What Do You Do After Work?

Why you need to get off your butt NOW

By Vanessa Adams

      What do you do when you get home from work? Last night I made paper snowflakes with my sister-in-law Lisa. She's visiting – as in staying with us on an air mattress in the middle of our one bedroom apartment – for eight days. Let me let that last part sink in a bit. Eight days. My initial reaction: "More than an entire week! I have to work that week. I have no room, no time, and especially no energy for a house guest."

The National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) reports that one of the best ways for us to cope with our work related stress is to balance our work life with our personal life. This little tidbit has always lurked in the back of my mind, but when it comes down to the execution, my weekends were for personal life, my weekdays were for doing little else than walking around in a stupor.

My mom, a fantastic dinner party thrower and holiday coffee hostess in her own right, trained me from a very early age to be entertaining and gracious to all guests. So due to enormous pressure to live up to these high expectations, last night I walked roughly a mile exploring downtown Denver, talked to a friend across the country on the phone for an hour, did laundry, ate a magnificent dinner (albeit I can't take credit for cooking it), cleaned the bathroom, deep conditioned my hair, did my nails, and yes, made paper snowflakes.

This is quite the transformation from my usual after-work/post-rat-race routine, which consists of the following:

Collapse on to couch for half an hour, sighing and moaning about tomorrow's work day, which will commence in a little over twelve hours.

Cajole myself into going to the gym.

Put on gym clothes, flop back on the couch.

Flick on the TV and scroll through 150 channels, only to realize that there is nothing that will hold my interest. Come to think of it, last time I checked, I don't even like TV.

Get up and slump over the computer. Check my e-mail, browse online catalogs.

Eat.

Look at the time. Realize it's almost bedtime and feel a sense of disappointment that my evening was fairly useless. Again.

Read.

Sleep.

And you know, I have a feeling I'm not alone in my slothfulness. Most people use their after work time to eat, catch up on household chores, and "decompress," which almost always is a nice way of saying "watch TV or surf the Internet". Think about this: When you spend 40 hours a week at work, and 40 hours of your work week sleeping (ideally, but Letterman likes to keep that from happening, doesn't he?) then you're left with an unaccounted for 40 hours that is all yours! 40 hours! When we spend 40 hours sleeping, what's the use in spending another 40 hours sleepwalking?

I would have liked to have just sat around, but with Lisa visiting, I was forced to actually do stuff, for fear of being a crappy hostess. One of the prongs on my engagement ring has been broken for months now. Finally my husband got around to dropping it off to be repaired, and when the call came that it was ready, our original plan was to drive to the shop on a Saturday to pick it up. But the jeweler is in a funky, eclectic part of downtown, that I enjoy showing friends who are unfamiliar with my city. We nixed our (boring and lazy) plan and the three of us walked.

The neighborhood was sparkling. The trees were bejeweled with white lights and the giant clock tower reflected beautiful tinted bulbs, like an enormous ticking Christmas tree. As the sun started setting and all of downtown became awash in rainbows, I found myself releasing a big sigh. One of those big, contented, belly sighs. I had thought for sure that having to go downtown on an errand would stress me out further, but it was actually making me happier. Intriguing, no?

When we got back to the apartment, I was, oddly enough, re-energized. Lisa and I spent the evening doing girly things like masques, manicures and gossiping. While my husband made a dinner consisting of Australian lamb with mint pesto and a delicious salad (um, yeah, don't ask where he got the gusto for that one), Lisa and I folded up computer paper, sat down with scissors, and escaped back to elementary school. A couple hours later, my apartment was a Winter Wonderland.

The point of all this isn't that I did a million enthralling things with my time after work (because I didn't). It's that I slept like a baby that night, and woke up feeling as though work doesn't control my life.

What does my evening say about stress and effectiveness on the job? Well, it says what experts have been trying to tell me all along, which I've shrugged off as helpful but impractical: the less stressed you are, the better you are at your job. Now who doesn't want to be a better employee with less to worry about?

The things experts suggest to keep our stress level down are basically just general guidelines on how to love your life, no matter what day it is:

Keep your sense of humor: This one is often hard to do, but I guarantee that whenever something horrible happens in my extremely high stress job, if I can find the humor in the situation I feel much better. Try to keep things in perspective. So the copy machine is broken: is your life really over? Or will you just be scrambling for the rest of the day? (The answer is no, your life is not over, by the way. So be nice to the Kinko's guy.)

Develop interests outside of work: Probably making paper snowflakes will only take me so far, but do anything you enjoy and that will make your evenings go by slower - in a good way.

Make sure you get enough sleep and exercise: These two go hand in hand anyway. The more active you are during the day, the better you're going to sleep at night. Even if your day was demanding and the last thing you want to do is see the inside of a gym to pump iron, you can always take a long walk in the park – something pretty and low intensity. Yoga is also a great stress-reliever.

Be spontaneous: This is the pillar of my discovery, so it's my favorite. Just go do something totally different and unexpected without any prior planning. Don't fall into the old "Tuesday is chicken day, Wednesday is Friends re-runs and pizza day" trap. If you have nothing to look forward to, nothing to spice things up a bit, your weekdays can stretch out to be long and monotonous.

Lisa stayed a week, and I made sure to really entertain the two of us. We went to a crafts store one day after work and bought materials to make soap! This is nothing I ever thought I'd actually do, but try a new craft with a glass of wine after work, and your stress just melts away. Read, learn to cook fancy dishes, or re-arrange your furniture. Changing things up a bit outside of work really makes the dreaded hour of 6:00 a.m. a bit more bearable.