I've lost count of the number of times I've heard about other countries trialling a four-day working week. But despite hearing about how it increases productivity and personal happiness, I am still dreaming of it becoming the norm here in the UK.
One person who has made the four-day working week a reality is Davina McCall, who at 58 has decided to take a step back from her broadcasting career, scaling back to four days a week to work on herself instead. This comes off the back of a stressful year, which saw the star undergo surgery to remove a benign brain tumour and be diagnosed with breast cancer.
Speaking on Miquita Oliver's podcast, Miss Me, Davina said: "I'm going to work a four-day week. I feel so much better now about my life and trying to get it more balanced. As I hit this stage of my life, I want to take more care of myself. That is my latest project, me, because I can't take care of anyone else if I’m not OK."
© Rachel Louise Brown StudiosFinding balance
While cutting down to four days a week at work might sound like the dream, it might not always be a wise decision. We spoke to three super successful women, who we'd very much say have got their lives together, to find out their advice for finding balance – and the potential concerns over working a four-day week.
'Lack of balance means we never feel safe to stop'
"Prioritising balance is one of the quickest ways to de-stress our lives because stress isn't just caused by doing "too much" – it's caused by the lack of recovery time built into our days. When we're constantly switching between deadlines, life admin, emotional labour, and staying visible at work, the nervous system never gets the signal that it's safe to stop.
"Balance creates that signal. It gives your brain a sense of completion, which reduces background anxiety - and when you regularly experience that, your physical health improves too: lower cortisol, better sleep, better mood regulation, and fewer burnout symptoms.
"Davina's commitment to balance comes as a consequence of a serious health condition, and presumably reassessing what is important to her in the way that she designs her life. She's not considering the four-day work week as a productivity fix, she's talking about her personal boundary and her desire to rebalance work and wellbeing. This is also an important note – 'balance' is for us to define personally in the context of our own lives - our own definitions are important and I encourage people to not borrow the definitions of others.
"The four-day week can absolutely offer benefits - but it depends heavily on the context. If you're in a role with autonomy, flexibility, and the ability to decide how you structure your time - or if you have support such as a team, or have already created some financial stability - then reducing your working week can bring real gains. You often see improvements in energy, clarity, relationships, and a sense of control, which is one of the biggest predictors of wellbeing.
"But we have to be careful not to romanticise it. In many careers - especially at earlier stages - a four-day work week often becomes five days of work squeezed into four. That can mean longer hours, higher pressure, and the "day off" being used for catching up on emails or doing unpaid admin that didn't fit into the week. Rather than feeling rested, people can end up feeling more stressed because the pace becomes unsustainable.
"For me, the bigger issue is how we redefine rest. Most of us have been conditioned to treat rest as something we "earn" after pushing ourselves to the edge - but that's like waiting until you're injured to start looking after your body. I encourage people to bake rest into the journey as a strategic part of success, the same way athletes build recovery, physio, and nutrition into their training. Because long-term success doesn't come from permanent output - it comes from learning how to sustain ourselves while we build." – Author and founder Emily Austen.
'Rest isn't the opposite of work'
"At the point, we're not talking about individual overwhelm; stress is systemic. In the UK, around one in six women aged 35–54 report feeling stressed every single day*, and much of that stress is work-related.
"When stress becomes constant, the nervous system never fully switches off. Prioritising balance isn't indulgent; it's a way of interrupting that chronic 'always on' state, allowing the body and mind to come out of survival mode and into something far more sustainable.
"For many women, stress has become the background noise of everyday life. Working four days a week can have a powerful impact on both mental and physical health. Mentally, it reduces burnout and decision fatigue, and physically, it gives the body time to recover from chronic stress, which shows up in everything from better sleep to improved energy and immunity.
Interestingly, many people find they're actually more focused and productive, because rest isn't the opposite of work, it’s what makes productive work possible." – Life coach Mhairi Todd
'Weigh up the extra pressure'
"Feeling out of balance can be a huge contributing factor to our internal stress levels and will subconsciously creep into and affect multiple areas of our life. So, focusing on small yet sustainable steps towards a more balanced lifestyle will have a huge impact on de-stressing your life.
"It's so easy to get wrapped up in an 'all or nothing' approach, which is ultimately not sustainable, hard to maintain and more often than not leads to failure.
"Working four days a week instead of five can be hugely beneficial to both our mental and physical health – if you use that time wisely. If you are realistically able to get your work done in four working days, and you use your extra fifth day wisely, then it's a brilliant idea. It will free up time for you to focus on things that either make you feel happy, productive or just give you time to relax.
"However, you have to weigh up how the extra pressure to get everything done during those four days will impact you. Will it mean longer working days and therefore less time to exercise, cook healthy food or sleep? Will it put you under too much pressure to achieve a lot in a small space of time and therefore be counterproductive? Changing up a traditional work schedule and moving away from the typical Monday to Friday, nine-to-five, can work wonders for people's stress and health levels – as long as you have firm boundaries and are disciplined with times you are meant to be working, and can switch off when you're meant to." – Life coach Hattie MacAndrews.
