With the hustle and bustle of our everyday lives, we often find ourselves yearning for a quieter, more balanced life. If your life has come to resemble an endless race to the finish line, take a look at the suggestions below to bring a greater sense of peace, calm, and even simplicity back into your life.
Tip # 1: Manage Your Time Better
Having effective time management skills will allow you to spend more time with your family and friends. Not great with time management? Then here are a few steps to help you improve your skills:
- Prioritize your time by rating tasks in the order of importance and urgency then direct additional time to activities that are most meaningful to you.
- Deal with procrastination by using a day planner, breaking large projects into smaller ones, and setting short-term deadlines.
- Keep a record of how you spend your time, including work, family, and leisure and make adjustments accordingly.
- Save time by focusing, concentrating, and realizing when it’s time to delegate responsibilities to others.
- Don’t over or under commit yourself or commit to anything that’s not important to you.
Tip # 2: Learn Healthy Coping Strategies
Living a balanced life means that it’s important to learn healthy coping strategies. We all get overwhelmed from time to time so we need to know how to deal with stress and issues as they arise. One way to do this is by recording stressful events, your reaction to it, and how you could have reacted in a journal.
Using this information, you can change unhealthy coping strategies into healthy ones. This will help you focus on the positive and what you can change or control in your life.
Tip # 3: Evaluate Your Lifestyle
You may not realize this but in most instances our behavior and lifestyle choices greatly affect whether or not our life is balanced. To get things into perspective examine your beliefs to reduce conflict between the life you believe you live and the life you really live.
This does not bring balance directly to your life, but it can interfere with the way your body deals with stress in edition to other issues. If your perception is different from your reality try to:
- Balance your personal, work, and family needs according with your other obligations.
- Get to know yourself by spending some quality time with you. This will help you to find your sense of purpose in life.
- Don’t drink or smoke and make sure you get enough sleep. These are major stressors to your body and cause you to feel “out of balance.”
- Yes your doctor was right—you need moderate exercise several times a week and a balanced diet for a physical and mental strength. Think about it … how do you feel after you eat a Big Mac? Enough said!
- Do something for someone else and expect nothing in return. This will help boost your “feel good” endorphins!
Tip # 4: Have a Support System in Place
Sometimes we need someone to talk to and having a support system in place keeps you balanced because you know you have someone to turn to. Having a positive support system in place is like having “mental security.” You know that you are cared for, loved, esteemed, and valued by those you care for the most. If you don’t have a support system in place the best place to start is to look within your family, friends, church and the community. Research indicates that having social support leads to having better mental and physical health and a better overall quality of life.
Tip # 5: Change Your Thinking
When an event triggers negative thoughts, this may cause you to feel out of balance. Usually when this happens you experience fear, insecurity, anxiety, depression, rage, guilt, and a sense of worthlessness or powerlessness. These are all emotions that trigger your mind and body to disconnect and cause you to react instead of act.
When issues such as these come up the best way to get your self back into a safe zone, where you feel you are in control is change your way of thinking and act (not react) on the problem. To change your way of thinking start by:
Ridding your mind of any irrational thoughts. This will help you avoid exaggerating the negative thought, anticipating the worst, interpreting an event incorrectly, and will eliminate unnecessary stress.
Learning to solve your problems by identifying all aspects of the issue. Then instead of putting it off find ways to deal with it immediately.
Changing your communication style so that you communicate in a way that makes your views known without making others feel put down, hostile, or intimidated. Poor communication causes a lot of issues that otherwise would never have surfaced.
By implementing a few of these tips you may also increase your performance and productivity which in the end will help reduce your stress and allow you to focus on what matters most to you: Living.
Living a simpler life is all about learning how to slow down and connect more deeply with your inner self. Whether you do that by simplifying your surroundings, calming your schedule or enjoying a quiet respite each day, the result is the same—a happier, balanced, and more peaceful you!
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