What does a life in balance look like?

It can be easy to identify when your life is out of balance, but what does a life in balance look like?

Identifying what a life in balance looks like for you, can be difficult. It is not as simple as wanting to live your last vacation over and over and over again. Your life needs some aspect of work and challenge to keep you interested and engaged. Sorry for the spoiler!

Figuring out what a life in balance looks like is personal and unique to each person. It is something that takes some time and thinking, I would recommend spending some time journaling to write down your ideas. 

Living a life out of balance can be detrimental to your health and can eventually lead to burnout. 

What does it mean to have a life in balance?

This can be an individualized answer, but to me, it means that you are able to keep each of the elements of your life in their place in your life. These elements are not dictating what you do each day or controlling you. They are pieces of your life, but you are not reacting or letting them pull you too hard in all directions. 

When things are in balance, you feel clear-headed, grounded, energetic, and calm. When things are out of balance, you feel stressed, reactive, wiped out, and out of control. 

What is your initial gut reaction?

When you hear the question, What does a life in balance look like for you? What is your initial gut reaction? Write that down! 

It may not be a fully formed idea or plan yet, but that initial reaction is full of good information. What area of your life does this gut reaction include? 

Take it a step further and journal about your dream life in balance. What does it look like, who is included, and what are you doing in it? 

What are areas of your life that you should consider? 

• Family-immediate
• Friends
• Fitness
• Spirituality
• Partner
• Work
• Health 
• Learning 
• Fun
• Pets
• Self-care
• Relaxation
• Family- distant
• Adulting tasks
• Travel/exploration
• Volunteering
• House upkeep
• Side hustle
• Hobbies 
• What other ones are on your personal list?

Walkthrough these areas and note whether they feel balanced to you right now? Journal or make a note about this so you can revisit it in the future. 

Why do I need to have so many different areas of life to balance?

Life is complex and dynamic. You have to include many different aspects of life into your balance in order for it to feel in balance. 

If you are feeling out of balance, it may cross your mind to remove some aspects of life to get it back in balance. That can work in the short term, but ultimately it will leave you flat and missing important components of life. 

Think back to a time when you were incredibly busy with one activity. Maybe a crazy deadline at work or finals week when you were in college. Every other area of life fell by the wayside.

You bear down and cut out everything but the bare minimum amount of sleep, maybe 5 minutes with the most important person in your life sometime during the day, and feeding yourself some easy food a few times a day. 

Nothing else. No fun, no socialization, no exercise, no relaxation for this week or longer period. 

Now, remember what you felt like at the end of it. Sleep-deprived, exhausted, and flat. No excitement in your life. 

Removing areas of life is not the answer. 

By having many different parts to your whole life, you have a dynamic and exciting choice of activities to do that support various areas of your life. Those choices keep you (and your brain) feeling novelty, spontaneity, and excitement with your life. 

Real-world information

Take some quiet time over a week or so and journal each day about how your day was and whether it felt in balance or out of balance that day. Work to identify what happened in your day that was the root reason why there was balance or was out of balance. 

Maybe you have an out-of-balance day on both Tuesday and Thursday, but when you look back, those are the days you have eight back to back to back meetings, where Monday, Wednesday, and Friday only have 1-2 meetings each day. 

Having eight meetings may cause you to give too much of your energy and mental effort to your job on those days, to the point where you have nothing left for yourself and your family or friends at the end of the day. 

My experience

I did this exercise for myself for about a month and made a huge discovery. Going into it, I felt like my life was manageable and in balance about two to three weeks a month. But every month, I had a crazy period of a week or 10 days that just left me frazzled and needing a week to recover. 

Once I started tracking balance in life, I realized that it wasn’t just one random week, it was consistently the 3rd week and part of the 4th week of the month, where I had four meetings scheduled in those 10 days for a volunteer opportunity. 

After I passed the final meeting on Wednesday night, the 4th week of the month, things lightened up and I had a life in balance again. But preparing and attending four meetings outside of work hours in those 10 days threw my life completely out of balance. 

Identify, Acknowledge, and Accept.

At the end of your real-world information, take some time to review what you learned and see how it applies to the areas of life evaluation you did earlier. 

Some of these results may be hard to read. Having a life or an area of life that is out of balance does not make you a failure or mean you are failing at life or adulting. 

Did you hear me? Really hear me? This does not mean you are failing or can’t handle life. 

The areas of life that felt out of balance, did they show up as out of balance in your real-world experience?  Read through your initial list of areas of your life, and then review your journal from your real-world experience. Make specific notes to identify what felt out of balance and what caused life to feel out of balance. Acknowledge these specific experiences (without calling yourself a failure!), and accept the role it has played in your life in the recent period. 

You can handle it. You don’t need to live a life out of balance as a sacrifice. Let’s make some changes and get you back to having a life in balance.

Make a plan to create more balance.

Balance in life can change from moment to moment. We can’t expect to have every moment perfectly in balance (I wish!). Take some time to review your lists and journal thoughts from above and answer the following questions:

1. What does my life need less of to feel balanced?
2. What does my life need more of to feel balanced? 
3. What do I want in a balanced life (not what does work want from me, or my partner wants from me).

Start small, pick one thing to reduce and one thing to add to replace it. Try that for a while and see how it feels. Once you have that change made consistently, then revisit this exercise and pick another pair to reduce and add to improve your life in balance. 

Make sure you are prioritizing what you want, and not what life or society is saying you “should” do. Just because you can volunteer at your child’s school (and that can be a priority you make), doesn’t mean your child will suffer if you learn that the volunteer days are the days in your life that feel most out of balance. 

Make sure you don’t focus on this too much and throw your life out of balance trying to find more balance! 

So, how does this sit with you? Are you ready to take back your life and turn it into a life in balance? 

If you have done any part of these exercises, I would love to know what you learned about your life! Share your thoughts and experiences in the comments below or over on our Instagram account!

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