Lifestyle Balance: 5 Ways to tip the scale in your favor.
Lifestyle equilibrium, or life-balance, can feel like an elusive concept, especially when you’re swimming in to-dos, tasks, and check-lists and treading water just to stay afloat. Too many days like this and you begin to feel lifestyle disequilibrium, or lifestyle imbalance. Other days can feel more harmonious….aaahhhh these are the days where it feels like it’s all under control!
Like most things, we can’t speak in absolute terms with lifestyle equilibrium…it’s not all or none (although it may feel like the scale is tipped towards imbalance more often that not!). Life-balance lies on a spectrum, with every day being a little bit different than the next.
What are some ways to design (or redesign) your days to tip the scale in your favor? Read on for 5 strategies that can help you to realistically redefine & redesign your life-balance.
Think holistically — It’s more than just “work/life balance”. There are so many facets to our lives. As you think about your lifestyle balance, I invite you to look at the entire picture of your life from the perspective of these 8 dimensions of wellness: emotional, environmental, financial, intellectual, occupational, physical, social, and spiritual. While it’s not realistic to have a perfect balance of all 8 of these domains, it can be useful to notice which may be dominating your time & energy (and where might you like to shift more of your time & energy).
Do a daily and weekly time-audit — recognize how many hours you realistically have in a day. Wake up at 6 am every morning and go to bed around 10 pm everynight? That’s 16 hours in a day to “work with”. How do you spend these 16 hours? What is realistic to squeeze into this time? Look at all the days in the week, especially if you have a lot of variability in your days.
Focus on your priorities — Some things are a necessity and therefore a priority, like going to work (even if you don’t love your job). This can take a chunk out of the time in your day (ie. those 16 hours from above). What comes next on your list of priorities with the remainder of time in your day? Family-time? Exercise? Getting food on the table? Crossing off items on the to-do list so you can focus on other priorities? Think about which activities are most important and meaningful to you and dive a bit deeper to understand why they are important to you.
Take a look at your routines. — Not all routines are created equally. Routines can help or hinder our efficency. What do you think of yours? Think morning routine, bedtime routine, dinner routines, weekday vs weekend routines. Incorporating healthy routines into your day can also help you to be more efficient with your time. Where could you modify or add a helpful routine into your day.
Drop or delegate — I know how hard it can be to ask for help and I know how it feels to want to be able to “do it all”. However, in the spirit of the quest for equilibrium for your lifestyle, what can you drop from your day? And what can you delegate to others?
By recognizing that not all days are created equal and we all have different tipping points on our scale, these tips above can hopefully shed some light on your personal story.
Wishing you balance & equilibrium.
P.S. Stay tuned for another upcoming blog post on common myths surrounding lifestyle balance.
