There’s No Such Thing As Balance

Burnout. Self-help. Self-care. You can’t pour from an empty cup. Put on your oxygen mask before helping others.

Find balance.

How many more cliches can I fit in that tell you to take care of yourself?

I’ve read a LOT on the topic of burnout, finding balance, healing from trauma, taking care of your mind, body, spirit, and anything else you can think of because, like many others, I have felt like something is wrong with me or missing that prevents me from living up to my potential.

After all, we are supposed to be able to do it all.

We should have a healthy, fit body, a career that pays a ton that we somehow also love, a thriving relationship, a social life that doesn’t suck, and somehow also be happy with what we have while constantly proving we have more than everyone else.

Well, sorry to burst your bubble if you haven’t already put this together, but it’s not possible.

Life, real life made up of people and not AI-edited and perfected insta feeds, doesn’t give you more than 24 hours in a day.

Side Note: it is NORMAL to feel like something is off or missing. It takes a unicorn of a very well-adjusted person to NOT feel like you have something wrong with you (or a sociopath), because in many developed nations the economy, and therefore government, relies on consumerism, and the feeling that something is missing is what makes people spend money. But that’s a whole other topic of conversation for another time.

On top of basic time limitations, there are a ton of really valid things that may have stopped you from getting everything that you think you are supposed to have.

This could be as simple as mild social anxiety impacting your ability to do well in job interviews and land your dream career, or as complex as growing up in an extremely demeaning and abusive situation so you are taught that you are not capable of the things you see others achieve.

I don’t mean to be depressing about it, but everyone faces a reality that can be as harsh and painful as it can be beautiful and abundant.

Here’s the silver lining though- you can have what you want.

In fact, there’s only one really important step to accomplish this.

Decide what you actually want.

Not what society or your family or your friends tell you to want.

Do you want to find a partner, get married, and have babies?

Do you want to earn a ton of money and retire young on a beach somewhere?

Do you want to travel the world and see beautiful places with an awesome group of friends?

Do you want to lose 50 pounds and finally break your sugar addiction?

You can do any of these things, and you could even do all of these things, but you CANNOT do them all at once. Or at least, you can’t start them all at once.

So prioritize what you actually want.

For example, my top three priority list looks like:

• Freeing myself from debt and dependence on a 9–5 job for income

• Losing weight to get to a healthy place physically

• Travel frequently, even if it’s local in my own state

That doesn’t mean I don’t also want to see my family and friends, or spend more time with my spouse, or read more books. But I know what my priorities are.

So let’s talk about what balance looks like, in real life, cause a pie chart won’t cut it.

Balance, for me, looks like spending 50 percent of my time on becoming debt free, and therefore financially free.

It includes spending 20 percent of my time losing weight and establishing healthy habits, 10 percent of my time on adventure and local travel, and 20% on other things that come up, including date nights, social time, and writing.

In daily practice, this means most of my time is spent at my day job or working side hustles, but I also now dedicate 30 minutes a day to physical activity and another hour a day dedicated toward taking care of other health needs.

Then I travel once a month on weekends, sometimes to local destinations to save more (easy for me because I live in the Pacific Northwest), or sometimes further away.

Not every category in my life is equally balanced. That is not a sustainable way to live.

But everything in my life is balanced in a way that supports my main three goals.

Once I have good practices in place to support my goals and/or reach them, I can rebalance the scales a bit and focus instead on finishing my novel or starting a family (if I ever feel like it).

The lesson here isn’t that you’ll never accomplish your goals.

It isn’t even to take incremental steps in the right direction, although following the power of compound interest is fantastic advice.

It is to really spend time and figure out what matters to you, and accept the fact that, despite what the internet tells you, everyone else’s life isn’t perfectly balanced either.

The TL;DR? Get your priorities in order and stop worrying about what everyone else is doing.