Obtain Life Balance: 3 Steps
Jasbina Ahluwalia asks Dr. Jason Beeharilal, Founder of Premier Wellness Associates, LLC: I understand there was a great deal of interest when you had the stage during your session at the 22nd Annual NetIP Conference held in San Francisco last year. I’m looking forward to learning your insights.
I know that work-life balance can be a hot topic for young professionals. It would be great if you’d share with us your thoughts regarding how to create true work-life balance.
_____
Dr. Jason Beeharilal
That’s a topic that we could spend a few hours on, to be honest with you. It’s a fashion of mind and it’s a work in progress. It’s very customized for each person.
My clientele range in ages from the young professionals all the way up to the older folks.
There are many iteration and versions of my three steps.
- Establish Goals
- Social Appointment Calendar
- Dynamic Lifestyle Enhancement
Obtain Life Balance: Establish Goals
The main three begin with setting up and establishing goals.
Obtain Life Balance: Parameters
There are four priority parameters that I tend to address in terms of a person, both in my own life and my client’s lives.
They are:
- Mentally
- Physically
- Spiritually
- Emotionally goal-based enhancement.
When we look at those aspects, each one of them plays a role in our lack of balance, when we’re not balanced, and in our balance when it finally comes to be. It’s a very dynamic process.
Balance is not a static state. We look at each day and try to focus on doing at least one thing working towards, if not each of the goals, at least one of the goals.
That’s the first step.
Obtain Life Balance: Nurture Relationships
This is the second step. If you notice, most of the civilizations that we call great, most of the wonders of the world revolve around community.
A community is based on relationships. If we don’t nurture our relationships, a house divided against itself cannot stand. Therefore, we look back at our relationships and we have to give back to our own social relationships.
That’s what we look at with the work-life balance.
Obtain Life Balance: Social Appointments
Part of the frustration is, “I don’t get a chance to spend enough time with my loved one, friends, family, parents or kids.”
Here is one of the things that I find helps busy professionals. We make appointments for everything from our medical visits to our dental visits, pedicures and clients.
Why not for ourselves? Most of us have smartphones. Most of us have some kind of calendar ability.
I talk about making social appointments, whether it’s with your child, your gym date or for a date night.
Obtain Life Balance: Prioritize
You say, “Okay, I’m making an appointment with this person. This person, group of people or task is just as important, it not more so, to make me more productive in the other parts of my life.” That’s the second step.
It is a social appointment calendar. It can be the same as your work calendar. It can be the same as your normal calendar where you make appointments.
It’s very important to nurture those relationships.
They’ve shown in studies that relationships, in terms of social interaction, prevent dementia. They stave off the onset of dementia. They lead to lower cortisol levels and less stress in people’s lives.
Therefore, all of the stress-based diseases tend to go down as well. That’s a very heavy one, even though it’s a short one.
Obtain Life Balance: Dynamic Lifestyle Enhancement
The third one is what my practice really thrives on. That is what I call dynamic lifestyle enhancement. It’s a very big one.
We start with three primary settings. We talk about our goals. Then we go to diet, exercise and stress mitigations.
“Stress mitigation” refers to the ways that we cope with stress.
How do we connect with the aspects in our lives that cause stress? How do we come back from that?
Obtain Life Balance: Food Choices
Some of us reach for unhealthy foods or unhealthy behaviors. Some of us reach for nothing at all, which creates emptiness. The stress mitigation becomes very important.
Then there is diet, in terms of nutrition. That’s our fuel for our body.
If we’re not fueled properly, we can’t hope to exercise. We can’t hope to be productive at work, which is the core of a lot of people’s existence nowadays, unfortunately.
On top of that, we increase what I call unstructured physical activity.
Obtain Life Balance: Exercise
There is the gym aspect, where you do an exercise program. You do different workouts for different muscle groups.
The unstructured stuff is the most important when you’re talking about functional ability.
Obtain Life Balance: Habits
We’re talking about parking further away at the grocery store. A lot of us get the handicapped spot right next to the entrance. It’s taking the stairs instead of the escalator or elevator. Little things like that are like money in the bank account.
Your body ends up getting used to moving and getting away from what we call the sitting disease. The sitting disease refers to the fact that your body gets used to whatever you teach it to do.
If we’re sitting at a cubicle all day, our body gets used to it. Our muscles atrophy. They get weaker. Our bones get less dense. Our tendons get a little more lax. The blood flow goes down, except to the brain and vital organs.
When you finally do exercise, the stiffness comes in. You are more prone to injury. Everything is not warmed up properly, unless you really make an effort of warming up.
Obtain Life Balance: Effects
They’ve shown in studies that a one or two hour workout in the evening, or the weekend warriors who are attacking the gym relentlessly only on the weekends, is not enough cardiovascular exercise.
It is not consistent enough to cause significant enough gain and prevent injury. Those are the three points.
Obtain Life Balance: 3 Steps Recap
To summarize, set up and establish goals. Work toward those goals each day.
The second one is to make social appointments to nurture relationships.
The third one is to try to enhance your lifestyle in terms of the fuel for your body, your unstructured physical activity and the way that you cope with stress.
You can use all three.
_____
Tell Us:
Do you feel these 3 steps will help you obtain life balance? Share your thoughts with us in the comments section below.
_____
The above is an excerpt from Jasbina’s interview with Dr. Jason Beeharilal
The entire interview transcript is at: Jason Beeharilal NetIP (Network of Indian Professionals) Interview – 3 Ways to Stress Less & Live More
Listen to the entire interview on: Intersections Match Talk Radio – Jasbina’s Lifestyle Show
Listen to the entire interview on Blog Talk Radio: NetIP Spotlight- Live Your Potential: 3 Ways to Stress Less & Live More
Listen to the entire interview on iTunes
_____
