindset.

Allowing yourself to adjust to the mindset of leaving work and still care for yourself but not bringing work with you is the balance you’re looking for.

Leaving all work behind isn’t always possible for those of us behind the chair either. We have clients calling and messaging us at all hours, and schedules to arrange, and product to purchase when we aren’t at work. So how do we find the work-life balance?

The life part of the work-life balance

Setting boundaries

Finding a work-life balance to prevent burnout means making it a priority.

Is it important to you that you don’t get burnt out?

So set a time when you no longer take calls or respond to clients’ messages. This time is set as a boundary. A boundary for you and your guests, who do not run your life!

After this set time, let’s say 5pm, you focus on your family, friends, personal time, and self-care. Home-life.

This doesn’t have to be a set hour either. It could be while you are with your kids, or significant other, doing homework, eating meals, or other activities, you intentionally do not respond to guests. They can wait.

After the meal or activity, you can allow yourself some time to ‘work’, but keep it limited to specific tasks (only responding to messages, or placing an online order for the shop). And then be done!

If you have any clients who demand that you respond immediately. My dear, they are not worth keeping. These types of clients believe they are a priority in your entire life, and forget that you are human.

Now, you don’t have to tell your clients that you stop responding after a certain time. Again, if they demand that you reply to them immediately, disrupting your personal time and thus the work-life balance and boundary, it may be time to fire this client.

If you have a hard time navigating the process of firing a client, How to Fire a Difficult Hair Client might be able to help you.

Balancing self-care

Self-care is NOT putting yourself on a pedestal above others or daily responsibilities.

You know that you need to take some extra time for self-care when you become easily angered, overly anxious, and exhausted. These are the first symptoms of burnout.

It’s OKAY to spend time on your own well-being. Self-care doesn’t mean you are selfish.

It’s about balance.

Setting time aside in your daily routine to maintain your soul, mind, emotions, and physical self is the best way to incorporate self-care regularly and not end up crashing into an exhausted heap.

And thus helping you prevent burnout and prioritizing a healthy work-life balance.

Spiritual self-care

What does it take to recharge your soul?

Don’t underestimate the power and importance of feeding the soul.

The soul is where you feel your passions, feed your emotions, and connect with your mind.

What is it like to have a drained soul?

Exhausted and irritable, not because the things around you are just exasperating and you have no patience to let the little things go.

How do you revive your soul?

👍 Prayer

👍 Meditation

👍 Yoga

👍 Hiking

👍 Walks

👍 Cooking alone

👍 Silence

👍 Alone time

👍 Journaling

Take just a few minutes every day to reflect, look inward, and assess the roots of some issues, irritations, and determine how to handle them today.

All of the above are suggestions for rejuvenating and refueling your soul. Taking time to be still and listen to the quiet, to the stillness.

Making a priority of taking the time to process life, think ahead, breathe, and prevent burnout.

There is power in breath. Healing elements in breathing deeply, counting, feeling the oxygen enter your body and directing it to where it is needed most. We still are getting to understand how powerful it is to just pause and breathe.

Physical Self-Care

Taking time to care for your physical body is equally as important as rejuvenating your soul.

Especially for those in our industry, constantly standing, at risk for carpal tunnel, knee and back injuries, bone spurs, and plenty of other issues for those who work behind the chair.

What to do about it…

Preventing injury sounds easy enough, but is it though? It takes mental awareness and intention to form habits to change how you do things to protect your body from premature damage and wear-and-tear.

How to go about this process?

The work part of the work-life balance

During the work day-

At work, behind the chair, for those of us in the hair industry, wear good shoes! Your work and your body depend on your feet to carry you where you need to go.

Wearing solid work shoes, yes, sometimes they’re not pretty or stylish, but they will protect your knees and your back.

Remember that song we used to sing as children? 🎵The knee bone is connected to the hip bone…🎵

It’s true. The whole body is connected to itself, take care of it all, then you will show fewer symptoms everywhere else.

✔️ Raise your chair! Use those ergonomic tips that we all learned in Beauty School.

❌ Don’t bend over to reach your client for the haircut OR the shampoo. Move the chair to prevent long-lasting wear and tear and damage done to your back.

If you do have to bend down, use your knees instead of your back. This prevents tightness and cramping in the lower back and glutes, which is a symptom of long-standing habits of using your back instead of your knees.

Be sure that you have an Anti-Fatigue Thick Black Mat to stand on during the day. This will help prevent aches and help you be able to stand longer without feeling any pain.

After Work-

Caring for your muscles after standing all day long is imperative. Believe it or not, it can take 1 minute up to hours, depending on your choice.

This does not mean that because it’s after work that caring for your body physically after a hard day of manual labor cuts into the ‘life’ part of the work-life balance.

Stretching is the best way to ease tension, prevent injury, and encourage healing in the muscles you’ve been using all day.

What to primarily focus on if you’re not used to stretching?

Calves- to stretch your calves, place one foot slightly in front of the other, flex your foot, so that the toes are pointed up, towards the ceiling, and reach down to touch your toes. This also stretches the muscles in your back and higher up on your leg.

Only stretch as far as you can go, DON’T OVEREXTEND!

Hamstrings- to stretch your hamstrings sit on the floor with one leg extended, and the other bent toward you. reach for your knee and toes, but only going as far as you can, don’t push too hard.

Quads- to stretch your quads, the front of your thigh, stand, bending one knee, and pull your foot towards your bottom.

Shoulders- FOR HAIRSTYLISTS AND BARBERS ESPECIALLY!!! Stand in a doorway, placing your hands on the frame, and stretch out the front of your chest.

I’ve always had issues with the tops of my shoulders and around my shoulder blades aching after a long workday. After discussing it with several massage therapists and chiropractors, it turns out that my issue was that the muscles in the front of my chest were so tight that they were pulling my back and shoulder muscles, stretching them to the point that they ached from being extended for so long.

So, stretching the pectorals, the chest, is a serious issue amongst the hairstylist and barber community because our hands are constantly extended in front of us. But is easily preventable!

Do all of these stretches once you get home from work. Hold each one until the count of 15, at least.

Also, regular physical exercise is important for maintaining a healthy lifestyle. I highly encourage a regular workout routine throughout the week to boost your energy, immune system, and maintain a healthy life 😃

Purchasing a gym membership is not very expensive considering the investment in your physical health. However, if you’re like me, I don’t have time to go to the gym so I work out at home. It’s not difficult to find workouts to follow on Youtube, or to invest in weights to have at home.

Or go for a run or a hike. This is one of my favorite things to do to get my body moving.

Disconnecting from work AND life

It’s important to occasionally (if not daily) excuse yourself from social media, your cell phone. For you hairstylists and barbers out there, like we talked about earlier, I’m talking about boundaries.

This time, it’s about vacations. Taking time off to get away. Find a new place. Explore! See new scenery.

I like to completely disconnect when I go hiking and camping. It’s not easy at first to allow myself to set my phone down, or leave it behind, but I have yet to regret it a single time.

For tips about what to do with your hair while hiking, please visit Camping Hair, Practical Tips and Tricks for Hiking Hair

Chiropractic care

Lastly, I strongly recommend Chiropractic Care. Seeing a Chiropractor could extend your career, and overall physical health, by years!

Chiropractors are often misunderstood as ‘bone doctors’. But that’s simply not true, Chiropractors are nerve doctors.

The nerves are all connected to the spinal cord, which is connected to your brain. Making sure that all of the nerves are all communicating properly and in healthy repair not only lessens pain, but treats the actual causes of the issues, not just the symptoms.

Because of my Chiropractor, I have not had any issues with carpal tunnel, and my back and knee aches have stopped.

Chiropractors are worth the investment. Your body is worth maintaining, and in my opinion, from the outside in, not by medications and pain killers or surgery, but working with your body from the outside in is better than starting with the inside out.

Mental Self-Care

Mental health is so, so important to make a priority. Making sure you are healthy and in a safe place inside your own mind plays a huge factor in your everyday life, even when you don’t realize it.

Assessing your mental state is when you look inwardly, at how you have been feeling and reacting to everyday situations.

Are you angry overall? Sad? On-edge? Afraid? Over-zealous? Anxious?

All of these negative emotions aren’t all negative, but they are when they are the only feelings that occupy your being. Here are a few ways to balance out these emotions, find their sources, and figure out how to process them so that they don’t take over.

Find Self-Balance

✔️ Go on a walk. Listen to the quiet.

✔️ Do yoga, breathe.

✔️ Eat chocolate.

✔️ Talk to a therapist.

✔️ Dance it out.

✔️ Take a bath.

For me, sometimes finding my balance (I think of it as a treat, or gift to myself) is simply making a basic vegetable soup, and putting on a face mask, and hair mask, or take a bath.

To see mask recipes please visit GoodHouseKeeping.

To me, it’s a re-start to the day, or even the week. It helps me get back to the mindset of, “I will feed my body what it needs, and allow myself the rest that’s required for the week so that I’m not exhausted by the end.”

What I mean by ‘balance’

Finding balance in your life doesn’t mean that other responsibilities are put off because of your work-life balance and self-care routine.

This type of balance has to do with balancing life and self-care. There’s a difference.

It doesn’t mean that self-care and ‘ME’ comes first everyday. Quite the opposite.

When I am mentally, physically, spiritually, and emotionally recharged and fed, it’s easier to serve others. To be humble, to let the little things go.

Self-care doesn’t have to take hours and hours out of each week. Or even hours out of the day, sometimes it only takes 10 minutes.

For example, taking one minute in the car to close my eyes and breathe, relax my entire face, feel my heartbeat, and I’m not gonna lie, hype myself up before getting out of the car. If that’s all the time that’s available, use it!

There are some weeks when I know that I need to be alone for a little more time than usual, and I set that time aside. Or incorporate it into the busy week.

Understanding this and reading the signals the body is sending ahead of time IS preventing burnout.