What Balance Really Looks Like in a Busy Life (and How to Find Yours)

I was on a call with someone recently who had taken on so much— a full time job, plus three extra jobs and, as a result, was working seven days a week.

She was able to sustain this for a year before burnout set in— her basic humans needs weren’t being met. An inventory of priorities were in order. 

In college, I very clearly remember a friend talking about balance, and how it relates to being successful as a student athlete. He himself was a competitive sailor, an instructor and, at the time, an engineering graduate student. 

Standing at the front of the room, dry erase marker in hand, white board with complex scribbles and markings behind him, he had been talking about team racing, and all the nuances that went with it. Turns out, team racing is more akin to playing chess on a sailboat than running an actual race.

Erasing all the cartoon triangular shaped boats and arrows pointing to various conclusions, he drew a simple equilateral triangle on the shining white canvas. At each point, he wrote one aspect of a student-life:

Sport

Studies

Social Life

“Pick two,” he had said. “You can be terrible to mediocre if you try to do all three, but if you want to be good, like really, really good, you have to pick two.”

It’s up to the user which sides of the triangle they want to live on— the sports + studies side, studies + social life, or a life of socialization + sports.

University is like the tide pool for the rest of life. Tide pools are connected to the ocean, but they’re a safer space to experiment and play, to explore what’s interesting. To see what works within the little tide pool, what doesn’t, and to grow in a more contained space before being sent out into the wilds of the world.

“Pick two,” doesn’t really apply when there’s a career, personal health, relationships, hobbies, a rent or mortgage. Add on top of that things to take care of— from inanimate objects like cars and homes on up to pets and children, even aging parents— and it can feel like you’re juggling glassware, balanced on top of a very large, round bouncy ball while someone pelts you with tomatoes. Hopefully at least they’re bitty tomatoes.

Work-life balance isn’t a perfect equation. It’s not clocking into one at a certain time, and then clocking out and poof! the gear is switched.

Balance doesn’t mean that your days are the same.

Balance, or at least creating it, can be messy.

In biology, the term for balance is called homeostasis— when everything is in perfect working order. Our bodies are constantly trying to achieve this.

Any inputs: food (or fasting), sleep (or lack of), exercise, bad news, good news all signal to the body that work must be done to accommodate this input. At almost no point in time are we in perfect homeostasis; things are always fluctuating.

Life is very much this way. There really is no perfect balance. We plan for the best, say yes to the opportunities that come our way, and along the way are in trying to figure out how to accommodate it all without overloading the system.

There are times when work is demanding, and you’ll need to devote more time, more energy to keep projects moving, to wrapping things up.

There are times when family life comes to the forefront. When someone gets sick or has a great milestone event coming up that needs attention and planning. Or you simply realize you haven’t been on a date with your significant other in ages.

Even if we can create a perfectly balanced schedule, we live in a constantly moving world. Which means, the plates you have set to spin so perfectly will, eventually, wobble.

The knee jerk reaction is here is to panic, to frantically get the spin going again. After all, it had been working so perfectly before.

If you believe in God, the Universe, Divine, Spirit, or Allah, perhaps the out-of-balance state is a message is that whatever it is you’re doing— it’s not working anymore.

And even if you’re not spiritual, it’s still an invitation to take a step back and asses what your priorities truly are, and if what you’re doing is still in alignment with them.

Perhaps you got sick, indicating a need for more rest and less running.

Perhaps you needed to take a closer look at what you spend the majority of your days on, and if it’s aligned with what you want to contribute to in your lifetime.

Perhaps you simply needed to make more time to take yourself on a date— no one else, just doing something that lights you up. This, in fact, is what I recommend for anyone going through a tough time.

Some more tactics to help even the scales:

• Planning: Figure out what it is that you want to do, what your priorities are and, very realistically, how long each of these will take.
• Ask for help: women especially suffer from the martyr syndrome, but men can be susceptible too. You do not have to do everything, and you certainly do not have to do everything alone. Collect your village. Imagine if someone were asking your for help. You certainly would jump at the opportunity. So give someone else the same opportunity and ask.
• Get outside: you are biologically wired to be outside, and too much time indoors can make everything go a little fritzy. If you can, get into the sunshine. Listen to the natural sounds around you, even if it’s through the drone or cacophony of manufactured things.

Sometimes all it takes to achieve that fleeting moment of balance is a few tweaks. Other times things are so out of whack it requires an entire overhaul. In either case, you get to choose what balance looks and feels like to you.

Happy navigating.