Some years ago I decided that enough was enough. It wasn’t that my employer was expecting me to respond to emails that I received outside normal working hours, it was that I felt compelled to do so.

The problem began when I was visiting my son in Tel Aviv in around 2013. I suddenly needed to check my work emails and I realised I had no easy way of doing so. My son took his luddite mother in hand and introduced her to the idea of getting her emails on her phone. (He even set the whole thing up for me). I was thrilled, but that was when my real problems with the intrusion of work into life began. The emails were worse than all the years of “on-call” that I’d done as a doctor because at least in that situation you are either on-call or you’re not. The emails keep coming no matter what.

Early on it was just a matter of checking in daily while I travelled to “keep my finger on the pulse”, but it didn’t take long for those daily checks to escalate to multiple checks a day.  At its height if I woke in the early hours of the morning my first response was to reach for my phone. It wasn’t OK. Eventually my solution was to simply turn off the work email account on my phone. Unfortunately, it’s not that easy for everyone.

Whilst my difficulty was nothing compared with those who work in the corporate world it did give me a window into what it must be like to be connected to work 24 hours a day. I began to understand why so many of my patients were stressed and burning out. 24-hour connection with work may be exciting but it is not sustainable in the long term.

In 2017 France introduced legislation that gave workers the “right to disconnect”. I find it extraordinary that such things need to be legislated but it seems that’s the way it is in this hyperconnected digital world. Other countries have followed suit and on 26^th August 2024 new federal laws will give Australian workers the right to disconnect.

This doesn’t mean employers will immediately have to stop contacting their employees outside hours or that employees can immediately stop responding, but it does mean that boundaries will need to be negotiated and adhered to.

It’s all very well for us to talk about personal strategies people can use to distance themselves from work-related stress, but how can that happen if work has the right to intrude on their lives at any time?

I’m hoping this new legislation will help people focus appropriately on their lives outside work and the chestnut of “work-life balance” will begin to mean something again.

In the meantime, if you would like to know more about burnout you might like to check out some modules called Navigating Burnout on the Black Dog Institute website. These modules were developed with health professionals in mind but if you are not a health professional you might still learn something about protecting yourself from burnout from these brief succinct and well-presented modules.