Leaf spiral

Source: Courtesy of Josh Bartok

I explored the ways that our external demands make "balance" elusive and pointed to the reality that this challenge is not a result of our own personal failings. I provided three tools to address this challenge, including clarifying what matters to you and avoiding some common missteps. Here I share five additional suggestions:

1. Blend in values-based actions when you can. Although there is value to doing one thing at a time and fully paying attention to only that, sometimes we can blend meaningful actions together so that we can engage in more things that matter to us. A good friend of mine often sets up calls with me while she is taking her daily walks. She still gets her exercise and her time outside, and we also get to connect. Doing chores or errands as a family can help parents have valued family time while still keeping their homes running smoothly. Intentionally choosing valued activities during a commute (such as listening to an audiobook of something meaningful to you) can make a commute less unpleasant and also fold in something valued into your day.
2. Think about balance over time and as an ongoing process. Balance is often presented as though it is a static state you can somehow “attain”—and it can be easy to imagine that we should engage in each thing that matters to us on any given day for our ideal amount of time. But life is messy and dynamic, and we can’t always do all the things or even do some of the things all the time. There are simply too many! It can be helpful to think about balancing across meaningful areas of our lives over a period of time. Maybe we try to touch on some things most days (like exercise), but maybe other things are folded in over the course of a week, a month, or even a year. If a family crisis is taking up a lot of time, instead of feeling horrible about the lack of balance every day and further adding to our burdens, we can think about how we will engage in other valued areas when the intensity of the crisis has passed. Or when work is extra demanding, we can look for a time when we can take a day off or reduce our time devoted to work. If we have added some things into our lives in small doses (as described in part 1 of this series) we can engage in them over longer periods of time at a later date and reduce our time spent on the competing demands at that point—but be a little careful about falling into the if-only trap of “later, later, later.”
3. Develop new habits. A consequence of societal demands for certain kinds of effort (e.g., work, responding to people in power) is that it can be harder to consistently engage in values-based actions that aren’t externally demanded. Once we have identified the areas of our lives that we have more trouble consistently engaging in, we can work to develop habits that will keep these things in our lives more regularly. When possible, connect new actions to habits and rituals that are already in place. We can make a point of calling a friend before dinner, or reading a novel before we go to sleep, or meditating as soon as we wake up. The more regularly we practice our new values-based actions, the more they will become habits that will be easier to maintain.
4. Pay attention. Developing habits is helpful in part because then we don’t have to use up our attention to keep up consistent patterns. However, because life is messy and ever-changing, we also need to pay attention to what we are doing and to how balanced things are so that we can readjust as needed. Personally, I find it useful to monitor activities that I want to maintain so that I don’t lose track of them. I have a simple free app that allows me to track several activities and I use it to keep track of my aerobic exercise, yoga, meditation, reading, and writing. That way I can see when something has lapsed and figure out how to add it back in. Another approach is to check in periodically and see how you’re doing with living according to your values and make adjustments at that point. It’s also important to pay attention while we are doing the actions that matter to us. It can be easy to think of the areas we aren’t engaged in, rather than noticing what we are doing. Bringing mindfulness to our actions makes them more rewarding (or at least lets us notice they aren’t as rewarding as we thought they were).
5. Be gentle with yourself. No matter how much attention we bring to balancing our lives, we will inevitably fall out of balance again when life gets busy or challenging, routines are disrupted, or new external stressors or demands arise. When we greet the imbalance with self-compassion, we are more able to readjust and fold things that matter back in our lives or accept that this may be a time of imbalance and revisit balance when a crisis passes. It may be helpful to think of the Zen saying, “Fall down seven times, get up eight.” We can lose our balance seven times and rediscover it eight times.