Why Blending Work and Life is a Good Thing

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Work-life balance is just as important now, if not even more. It’s even easier to blur the lines between work and family, or even to continue working because you never moved all day. People are distracted by family members as they work. This integration of work and life can be frustrating, but it’s not necessarily a bad thing. It’s called spillover, and it can help you become even more satisfied with life. Bottom-up Spillover Theory1,2,3,4,5 states that when you become satisfied with a small, specific event in your life (such as spending more time with family) your satisfaction can travel up to more vague areas of your life (such as being satisfied with your family as a whole), which then leads to becoming satisfied with your life as a whole. For this theory, the same pattern holds for work, health, leisure, and other areas of your life. In other words, how we view a foundational event in our lives becomes how we view our lives as a whole. For example, the more satisfied you are with your work, the more satisfaction with life you will likely have6 and the higher you’ll perceive your well-being7. In another example, being satisfied with a service (e.g., police or library services, bank or insurance services, and crisis or religious services) leads to more satisfaction with the community as a whole, and experiencing satisfaction with the community leads to being satisfied with other areas of your life8.

But, don’t forget that the different areas of our lives were already interconnected. For example, participating in sports is directly linked to being satisfied with your health, housework, and leisure, particularly in people with disabilities. Health, housework, and household income then contributed mostly to overall life satisfaction9. How you feel about one area of your life will spill over into other areas of your life10,11,12.

So, how can you manage this?

1. Allow the positive spillover: Let an area of your life with which you are satisfied carryover into other areas of your life. Doing so will help integrate your roles and make your life’s areas integrated13,14. Because positivity in one area is spilling over into other areas, you’ll be happier and more satisfied with life as a whole.
2. Manage the negative emotions: If our positive emotions can spillover from one area of our life into another, then so can our negative emotions. For example, the stronger we feel negative emotions during a work day, the more likely we are to have a higher number of negative family events, but this pattern will only be true if we compartmentalize our roles; integration limited this carryover15. The good news is that our positive emotions will help integrate our roles already, but you can also do mindfulness-based stress reduction exercises to lower stress, depression, anxiety, and distress16. These include meditation, but Psychology Today has a lot of tips on how to do these exercises.

​Overall, we can use this time to help us connect the various areas of our lives. The positive spillover will rise to larger areas of our lives, and we’ll be better because of it.

1. Andrews and Withey (1976); 2. Campbell et al. (1976); 3. Diener (2009),
4. Lee et al. (2002), 5. Sirgy (2012); 6. Rode et al. (2007); 7. Bowling, Eschleman, Wang (2011); 8. Sirgy, Rahtz, Cicic, & Underwood (2000);
9. Pagan (2019); 10. Edwards and Rothbard (2000); 11. Grzywacz and Carlson (2007); 12. Staines (1980); 13. Clark (2000); 14. Greenhaus & Powell (2006); 15. Gazica (2017); 16. Khoury, Sharma, Rush, & Fournier (2015).