Work–Life Balance: Striking the Right Chords for Harmony

As a mother of two young children and a fellow in pediatric critical care, I was often asked the question: " how do you do it? " I certainly liked to think that I was balancing work and life appropriately. To be honest, more often than not there was simply no choice to be made about what the need of the hour was – the bare minimum at work and home accounted for every minute. When I took up additional research or childcare responsibilities, it translated into one thing: working even harder. Somehow, in addition to fulfilling the requirements of an academic fellowship, I managed to make time for doctors' appointments, preschool events, and birthday parties. I was doing enough, but it was not enough to make me satisfied. There is no objective way to measure what constitutes a good work–life balance. It is probably safe to assume, though that most of us have experienced a significant period of conflict between work and family at some point in time. Garcia et al. (1) reported a burnout level as high as 71% among Brazilian pediatric intensivists. While these data may not be reflective of prevalence in other countries, a rate of burnout as high as 50% was reported by Fields et al. (2) 20 years ago too. Burnout represents the far end of the spectrum of a chronically disrupted work–life balance, and these numbers should serve as a clarion call to us. The Maslach Burnout Inventory Scale (3) focuses on three major domains: emotional exhaustion, depersonalization, and a sense of low personal accomplishment. Intensivists have consistently scored high in all three areas (4). While the presence of emotional exhaustion in intensivists makes intuitive sense, the other two components demand pause for thought: how does being so directly involved in patient care and working so closely with other team members coexist with feelings of depersonaliza-tion? How does one reconcile feelings of low accomplishment with saving lives? As intensive care providers, we like to be in control of every situation and to be proactive with our choices. We like to do it all and have it all, both at life and work. Just as anything less than perfect is unacceptable at work, so too settling for less than the best for our children and families will not do. In this pursuit of perfection, the inevitable victim is our personal time. As I went …