When I was in short term treatment for alcoholism and drug addiction, there was a lecture at the rehab center I attended about balanced lifestyle. At the time, I thought that this was sort of irrelevant, and I did not really see how it would help me to stay clean and sober in recovery.
But a year or two into my recovery, balance had become one of the most important concepts for my overall health and well being.
Why?
Because as I stayed clean and sober, my life slowly became more complicated, and full. Relationships formed. I started working, went back to school, started a part time business, and so on. Life fills up with stuff in recovery. You experience new things, learn new things, and thus start accumulating stuff. Physical stuff, new relationships, and new responsibilities.
As you grow, and as your life gets better and better in recovery, the need for balance becomes more and more important. Let’s take a closer look at the concept of balance and how it relates to our recovery:
A balanced lifestyle meshes perfectly with the holistic approach to good health in recovery
Part of the Introverted Recovery program is the pursuit of holistic health.
That simply means that a person needs to focus on personal growth in all areas of their life, treating the “whole” person rather than just one part (like the spiritual aspect, for example).
So an holistic approach in recovery might include:
1) Emotional health through 1 on 1 therapy.
2) Physical health through regular exercise.
3) Spiritual health through reconnecting with nature (or whatever your chosen path may be).
4) Quitting smoking or other undesirable habits.
7) Social health by checking in with a friend periodically.
8) Mental health by journaling and seeing a therapist.
And so on. Anyone who is actively pursuing growth in their life in several of these areas is really pursuing a holistic recovery strategy. Doing so becomes extremely powerful, because each one of these areas of growth can have a positive impact on your recovery and your quality of life.
Many recovery programs limit themselves to spiritual growth alone. That’s a mistake. The holistic approach is more powerful, and it also lends itself to a more balanced life.
A balanced lifestyle needs to include downtime in it to reduce stress
Sometimes the holistic growth thing can seem to get out of hand. If you are constantly trying to improve nearly every aspect of your life, how do you find time to relax and just enjoy your new life?
Balance is the key. Sometimes I have become far too wrapped up in my work and my business, and at some point it starts to affect me negatively. What typically happens then is that my family will encourage me to go on a vacation with them, and doing this taught me the importance of work/life balance.
Some people strive to have this sort of balance on a day to day basis. Others may do just fine with the occasional vacation or scheduled family time. The point is that you have to find a path that works for you. I am still finding my own path in this regard, and I haven’t quite perfected it yet.
If you are just stuck on pushing yourself as hard as possible for personal growth then you run the risk of becoming obsessed. Exploring the idea of balance will help to reduce this risk by forcing you to examine the aspects of your life that could include some healthy stress reduction. Down time could include things such as:
* Just taking the afternoon or day for yourself.
* Meditation sessions built into your schedule.
* A daily walk you take regularly at the same time each day.
The more hectic or busy your life is, the more you need to actually schedule your downtime, and then stick to that as part of your routine. For example, if your mind is always racing, then you should schedule daily meditation sessions, even if it is only a 5 minute break for your mind.
Awareness is important to maintain a balanced lifestyle
One of the common themes that we’ve discovered in addiction recovery is this:
Sometimes we are too close to the problem to realize there is a problem.
This can be true with various forms of addiction, but it can also be true when our life is out of balance.
It stands to reason: If you want to maintain balance in your life, then you need to be aware of when your life is not balanced.
That may sound obvious, but when you are caught up in the busyness of living your life, you often cannot slow down enough to see what things you should be focusing on.
So taking a moment to consider “balanced lifestyle” is exactly that–your chance to take a look at what is important, and how you should be spending your time, and making sure that your life is not being dominated by too much of something–at the expense of everything else.
The Introverted Recovery program has a few tools to make all of this work:
1) Journaling – allows you to see the trends in your own life by writing about your life on a regular basis.
2) One on one therapy – a therapist can give you insight and much needed perspective because “we are too close to our own problem.” On top of this, a therapist may have genuinely good suggestions and solutions for you.
So with these 2 tools of awareness, you should be able to see any lopsided imbalances in your life, and hopefully you can take corrective action and fix them by taking a look at what areas may be lacking from the pieces of the “holistic health” pie. Additionally, if your life is overly chaotic, you can force yourself to schedule in some downtime. Through these steps you can work towards achieving a more balanced lifestyle.
Leave a Reply