Life Balance

Life balance is all about achieving a harmonious relationship across all facets of your life. It matters because too many people neglect some part of their life to the point that things become unbalanced. Left unchecked, this causes stress, anxiety, and a variety of other health problems.

Many people, including life coaches and therapists, use the Wheel of Life to explore life balance and identify areas where they’re putting in too much time at the expense of others. A person spending too much time at work may neglect their family and health. Before long, despite their business being a success, their family life or their health may suffer.

By examining your life balance, you can look at your life strategically and correct any imbalances for the benefit of the whole.

The Problem with the Wheel

The Wheel of Life is a useful tool, but it’s not dynamic. It’s only a snapshot of your life balance at one given moment, and like trying to balance on a stationary bicycle, your wheel of life at any given time could be unsteady.

Your life should be fluid; it should always be moving, and so should your view of your balance. Today’s world isn’t static, and the pace of life is generally getting busier. Technology like smartphones and smart watches is always with us, keeping us attached to work around the clock, blurring the boundaries between the different parts of our lives. The always-on culture isn’t just affecting work-life balance. For many people, it’s eroding it.

The Spinning Top

It’s for reasons like these that I like to think of the Wheel of Life not so much as a wheel but as a spinning top.

Too many people and coaches have the misconception that the Wheel of Life is a tool to help you slow down. But think about the physics of an actual spinning top for a moment. It doesn’t stay upright because it’s balanced — it stays upright because its spin converts a tipping force into a kind of dynamic stability, while it’s genuinely unbalanced the whole time. And a spinning top always falls over eventually: friction bleeds off its energy continuously, and without more energy going back in, it winds down and falls.

That turns out to be a better model for life balance than ‘keep it steady’, because it captures something most balance advice misses entirely: you can have perfect time allocation across every part of your life and still feel completely unbalanced if you’re exhausted, in exactly the way a top falls the moment it runs out of spin. Balance isn’t just about where you spend your time. It’s also about whether you have the energy to engage meaningfully when you’re there — and the trick with a spinning top, and with a life, is making sure you don’t run out of energy, not just keeping the day’s allocation of hours perfectly even.

By looking at the priorities in all the facets of our lives, and keeping the energy behind them topped up, we can keep our lives balanced. It’s addressing the priorities we meet every day, not just which sector we’re spending our time in, that’s the key to a balanced life.

There’s a genuine and interesting pattern in the research on time and wellbeing: people with a moderate amount of free time in their day tend to report better satisfaction than people with either very little or a great deal of it, with satisfaction actually declining again once free time becomes excessive (Sharif, Mogilner & Hershfield, 2021). There’s a sweet spot, in other words, and it isn’t at either extreme.

Priorities, Not Time

Life balance is about regularly assessing where our priorities lie and keeping our lives moving to correct any imbalance. When home life is a priority, focus on getting the most out of the moment. When health is important, eat well, rest, and take some time for yourself every day. When work takes priority, work hard and do your best to succeed.

I had a patient, a composite of people I’ve seen with this pattern, who had a terrible work-life balance. He was working sixty-hour weeks, barely seeing his family, and missing his children’s school events. He was exhausted, resentful, and convinced he needed to quit his job.

When we examined his situation more closely, the problem wasn’t the hours. It was the priorities. He was spending sixty hours a week at work, but probably twenty of those hours were on low-value tasks that could be delegated or eliminated. When he was home, he was constantly checking email, never fully present. He was spinning, but the spin was chaotic rather than balanced.

We restructured his priorities. At work, he focused on high-value tasks and ruthlessly delegated or eliminated the rest. His work hours dropped to forty-five per week, but his output actually increased. At home, he implemented strict boundaries: no email after 7pm, no work at weekends. When he was with his family, he was present.

Six months later, he reported a better life balance than he’d had in years. The hours hadn’t changed dramatically. The priorities had.

The Myth of Perfect Balance

Here’s something most people don’t want to hear. Perfect balance doesn’t exist. There’s no magical state where work, family, health, friends, hobbies, and personal development all receive exactly equal attention all the time. That’s not balance. That’s fantasy.

Real balance is dynamic. Some weeks, work dominates because you’ve got a major project. Some weeks, family dominates because someone needs you. Some weeks, health dominates because you’re recovering from illness. The balance isn’t about what you do each week, because that changes with need. The balance is in the overall pattern.

People who accept the dynamic nature of balance tend to report better wellbeing than those pursuing perfect equilibrium. The pursuit of perfect balance creates stress. Accepting dynamic balance reduces it.

The trick is to use the Wheel of Life as a template, not a rule. Reassess what you do every day to address the priorities in front of you. Checking in on your life with a therapist or coach a few times a year isn’t enough on its own; continually assessing your balance day to day is what gives you the ability to focus on doing the best you can with the time you have.

The Energy Question

Sometimes you need to slow down, and sometimes you need to speed up. There’s a time to spin fast and a time to spin slow. The trick, as with the top, is not running out of energy — keeping enough in reserve to maintain your balance and momentum for as long as you need to get where you’re going.

This is something most discussions of life balance ignore: energy management. The burnout literature points consistently to resource depletion, rather than hours worked, as the real driver of exhaustion and dissatisfaction (Hobfoll, 1989; Demerouti et al., 2001). You can spend two hours with your children, but if you’re so exhausted you’re just sitting there staring at your phone, that’s not quality time. You’re physically present but energetically absent.

This is why everything else discussed in this hub also matters for life balance. If your Default Mode Network is catastrophising constantly, you’re burning energy. If your allostatic load is elevated, you’re exhausted. If you’re not breathing properly or sleeping well, you’ve got no reserves. Life balance requires having the energy to actually engage with life.

The Daily Practice

Every day, work on your priorities. Take the time you need to do the things that add value to your life. Let go of the things that are holding you back. Outsource the things you don’t need to do. Take time for yourself every day.

Reassess your balance every day. Make sure you have the energy to keep going. Don’t be afraid to be busy — just be busy with the things that are a genuine priority.

This requires brutal honesty. Most people aren’t actually working on their priorities. They’re working on whatever’s urgent, whatever’s easiest, whatever other people want them to work on. They’re spinning, but they’re not in control of the spin.

People consistently overestimate how much time they spend on priorities and underestimate the time spent on distractions. If you want real life balance, track your time for a week. You’ll probably be surprised by the gap between what you think you’re doing and what you’re actually doing.

The Strategic Approach

Life balance isn’t about equal time allocation. It’s about strategic energy investment in what matters right now. Some seasons of life require more focus on work. Some require more focus on family. Some require more focus on health. The skill is recognising which season you’re in and acting accordingly.

High performers don’t maintain a constant, perfect balance. They strategically unbalance towards career during critical periods — starting a business, major projects, career transitions — then rebalance towards other priorities when those periods end. They spin fast when they need to, and slow down and become more balanced when they need to recover.

The mistake is getting stuck in one mode. Spinning too fast for too long leads to burnout, which is now recognised in the international classification of diseases as a genuine occupational phenomenon, and severe or prolonged burnout is worth discussing with your GP rather than working through alone. Spinning too slow for too long leads to stagnation. Dynamic balance means adjusting your spin rate based on current priorities and available energy.

What Good Balance Feels Like

You know you’ve got a good life balance when you’re not constantly feeling guilty about neglecting something. When work doesn’t feel like it’s destroying your health. When family time doesn’t feel like it’s sabotaging your career or vice versa. When taking time for yourself doesn’t trigger anxiety about everything you’re not doing.

Good balance feels sustainable. You can maintain it. You’re not running on fumes. You’re spinning at a rate that works for this season of life, with enough energy to adjust when priorities shift.

People with good work-life balance don’t necessarily work fewer hours than those with poor balance. They tend to have better boundaries, clearer priorities, and more intentional energy management. They’re in control of their spin.

The Permission You Need

Here’s what most people are waiting for: permission to say no, permission to prioritise, permission to be busy when they need to be busy and to rest when they need to rest, permission to have different priorities in different seasons.

You have that permission. Life balance doesn’t mean doing everything equally all the time. It means doing what matters right now, with the energy you have available, whilst maintaining enough reserve to adjust when priorities change.

Your spinning top needs to keep spinning — sometimes fast, sometimes slow, but always with enough energy behind it. That’s balance. Not a perfect distribution. Strategic momentum.

Don’t wait for perfect balance to start living. Perfect balance doesn’t exist. Dynamic balance does. And you can start creating it right now by honestly assessing your priorities, ruthlessly protecting your energy, and giving yourself permission to spin at whatever rate this season of life requires.

Further reading

1. Hobfoll, S. E. (1989). Conservation of resources: A new attempt at conceptualizing stress. American Psychologist, 44(3), 513–524.
2. Demerouti, E., Bakker, A. B., Nachreiner, F., & Schaufeli, W. B. (2001). The job demands-resources model of burnout. Journal of Applied Psychology, 86(3), 499–512.
3. Sharif, M. A., Mogilner, C., & Hershfield, H. E. (2021). Having too little or too much time is linked to lower subjective well-being. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 121(4), 933–947.
4. Maslach, C., & Leiter, M. P. (2016). Understanding the burnout experience: Recent research and its implications for psychiatry. World Psychiatry, 15(2), 103–111.
5. Robinson, J. P., & Godbey, G. (2010). Time for Life: The Surprising Ways Americans Use Their Time (3rd ed.). Pennsylvania State University Press.