This is why you and your SO should never bring your work to bed
Our wildly busy schedules make it hard to definitively separate work and life at every moment. But there are some hard, fast rules we should make for ourselves if we want to keep a healthy balance.
One thing you should never do is bring your work to bed, especially if you and your S.O. share a home. It’s much easier said than done when you’ve got a million emails lighting up your inbox in the evening, but separating your work from the place where you and your partner sleep is a crucial factor in a sustainable relationship.
When you and your SO bring your work to bed, you run the risk of dumping stress on one another.
A study by the American Psychological Association found that the two biggest stressors in people’s lives are (not surprisingly) work and money. When you think about what kind of home life you want, we doubt you’re imagining the kind of bedroom that’s full of tension and anxiety.
That’s exactly what you’ll get, though, if you choose to bring business into bed. Even if you don’t mean to dump work stress on your partner — and even if they don’t mean to either — it’s likely that you’ll inadvertently transfer it to one another if you’re trying your best to finish a time-sensitive project.
Furthermore, working in bed will rob you of quality time with each other.
Nights are the perfect time to catch up on your day and share some pillow talk. These intimate experiences maintain the closeness between you and your partner, so you don’t want to miss out on them because you keep turning your attention to work instead. Also, yes, this refers to sex too. You can’t have a healthy sex life if you train your bodies to think of the bed as the workplace, rather than a place for knockin’ boots.
The healthy boundaries set between work and personal life will make all the difference in your relationships, particularly the one you have with your S.O. We’re surrounded by so many distractions on a daily basis — cell phones, social media notifications, emails, phone calls — that it can be hard to give our partner our full attention. But if we get lost in all that, our relationship with our S.O. will be the first thing to suffer, so it’s of the utmost importance to set priorities straight in a special place like the bedroom.
Let’s also not forget that beauty sleep is something you both desperately need if you lead busy lives.
When you’re glued to your screens in bed, you won’t catch the Zzz’s you need to go about your next day in a productive way. Not only does your work suffer from it, but you might be irritable toward each other as well, which will only lead to fighting.
All in all, you’ve got a lot to gain by leaving your laptop at your desk and just chatting with your partner before you go to sleep. The two of you will be much happier for it.
