3 Strategies to Create More Balance into your Life from Dr. Rick Hanson

By kristenrace | November 18, 2019 | 0

I want to start off with a question for you:

What’s your #1 challenge for achieving a sense of balance in your life?

I would love to know! Please click here to reply if you don’t mind. 😊
 
Lately, I have been presenting a keynote presentation entitled “Balance your Brain to Balance your Life.” In short, I challenge the standard thought process on balance by arguing that external actions (planning meals on Sundays, leaving work early to attend your child’s  soccer game, not checking email on Saturdays), are only helpful if we nurture internal balance first. For me, the key to a balanced life is a balanced brain.

My approach meshes well with Dr. Rick Hanson’s , who in an interview with me, shared his top 3 strategies to create a better sense of balance.

Below are the three strategies Dr. Hanson suggests integrating into your daily life to achieve the ever sought-after work-life balance.

1. Fill yourself up with the good

This strategy is all about you. Nurturing yourself, taking care of yourself and being compassionate with yourself. By ensuring that you get enough sleep, eat nutritious meals and receive and express love, you start to build up what Dr.Hanson calls “psychological resources”. These resources will help you in times of stress and allow the smaller issues, to simply ‘slip off your back’.

This does not need to be integrated into your life in a drastic, time-consuming manner. You can simply do little things throughout the day that take care of your basic needs. Aim to amass 30 minutes a day to really soak up the good and feel it melt inwards to start creating more resilience to stressful factors.

2. Be aware of the people with whom you surround yourself 

Dr. Hanson also points out that getting clear on which people and what situations push you into the “orange” or “red” stress zones is crucially important. He encourages us to seek out and surround ourselves with individuals who have our best interest at heart vs. the bottom line.

We are starting to see a strong movement of forward-thinking companies that value their employees and realize the benefits of making sure their people are taking care of themselves – the triple bottom line.

In Dr. Hanson’s words: “Be clear-eyed about the seductions of the workplace”. It may be that your employer does not have your welfare in mind. That means it’s up to you to make those decisions that will nurture the balance in your work and life.

3. Prioritizing into A and B priorities

According to Dr. Hanson: “if you are going to fill your bucket, put your big rocks in first.” This strategy focuses on learning to pull apart your priorities, and classifying them into two groups: crucial and/or fixed and secondary and/or flexible.

The crucial/fixed priorities are the things that matter the most to your well-being. These are key, and once you gain an awareness of what they are, you can then create a plan to make sure that they are met daily.

The secondary/ flexible type priorities are things that you would like to get done, but are not crucial for your well-being. These are like icing on the cake. Adding them into your bucket last allows you to control the flow and avoid overwhelm or overfilling your bucket.

All three of the strategies Dr. Hanson suggests are simple to integrate into your day, and are changes that will further support the functioning of your pre-frontal cortex. By spending short periods of practicing awareness and compassion for ourselves and our surroundings, we can ‘re-calibrate’ our brains and achieve a stable, optimal sense of balance in our lives.

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