Sprout

Balancing your life

Sprout Admin -

Your values often inform your priorities in life. If you value close relationships, you might prioritize your family over independence. If you value success, you might prioritize hard work over relaxation. Regardless of what you value, it’s important for your mental and physical health to maintain a balance of priorities.

In order to balance your priorities, it’s important to look at the different areas of your life and understand your needs. These areas include biological, psychological, social and environmental factors. It’s also helpful to understand factors affecting mental health, and those contributing to burnout.

Let’s take a closer look at each of these areas:

  • Biological: This area encompasses physical health. Here, we can consider factors such as nutrition, sleep, active living, substance use and relaxation.
  • Psychological: This area addresses mental health and can include positive self-talk, showing yourself kindness, self-understanding, self-awareness, beliefs and coping methods.
  • Social: This area prioritizes social connections, such as support networks, family circumstances, friend groups, religious or spiritual groups and relationships at work.
  • Environmental: This area refers to situations around you and their impact on your biological, psychological and social health. It can include your workload, taking breaks at work, office space, where you take your lunch, restorative time, vacation, personal time, access to resources like childcare or public transport and work-life boundaries.

Maintaining a balance of these areas is important in preventing and recovering from burnout, and the areas tend to support one another. For instance, taking breaks at work (environmental) can improve your nutrition (biological) by giving you time to eat a healthy lunch instead of a quick bag of chips.

How do you feel you’re balancing your life in these areas right now? Are there any areas you feel you’d like to prioritize more than you do at the moment? Take a moment to reflect on four areas (environmental, biological, social psychological) and consider how each fits into your life.