Does life feel small and restrictive in certain areas? If so, here’s how to find balance again.
One of the key symptoms/features of chronic stress/burnout is withdrawal and insularity.
Do you see yourself in this picture…
Work is demanding and you don’t want to let anyone down, so you draw upon all your reserves to meet the workload with grace.
Over time, you begin to feel drained and exhausted. To keep meeting demands, you ‘borrow’ time and energy from other areas of your life, to funnel into work.
This looks like declining social invitations and withdrawal from family and friends. You start to keep to yourself, feel apprehension or anxiety about having to socialise and soon realise the things you love no longer impart joy or pleasure.
You chalk it up as part of being an adult – we’ve all seen the memes….
I’ve lost count of the number of times such memes appear in my feed – and of how many times I’ve had a relatable chuckle…
But hold on second… let’s not confuse self-care and an early night for wanting to retreat from the world because we’re just too damn exhausted.
Take those beautiful Mediterranean Baba’s for example – In Croatia, where my family is from, the oldies are sitting outside at 10 pm every night, shoulder to shoulder around the table, talking over each other with increasing decibels, enjoying a tipple of wine, a card game and a sweet treat. This is how life should be!
And yet here we are, ignoring text messages from friends, not showing up to that event, hiding under the covers…
If you’ve been silently nodding along, let me tell you – there is a solution. And I have just the tool to help you.
🎡 The Wheel of Life
The Wheel of Life is a self-development tool that helps people gain insight into the areas of life that have the greatest potential for change and expansion.
On the circumference of the circle lie what can be termed as ‘primary foods’. These are the things that nourish us, beyond food… the very things that we sacrifice and push to the side when life overwhelms us and stress becomes chronic.
Because energy flows where attention goes, the idea is to simply plot on the wheel how rich or deficient that area of your life feels.
The centre of the wheel indicates low satisfaction, a 1/10. The outer rim of the circle indicates full satisfaction, a 10/10.
Once you’ve marked your spots, connect the lines to form a wheel.
This will give you a visual representation of the areas in life that could do with attention. You might like to consider some of the below –
- Am I spending more time and energy on certain areas of life (work?) than deserved?
- What would I love to do more of?
- What would I love to do less of?
- What brings me joy?
- What gives me purpose?
Date the wheel, then pin it somewhere you can cast your eyes over it daily. Take small but consistent steps to help nurture the areas of life that scored low.
🎊 Celebrate progress
Repeat the process a month or two on, to see what has changed. Don’t forget to celebrate your progress – even expanding out a single dot on the map is huge!
If you’d like to give this a try yourself, download the template here.
Let me know how you get on, I’d love to know!
Till next time,
Lauren.
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