Happy Spring Equinox! This year, these posts are mainly dedicated for a common celebration of the date it publishes, or one we create, with themes for wellness, creativity and life coaching. And today, it’s spring equinox – a day when our daylight in the northern hemisphere have increased so much, that day and night are equally long – a day with perfect balance between light and dark. From here on, the daylight will continue to increase until the summer solstice, which is the longest day of the year with only a couple of hours of darkness. But right now, the earth is in perfect balance with the sun. How is your balance in life when it comes to your waking hours, and hours asleep for starters? 

There are two ways to look at these shifts. Either you want to live as close to nature as possible and therefor maybe rise earlier with the sun as the spring turns into summer and sleep more and longer in the winter. While this can feel more energetic and lifegiving, it can also create stress for our bodies. So, another way to look at these shifts of daylight, is to strive for balance all year around instead. I’ve had the blessing and the fortune to live both in Hawaii for three years and in Portugal for one year, where the hours of daylight are almost 12 hours consistent during the whole year, which made wonders both for my physical health and for my mood. Everything felt more stable. If this is true for you too, you might benefit from looking into how you can create this in your home, such as to get blinders in the summertime that makes your room darker, and to get a lamp that uses natural light to wake you up in the wintertime. What do you prefer?

The next step to create balance with our time, is to see where and how we spend it.

In life coaching, it’s important to build habits and structures that support life balance in our different areas. To better see what you might need more of, or less of, you can draw a circle and divide it into eight pieces like a pie. Each piece represents an area, where you can coach yourself with clarifying questions, or together with a life coach. Take out your planner, or journal, and look into how much time you spend on each piece. These eight common areas of our life are:

1. Health – What are your physical needs of sleep and diet, like supplements?
2. Home – How do you live and where? Are you taking care of it regularly?
3. Work or study – What do you do for a living, or like to do?
4. Socializing with friends – Who do you spend time with and when?
5. Romantic relationship – What can you nurture here?
6. Fun and recreation – What makes you feel relaxed and refreshed?
7. Money – How are your spending habits?
8. Personal growth – What can you learn more of? Are you practicing faith?

Then, rate each area for how much you have of it, and see how full your circle becomes and what is missing. How much time and energy are you spending on each area? Are you satisfied? What can you do to improve each area? And what can you do to balance these up with flexibility? Can you make a more defined schedule perhaps? Finding life balance is never a constant and might differ both depending on which phase of our life we are in, and what we currently need and focus on. The key, is to be awake and aware of how we feel so we can set appropriate boundaries that support each area to be seen, heard and integrated with equal importance in our lives. You can look at it daily, weekly, monthly and yearly. If you have spent a lot of time and energy on your job and worked overtime, it’s no wonder if you need to take some time off after your project is done. 

All these pieces aren’t only about time for our physical and emotional needs but can also support one another. When we refill our cups with rest and romance, it becomes easier to do a better job and manage our home and finances. Likewise, when we get time to focus on developing new skills and reflect on our lives, we get something to talk about with our friends, which enliven us and can make us feel more motivated and inspired. The point is, each area affects another. You can even draw an arrow around the circle to see how one can lead to the other, both for better and for worse! With too little sleep and no fun and recreation, you will ultimately do worse on the job and have more conflicts in your relationship. To tend to your life balance, is to take good care of yourself, so you can care about others and earth too.

To listen to this blogpost as a podcast, find The Source Podcast on YouTube, Apple or Spotify.