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At one time or another, nearly everyone struggles to balance the demands of work and family – and we are defining work as not only job related activities – it can be volunteer work, or even hobbies you have. And we define “family” as a spouse, siblings, a much–loved pet or even an aging parent. Thus, everyone – including stay–at–home parents and professionals without kids – experiences the stress of being pulled from different directions and feeling like there are not enough hours in the day.
 

Amy Piper, a life coach, says that these feelings of anxiety and frustration often feed upon themselves and create a vicious circle. “Stress is not only created by a response to an external situation or event – a lot of daily stress is created by ongoing attitudes or recurring feelings of agitation, worry, anxiety, anger, judgments, resentment, insecurities and self–doubt,” Piper says. “These emotions are known to drain our emotional energy while we are engaging in everyday life. This leads to more fatigue and an endless cycle of negative emotions”.
 

Piper says that finding a work, life balance starts with both defining who you are and recognizing your personal mission in life. Then you are best able to always honor your priorities in the way you want rather than making decisions based on the ever changing norms of society or someone else’s expectations.
 

“When your mind and emotions are balanced – when you are in heart coherence – your physical systems function more efficiently, resulting in emotional stability, mental clarity and improved cognitive function,” she says.
 

Here are a few tips that could help you balance out the work/life dichotomy and get you closer to your heart coherence:
 

1. Define who you are, your mission in life and your life’s goals
   • Start your day with a prioritized list of work/job-related tasks and give yourself a 6 p.m. deadline to complete them.
   • In the meantime, commit to the larger values in your life – relationships, exercise, spirituality and fun. Make a firm commitment by putting those activities on your calendar.
2. Create habits that support your goals
   • Habits are like grooves in a record. The deeper they are, the harder to escape from and the more likely you are to play the same behavior over and over. But you can change habits with effort. Incorporate behaviors that further your goals.
   • If you can make those habits part of your daily routine, that’s even more effective. For example, if one of your goals is to get in better physical shape, maybe you can ride your bike to work every day and/or take the stairs whenever possible.
3. Remove ‘time suckers’
   • This may sound hard-core but there are people and activities that don’t add value to your life. They can ‘suck’ time and positive energy from you and your mission. Cultivate an ability to identify these ‘time suckers’ and remove them.
   • One somewhat trivial, but effective, example of a time sucker is that closet you have in your home that is messy and disorganized. Every day you walk by it, acknowledge it’s presence and then do nothing about it. That moment sucks a bit of energy from you. And guess what? That closet will keep sucking energy from you until you clean it up. Once you do, you can take control of that energy again. This example sounds a bit silly but humans do operate like this. We all feel these tendencies to do things that are not in our best interest and that suck time away. Take charge and get rid of them.
4. Live more mindfully
   • Life unfolds as a non-ending thread of ‘nows’, all we have is the present. Unfortunately, our current society has evolved at such a mind bending pace that we tend to squander these precious seconds we each have on the earth. As the Buddhist scholar B. Alan Wallace says: “We’re living in a world that contributes in a major way to mental fragmentation, disintegration, distraction, de-coherence.”
   • We need to all live more “mindfully”. Mindfulness is a state of intentional attention on the present. By cultivating a state of non-judgmental awareness of your thoughts, you realize that you are not actually your thoughts. You can start to train yourself to stop swinging mindlessly from thought to thought — like a monkey in a tree (‘monkey mind’ as the Buddhists call it) — and just focus on being.

Learn to recognize when your mind, body and heart are not in balance and refocus on those mindful activities that move you towards your life’s goals and heart coherence.