There’s a lot of talk these days about life balance. For many of us, life is out-of-balance – too much work, too little family, too much sitting, too little exercise; too much sugar, too little green vegetables; too much stress, too little relaxation.If you go to a “life balance coach,” you’ll probably be told to make a pie chart of your life, and to start removing things that are stressing you.
It may be suggested you change your job or career, change your partner, get more day care for
kids, hire a maid, get more exercise, eat more carbs, set priorities, rearrange your schedule, or move around other external things.
These are important, but it’s treating symptom, not cause. There’s a better way to get life balance that lasts longer and has a deeper impact on your life. It requires that you make some internal changes.
After all, you will never be able to remove every source of stress in your life, nor would you want to. Consider for instance that your husband is currently cause you stress. Maybe he’s just had a quadruple bypass or you’re worried he will. Maybe your wife has gotten a promotion and is very on edge lately and difficult to be with. There is stress in relationship, but is this a reason to throw your partner out, like “toleration”? A person is not a “toleration,” and your primary relationships are not “obstacles.” And if you need an extreme example of this faulty line of reasoning – consider how much stress that little ole newborn baby put into your life!
But not only can we not get rid of all our stress, we wouldn’t want to. It is widely reported in psychological literature that every organism (including we humans) seeks what’s called “equilibrium.”
Like Goldilocks and Three Bears, we don’t want too much, and we don’t want too little. We want it just right! Subjects who have spent hours in a sensory deprivation tank are miserable, just like adrenalin-junkie on corporate merry-go-round.
The ideal is to have just right amount of stress, change and emotion in your life – not too much, not too little, and just right. And all time. Ha!
What happens, then, to our “life balance”? We look inside, not outside. There is no way we are going to be able to control external things. Just when you settle down for a relaxing evening at home, neighbor’s fire alarm goes off, and fire engines start arriving. Who knew?
