Often people say they tend to not do their self-care strategies when they need them most. What this usually reflects is not having planned self-care into our regular life routines. We live busy lives with many different aspects that can enrich, stress, and distress our mental health. As healthcare professionals it is essential to have as much balance as possible and to have self-care be a regular part of our routine.

Assessing your life balance

Self-care involves balancing our lives in a holistic way. We won’t be perfect at this, but the more we attend to planning into our lives what is needed to feel the most balanced, the better we can stave off things such as burnout.

When our life is in equilibrium there is a balance between opposing forces, opposing forces like the desire to lay on the couch and the need to get up and exercise; the draw of being with friends at a social gathering and the yearning to be alone in nature, the drive to learn and achieve and the requirement to “just” be ourselves, etc.

Each day we make choices about how we live our lives and use our energy. Ultimately this is our choice even at the most painful times such as during illness. Sometimes these choices become unconscious, derived form decisions we took months of even years ago. An example might include the work we do today being the result of career choices made in our teens.

What is clear is that our lives are most satisfying when we have achieved a balance between the social, emotional, intellectual, physical, spiritual and financial/material aspects of who we are. It makes sense to review our life occasionally and then choose to change or reconfirm to ourselves that what we are doing is our conscious choice.

Activity: Wellness Wheel

Robin Robertson and Gisele Microys created this instrument in 1998 as a way of helping people assess their current life balance. It has since been used by hundreds of people. The instrument was revised in 2001 based on learning and experience by the authors from facilitating groups and sessions on life balance, consulting to organisations, coaching in the workplace, and counselling individuals in psychotherapy.

Robertson & G. Microys, Life Balance Assessment and Action Planning Guide, 2001-2 and Lutheran Social Services of Michigan, Your Guide to the Wellness Wheel.

Assess your life balance

Now that you have looked at your own wellness wheel and your life balance, try listing some of the things you can schedule into your weekly or monthly activities to help make sure you are attending to your holistic wellness.