Some Amazing Life Balance and Well-Being Exercises I Just Discovered
Why Didn’t I Discover These Sooner?
All over the Internet, social media, and traditional knowledge resources, innumerable new suggestions, exercises, and frameworks are constantly being offered to help individuals achieve greater life balance and overall well-being. Although self-help has been a hot thing since ancient times, the domain seems to be among those that are unboundedly deep with new points, insights, and principles to be found. And yet, is it not crazy how many of those greatest life lessons were in front of us the whole time? Here are some formulas and exercises I just discovered that I will strive to apply in my own life. Let’s take a look and see if maybe they would be helpful to you as well.
What You Give a Hoot About Pie Chart
Ah, those pie charts from school days! They may have been some of the most strenuous or hair-pulling assignments for many of us once-youngins! Now, we might just happen to stumble upon one of those graphs in a book or file, or if we are putting together a nice presentation for our boss or clients. But it turns out that priority pie charts for your life are a thing! Who knew? Well, quite a few did actually because numerous articles are online.
I learned about this list when reading Amy Morin’s powerful book 13 Things Mentally Strong People Don’t Do. The basic exercise goes something like this:
- ) List many of your main priorities, goals, and values. Many of these could not fit into a pie chart because they encompass every part of your life(like health and faith). But these would be the things you want to devote most of your time and energy to.
- ) Make a rough pie chart of what you actually invest your time and energy in. This could include one pie chart for time and physical tasks. You can divide up how much time is spent weekly or monthly. How much of your time is spent working out or connecting with your spouse?
- )A separate chart could plot what you invest your energy in. Of course, this would be harder to track. Perhaps you will decide to track the total hours you spend thinking or dwelling on a certain subject. How much energy do use worrying about your bills or children? How much time do you spend stewing about something someone did to you at your family reunion several months ago?
This free-form and open-ended exercise does not have to become a science project. But it will offer some profound insights about how your time, activity, and energy align with your priorities and values. You may be shocked about how much time and energy you throw away on things that should not take so much of your time and energy.
You may find that 10% of your time is spent running errands for your job outside of work time. Cutting this down to say, 2% of your time will give you that much more time for moments with family or time for yourself. And goodness, did you realize you spent that many hours per week stressing about what your coworker did or something you are pretty sure the brother of the best friend of your neighbor’s third cousin said about you at the community center?
To avoid censorship, I will label this the “what to give a hoot about” pie chart exercise. How well do these time and energy pie charts line up with your priorities, goals, and values? The magical thing Morin emphasizes is that if you spend less time and energy on things that do not matter as much, you find that you get so much power and life back.
The Life Journey Line Graph
We see those ever-occurring line graphs wherever we go — they come with their data about political polls, investment fund performances, sports stats, or numerous other topics. We can’t avoid them in our work meetings. News stations and online resources like to throw them out to halfway-attentive audiences. By golly, they show up on our bank statements and retirement account online pages! But do we ever take a moment to plot the course of our own life journeys?
This exercise would certainly be complex and potentially time-consuming, but just like the pie charts you can do just the rough thumbnail version.
Just like if someone was tracking the performance of a mutual fund over 5, 10, or 20 years, maybe just sketch out a rough general overview line chart of your overall journey so far. Did your childhood contain too many rough parts or was it wonderful, amazing, and innocent? Thus you may sketch a general line going up or carve out a roller coaster line progression. The same for adolescence, early adulthood, and so forth. Once you have plotted out your life’s general path, you can make note of the periods of calm and tough periods. You can pay special attention to the periods extra high, super low, or extra turbulent between the two, and also what followed.
The sky is the limit here for what breakthroughs may come. But one thing that can be said for sure is this exercise will bring perspective. Often we feel so overwhelmed by one period of our lives. Maybe we are stuck in those golden times when we felt everything was so wondrous before we saw life’s other negative side. Perhaps we are stuck in the nightmare that transpired after a meteorite blasted our lives apart(as Alberto Garcia explores in this article). If we expand our horizons to glimpse our life’s whole journey, we can see those positive or negative periods in a more balanced light. They do not have to be super-enhanced like a web page in large print after a zoom lock. Also, we might find that the positive and negative periods of life constantly balance themselves out.
Venn-Diagram The Voices To the Background
In school, I was especially fond of Venn Diagrams. You know, those multiple circles you group over one another to analyze how concepts, domains, or viewpoints diverge and intersect. The beauty is that you could (in theory) try to plot multitudinous distinct circles. However, the more subjects you try to juxtapose in the same analysis, the more you realize the unbounded complexity and vastness of anything.
How about Venn diagrams for the voices you hear? This is rather figurative, for sure(if you are literally hearing voices you may need to seek a medical professional). The voices we hear can be the many thoughts in our minds that circulate back and forth. This can also be the voices we hear from others in terms of friends and loved ones who express their opinions and insights about our life choices. It can also be others’ perceptions and understandings about us — those fruits that make up a fanciful tree called a reputation.
Like the pie chart or line graph exercises, these Venn Diagrams will barely begin to capture the intricate nuances of others’ voices or our own internal ones. But again, this can be a thumbnail sketch rather than an extensive dissertation.
The first step is to plot out the main categories or themes of voices. Perhaps for our own internal thoughts, we can categorize by “positive thoughts,” “negative thoughts,” or “neutral thoughts.” For others’ external voices, we can plot similarly. These various categories or themes would represent various circles.
The second step is then to plot how the various circles compare and contrast. The disparate parts of the circles will show the diverging messages and themes of the contrary categories of voices. The converging parts of the circles will show the common themes or messages shared by all categories of voices(even if there is just a deeper implied or idealized message underlying what is actually thought or said).
The final step is to add your own deeper self to the mix. Create a circle for your genuine self. This would be your most sincerely held opinions, views, insights, and values underlying all of the disparate waves of various voices you hear internally and externally. Then, you can determine how your circle compares and contrasts with the others.
There will be countless results from this exercise as well. Again, one primary result will be a change of perspective. You can scrape through the vast array of often conflicting statements or views and probe the deeper meanings and enduring constants. And whether or not this exercise is tracking others’ voices or your own, you may indeed find a reclaiming of your own power and voice. The more dissonant voices can then filter out to the background.
What a remarkable exercise this can be for someone who is facing depression or serious anxiety. On some days, their thoughts are so dark and low that they can hardly get out of bed. On other days, they experience more uplifting and positive thoughts. Every day, their underlying attitude is “I wish I could have more positive days than negative.” Well, when they go to Venn diagram these various days, it is easy to see what the underlying constants will be and where their genuine voice and self stands.
Such an exercise is also good for decision-making. Let’s say you are trying to sort through others’ conflicting tidbits of advice or insight about a major decision in your life. Let’s say, for instance, Jack and Jane are planning their wedding. Jack’s parents insist on a good old-fashioned church wedding while Jane’s parents won’t put up any money unless the wedding takes place at the family’s generation-old orchard. Various aunts and uncles do not want to travel too far, which is especially difficult because Jane’s family’s orchard is on the other side of the country. Furthermore, Jack’s friends do not want to be at the wedding party if they can’t throw Jack a bachelor party the night before in their hometown. All the while, both Jack and Jane just want to have something nice and simple that they share with all of their loved ones.
Befuddled by all the conflicting advice, Jack and Jane sit down and complete a Venn diagram. They create separate circles for each of their respective families and groups of friends. At the bottom, they craft their own circle. They find that the underlying constants to what everyone suggests or desires include convenience, good times, and ideally their happiness. As they are the primary decision-makers, Jack and Jane decide to do what they believe is best but will also keep the best interests of everyone in mind. They hold a private ceremony for closest friends and family in their current state and then two small receptions in each of their respective home states at a later date for both sides of their family.
Wow, I had loved Venn diagrams from elementary school through college. But I never figured I could use them to help mine through the thick fields of internal or external voices making their way into my deeper mind and heart. Who knew such formal tools could be applied to the most personal and even sacrosanct of matters?
Hardly Scratching From The Surface
Wow, what an amazing array of tools we have added to life’s toolkit! And we are hardly scratching from the surface. One of the most striking things about these exercises for me is that they use simple structures of pie charts, line charts, and Venn diagrams to tackle some of life’s biggest problems. Of course, that may be why many like myself did not discover them sooner. Sometimes it seems that the overuse of scales and measurements can take away from life’s deeper impenetrable mysteries. Hopefully, these exercises help to prove the contrary. Through filtering through and laying out what can seem sometimes overwhelming and frightening, we can then rebalance to be in better touch with what is immeasurable.
