THE IMPORTANCE OF BALANCE

“With every down, is an up; with every pain, comes pleasure; with every frown, comes a smile; with every drop of rain, there’s a ray of sunshine; with every negative, comes a positive.”

Living in a modern society, adopting and maintaining a balanced lifestyle is important as it can have immediate and long term effects on our personal health and wellbeing. 

Sustaining a well balanced diet and active lifestyle improves overall health and mental wellbeing. But balance means the even distribution of something, right? Not necessarily. 

Regularly reflecting on the different aspects of your life and how you live it can determine the right amount and proportion that defines balance for you.

More recently, in the past year, I have been making it a priority to live a more healthy, sustainable lifestyle. 

Every three months or so, I like to sit down and reflect on my diet, my mental health and exercise. I choose to reflect on these things every three months because I believe it is important to implement change within ourselves regularly as our lives are often in a stage of ebb and flow. 

I choose to do this every three months because it allows me enough time to make mistakes and adjustments without putting any added pressure on myself in meeting my expectations. 

If you stay in a stagnant state, you become less motivated and inspired, especially when it comes to achieving your goals. It’s a sign of deeper issues and is a symptom of a problem. 

If you don’t adjust to change well, that is okay but think of reflection as planned change. Adopting this mindset can help you to ease into new projects and goals at your own pace and stick to them. 

DIET

The 80/20 approach is something I have adopted to help me better understand intuitive eating and stick to my goals whilst eating what I want. This approach is where 80% of the foods you consume are whole foods and the other 20% are “soul” foods. Soul foods are the foods that you crave. The foods that are known for bringing you guilt. The “bad” foods.

As long as you are eating foods that are nutritious 80% of the time, it doesn’t matter too much what you do with the other 20%.

Working in an office from 8:30am to 5pm each day makes it easier for me to eat nutritious foods. During an average work day, I will consume roughly two meals and two snacks. Preparing your meals the night before you go to work is not only beneficial in terms of organising a nutrient filled meal/snack, but it also helps for those days you know you are going to be limited in time and just want to grab something out of the fridge. 

Having this option means you don’t sacrifice your nutrition by saving you the stress of choosing something nutritious when you are busy. 

When I get home, I aim to eat a nutritious dinner but don’t worry too much when I have a couple of cheeky soul foods in the mix or if I choose to have dessert.

EXERCISE

You may have heard it before but schedule your exercise! It is just as important as anything else you do on your daily to do list. 

As well as having countless positive effects for your health and wellness, scheduling time to exercise is important as it allows you to:

1. Go into your workouts with a plan.
2. Track your progress and keep you on track towards your goals.
3. Prepare your body for recovery and welcome the rest days.

When one aspect of your life is becoming more orderly, it makes it easier for other aspects in your life to follow. 

For me, this was a good place to start as it helped me create a sense of discipline and view discipline as a form of training rather than punishment. 

Consistency really is key so as long as you are being active for at least 20 minutes a day, four days a week, you will start to notice an improvement in your physical health and appearance.

Keeping in mind though that you need to be patient and it takes time. The magic doesn’t happen overnight!

There are so many negative stigmas towards exercise that prevent people from wanting to start doing something about it in the first place and it starts with something simple like lifting that first weight or running your first 100 metres!

MINDSET

In any aspect of your life, you are required to grow and growth starts with your mindset. It is about how you perceive yourself and how you react to certain challenges you may be faced with. 

Dr Carol Dweck, a Stanford psychologist, identified two mindsets: a fixed mindset and a growth mindset. She studied students’ attitudes about failure and noticed that when students believed they could get smarter and achieved success, they began to understand that effort is what ultimately makes you stronger. 

Those who have a fixed mindset let failure and success define them and spend more time recording their talents rather than working on developing them. 

A growth mindset allows you to embrace failure and learn from it. It causes many changes in your brain throughout your lifetime that are vital for resilience. 

To become resilient is beneficial for a number of reasons: 

1. It allows you to adapt to change easily, developing mechanisms that protect you against events that may be overwhelming. 
2. Maintains balance and the ability to cope with stressful situations. 
3. Improves quality of life by aiding in the prevention of mental health issues. 

So if we believe that we can grow, whether it be learning a new skill or achieving a new goal, we can change our attitudes and behaviours towards that by changing the way we perceive that task. 

Your brain is just the starting point and neuroscience has shown that we can increase our neural growth by asking questions, practicing and following good nutrition and sleeping habits. 

Incorporating a growth mindset is just about praising and rewarding the effort. So if you have set out to achieve a certain goal and you fail somewhere along the line in achieving that, use that failure to your advantage and think of failing as learning instead of simply giving up and thinking ‘I can’t do it’. 

I hope these tips can help assist and influence you to make small changes daily and live a more fulfilled, happy life. 

I would love to hear of your own methods that have helped you reflect on certain aspects of your life whether it be on the topics listed above, environmental or social. 

Nik x