My Personal Definition of Balance

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Optimizing Justin P Lambert

6 min readDec 30, 2016

Balance is a touchy topic.

There’s no “right answer” when it comes to living a balanced life. One person’s balance could be another person’s fanaticism and vice-versa.

So I want to start by emphasizing: this post is about my own personal definition of balance. It’s not a How-To treatise on achieving balance in your life and I’m not purporting to have even a few of the answers, much less all of them.

That being said, I admit my personal definition of balance fits in fairly well with the opinions of some writers who have taken that next step of claiming to know a thing or two and making educated recommendations, so hopefully I’m not too far off the mark.

The 4 Main Life Categories

To me, true balance involves investing the necessary time, attention, and energy into all four of what I call The Main Life Categories:

That list isn’t in priority order because appropriate balance is the goal. Based on circumstances, my priorities, my personal values, and other important factors, I need to be able to decide which activity to pursue at any given time. One of the key outcomes I hope to glean from my optimization project in 2017 is to develop a more intuitive understanding of how that balance can be achieved and maintained so that, hopefully, I won’t need to put so much conscious effort into doing so in the years to come.

Physical

This pic was taken back when I was a superhero.

As you can guess, activities falling under the Physical category include:

Diet
Exercise
The physical effects of my mood
Energy level
Overall health

Here is a constantly updated list of posts on this blog relating to Physical activities.

Being balanced in this area means that I’m going to give my physical condition the attention it deserves without focusing so much time and energy on it that I neglect more important things.

For example, I’m going to try to finally establish a daily exercise routine, log my daily food intake, and work on losing weight. But I’m not going to move on to training for a marathon or something else similarly involved because I don’t want to sacrifice time with my family or time for other more important pursuits for the sake of achieving something like that. (Again, that’s strictly my own priorities at work.)

Mental

Some examples of activities that would fall into the Mental category are:

Reading
Studying
and gathering information in other ways
Mental health considerations

Here’s an updated list of blog posts involving the Mental category.

I absolutely love mental stimulation, and I know for a fact I can slip into unbalanced habits if I’m not careful to avoid them. For instance, when I visit a library, I usually come away with six or seven novels, the longer the better. I tell myself this is because I want to have other options available in case one of the books turns out to be stupid, and there’s some truth in that. But more than that, I just love the idea of reading all those books, and I would totally read for 10 hours a day or more every day if I didn’t have to worry about earning money or living life.

I can get equally enthused about documentaries, YouTube videos, and endlessly surfing the web too. It’s all in the name of learning, and I love it so much I’ll skip lunch for the sake of it.

But that’s totally unbalanced, and it’s something I know I need to watch out for.

Throughout 2017, I’ll be using various tools to keep a strict watch on my time and how it’s being used. If and when I find a disproportionate amount of time dedicated toward Mental pursuits, I’ll need to put corrective action in place.

Emotional

The Emotional category involves both my own emotional health and that of my family and friends (to the extent that I can affect it.) That means any activities connected to:

My struggle with depression
My mood
Time dedicated to conversation and family togetherness
Social activities

Here is a list of all the blog posts involving the Emotional category on this blog.

This is going to be a tough one for me to optimize for a few reasons. First off, according to my Emergenetics profile, Social is the weakest of my four thinking aptitudes. That means that I’m least likely to even consider the social aspect of an action or decision if it’s not consciously brought into the discussion (usually by someone else.)

I’m also a guy, which means — let’s face it — I’m kind of clueless when it comes to a lot of emotional things that seem very straightforward and obvious to my wife and others of the female gender.

That being said, however, humans are emotional creatures. So it would be foolish for me to attempt to avoid it or work around it without approaching it in a balanced way that gives the emotional aspects of my life its due diligence.

Spiritual

While everyone’s view of this Life Category is going to differ, I’m going to describe how I see it and why I consider it the most important of the 4 Life Categories that I aim to keep in balance.

Here’s the list of posts falling under the Spiritual category from this blog.

I’m a very religious person, I come from a religious family, and my wife and I are raising our kids with a strong spiritual aspect to their lives. We dedicate approximately 10–12 hours per week as a family to attending religious services at our house of worship, worshipping together as a family, and participating in volunteer work that supports our convictions. My daughter has recently graduated High School and has chosen to pursue this volunteer work even more with a commitment of at least 70 hours per month.

So, when I talk about activities and habits that fall under the Spiritual category, most of what I’m discussing is a lot more concrete than the generally ambiguous factors you may think of first, like inner peace, a sense of serenity, or connection to something greater than myself. Sure, all those are involved somewhere along the line, but the bulk of the items I consider to be a vital part of my Spiritual life include:

Bible reading and study
Upbuilding scriptural conversation
Congregation activities/responsibilities
Shepherding fellow believers
Family worship

I consider Spiritual matters to be the most important of the 4 Life Categories because, in my opinion, without a Spiritual component in my life, the other categories don’t carry much weight:

Mentally, I could gather all the data and experiences in the world, but without the wider perspective spirituality affords me, none of it would really make any sense.
Emotionally, I’d be lost without my relationship with God and the stability it provides me.
Physically, if I had nothing to look forward to and believe in spiritually, I’d be looking at 70–80 years moving from one fleeting moment to another in this crazy, unpredictable world followed by nothingness.

Finally, even if I were to find out tomorrow that everything I’ve ever learned about the Bible, Jesus Christ, God, Heaven, the future of the Earth, and all the rest of it was a huge lie, I know I’d still be a better person having worked to live in a spiritual way than I would have been without it in my life.

While I’m already heavily involved in spiritual activities at this time, I know there’s plenty of room for improvement — not just in quantity, but more importantly, in quality — so that’s what I’ll be focusing on in this optimization project.

How do you define life balance, and how do you go about achieving it? Let me know in the comments.