Kava and everyday balance
· 5 min read
A term everyone knows and nobody can define
Work-life balance is one of those pieces of corporate vocabulary you have probably heard dozens of times, yet you would likely struggle to give a precise definition of it. It gets presented as a measure of professional success, sometimes as a precondition for personal happiness, and sometimes simply as a slogan from a time-management workshop. Increasingly, though, a question keeps coming up: does splitting things into work and life at all, as if they were two opposing camps, even make sense.
The simple model says: at work you set the rest of life aside, after work you set work aside. Reality is rarely that tidy. Professional passions can bring real pleasure, so it is hard to strictly separate them from private life. Stress, meanwhile, does not stay behind the office door, but leaks both ways, affecting concentration at work just as much as the quality of an evening's rest.
Why the eight-hour working day is a hand-me-down from another era
The popular division of the day into eight hours of work, eight hours of leisure and eight hours of sleep traces back to the nineteenth century, an era when working more than ten hours a day was the norm and children worked in factories. That benchmark has survived to this day as a reference point, even though its original context became outdated long ago. The pandemic and the mass shift to remote work only sharpened the problem: for many people the line between work time and private time blurred almost completely, and with it went the clear boundary that allowed for a calm, restorative evening.
What research on balance shows
Interesting data comes from an analysis published in 2021 in the Harvard Business Review by researchers Ioana Lupu and Mayra Ruiz-Castro, based on close to two hundred in-depth interviews with nearly eighty mid- and senior-level professionals from two large London firms. The authors found that around 30 per cent of men and 50 per cent of women taking part deliberately avoided long working hours in search of better life balance. Those interviewed used various strategies, but the common thread was reflectiveness: regularly examining what was causing stress, how it affected work and private life, and what had to be given up to reach a given professional goal.
Based on these conversations, the researchers identified five recurring stages of an effective pursuit of balance. The first is stopping to consider exactly what is generating stress. The second is examining your own emotions and how the current situation is affecting your wellbeing and energy. The third stage is re-evaluating priorities in light of what emerged from the first two steps. The fourth is weighing up the available alternatives: what can be let go of, what to focus on, what is worth changing. The fifth and final stage is actually implementing changes, in both private and professional life, and monitoring the effects on an ongoing basis.
The key finding from this study is simple: work-life balance works when it is treated as a process under constant revision, not a one-off, measurable goal that can be reached once and ticked off a list. Priorities change along with life, so expecting a fixed, unchanging balance is doomed to disappointment from the start.
This insight also changes how it makes sense to judge your own progress. Instead of asking whether you have finally achieved balance, a more useful question is whether you have lately been returning to it regularly and correcting course when something stops working. The researchers stress that the people who coped best had no ready-made recipe, just a habit of periodically reviewing their own choices, much as a company regularly reviews its strategy instead of waiting for a single moment of breakthrough.
Where a moment of relaxation fits into all this
If balance is a process, it is worth asking what everyday tools actually help with it. One recurring theme in conversations about stress reduction is the need for something that clears the mind after a working day without disturbing clarity of thought the next morning. This is where kava (Piper methysticum) often comes up, traditionally used in Pacific island cultures precisely in the context of relaxation and communal winding down after a day full of obligations. The mechanism through which kavalactones act on the nervous system involves, among other things, their effect on GABA type A receptors, described in a study published in the journal PLOS ONE in 2016. It is worth remembering, though, that kava is not a cure for chronic stress, nor a substitute for the real change in priorities that Lupu and Ruiz-Castro write about, but just one possible part of an evening wind-down ritual.
If you want kava to genuinely support recovery rather than just momentary relaxation, it is worth pairing it with basic sleep-hygiene principles and avoiding drinking alcohol at the same time, since both substances load the liver in a similar way, and combining them raises the risk of adverse effects, especially with regular use. You can read more on this in the article on kava and the liver.
Balance as a daily practice, not a one-off goal
What has changed most in how we think about work-life balance is a shift in emphasis from goal to process. You do not need to precisely define what good work and a good life after work look like as separate things. It is enough to keep returning to the question of what inner balance means for you at a given moment, and to accept that the answer may change along with you, just as your responsibilities, energy and priorities shift with the season of life you are in. If you want more information on the mechanisms behind kava's relaxing effect, also check the article on kava and cortisol and on kava and GABA.