Balancing Work – Rest – Exercise & Play

To find a balance in our busy lives is sometimes incredibly challenging.  Suddenly a deadline runs over, a family member becomes sick, friends and relatives visit at a busy time or you simply over commit yourself with the best intentions of keeping everyone happy.

With greater employment demands and increasingly more commitments, we have to ensure we make time to rest, exercise and play.  The fact we need time for our bodies to recuperate is obvious, but typically adults should strive to have 7-8 hours sleep per night.  If you find your body is wanting more than this review your diet or try one week of resetting your body clock.

Exercise is another component essential for life balance. It often gets pushed to the side as a low priority when time is poor.  Everyone, regardless of age needs to ensure this is a high priority in their weekly routine with 30 minutes cardio vascular activity every day and strength and conditioning exercises every second day to improve our muscular development, core strength and bone density.

Poor health statistics are proof that too many of us aren’t prioritizing exercise into our lives and the cold hard fact is if we continue to be unhealthy, overweight and make excuses, the statistics for dietary related illness will continue to rise. The strain this will place on our health system is immense so we need to be responsible and take positive action now.

Play is something we enjoy, our recreational activity – whether it be walking the dog, reading, painting, playing cricket with the kids, going for a hike, having a BBQ with friends or going out on the town.  Whatever you consider to be your recreational activity you have to find the time to include this in your routine.  Alcohol consumption should be kept in check because excessive amounts will impact greatly on your ability to meet your commitments, reach your goals and achieve a life balance.

If you find life often spiraling out of control take a few moments and consider what is important to you most personally and what is essential for good health. Are you regularly including this into your routine?  It might mean there needs to be some sacrifices to fit it in.  If you have a family, there may need to be some compromises – have a family meeting where everyone writes their priorities on paper so all are aware what is important to the individual family members.  See what can be included for each individual into to the weekly, fortnightly and monthly schedule.   You might find there are some activities you can combine as a family which will build a stronger bond and improve family spirit within a fun environment.

Sure you can’t live life by a calendar, there will always be curve balls, but at least if you make a conscientious effort to include what is important,  you will have greater satisfaction and not feel as though you are just going through the motions.  Achieving a life balance will see you strive to be a high achiever, become more motivated, enthusiastic and stimulate variety in your life.  You’ll have a healthy mind and body, feel greater satisfaction, higher self esteem and be happy within yourself with more energy for others.

Strive to find that life balance, after all life is for living!

Aaron Shedlock
Limitless Health