Why Trying to Strike a Work–Life Balance Will Never Work for HSPs & the 1 Thing You Need to Do Instead to Find Balance

 By the end of this episode, you’ll discover why work life balance is an illusion and how to find peace more directly.

Welcome to Stress Management for Highly Sensitive People. A podcast helping HSPs avoid overwhelm, eliminate stress, and find true inner freedom. I’m your host, Todd Smith, a facilitator of the work of Byron Katie. A way to question and reduce stressful thoughts, and you guessed it. I’m a highly sensitive person myself.

In this episode, you’ll discover why the allure of a perfect work life balance appeals to highly sensitive people. How attachment to this idea can cause disappointment and stress. And how to loosen the attachment so you can start enjoying an imperfect life Again, this is an addition of strategy Fridays where we think about specific things you can do to help manage stress as a highly sensitive person.

If you’re like me, you probably love the idea of work life balance. It’s an ideal that I have been interested in my whole life, and I have pursued so many different things and. Hoped that I could bring them together and make it all work in some kind of cohesive whole. But alas, it doesn’t seem to work that way.

I have tried going into an asam. I lived in ASAM for 10 years and I was focused on just meditating and then, but I wanted also to have a career. And so I came out and I have was a photographer for a number of years, and. Now do what I do here. And and then I have a partner. And so I like to spend time with my partner.

I like to have hobbies. I got into pickleball for a while. I have a dog. Oh my gosh, there’s so many different things that interest me and I love to go deep with things, which is an HSP trait. And so I like to see if I can become really good at different things. I studied French for a while.

And I tried to become really good at that and spent a lot of time. It just goes on and on. All the different things that are great things. These are not bad things. These are wonderful things that appeal to me that I want to fit in, and all the while want to keep doing long meditations, doing my inner work.

My goodness, it just goes on and on. So the ideal that. I hold in my mind, and you may hold something similar, is this perfectly balanced place, like perfectly balanced lifestyle where there’s enough time for meditation, there’s enough time for sleep, there’s enough time for playing and walking the dog.

There’s enough time for different hobbies. There’s enough time for really going deeply and being successful at my job. There’s enough time for my partner. There’s enough time for all of the things I wanna learn and study. Yeah, this sounds really good. Except when you add it all up, it comes out to about, 563 hours per day.

And reality is actually different than that. We don’t have that many hours in our day, and so the ideal doesn’t match the reality. Why are we as HSPs so drawn by this idea of a perfect work-life balance? First of all, we love to optimize things. We love to do things really well, and we like to do life really well.

It’s a kind of possibility for highly sensitive people because we’re, we look so deeply into things and. It’s just out of reach, I think I almost could make this work. And so the allure is there and the chase is on and we often follow that a long way. The other thing that makes work-life balance so appealing to HSPs is that we have more needs.

We need more rest. We need more alone time. And we have to work that into our perfect balance as well. And so there’s this desire to make it all work. Like I wanna wake up feeling great every day after a long sleep and still have plenty of time for meditation and doing a great job at work and amp so.

The need is there to take care of ourselves. And so we actually have a smaller day than other people, and that can actually make us more attached to finding some kind of a balance. There’s a, there can be almost a craving for balance and when we look at other people, we can almost feel like it’s not fair that they get to burn the candle at both ends and don’t seem to have any real repercussions for that.

And we have to go to bed early and get up late and still want to fit in so many different things. So another reason why we are attracted to this idea of a perfect work-life balance is that we, as HSPs are great at imagining things. We can imagine what a perfect vision or version of life would look like and.

We can feel its potential, like we’ve got that emotional connection as well. And so when we see and feel how perfect it could be in an ideal sense, we can get attached to this vision. Basically we can be idealists. The problem is that attachment to this ideal actually and can end up causing stress and disappointment, and that can actually keep us further away from the experience of that ideal.

When you want something that you don’t have, or even more so if you don’t know how to get it, then that can cause stress. In fact, I often say that the only cause of stress is wanting something that I can’t have or don’t have. It’s this needy feeling and it just can drive you crazy. So the push to fulfill this ideal.

It can make us feel powerless. It can make us feel like a failure. It can make us work harder and push past our limits more quickly. Attachment can do all kinds of things. It blinds us, love is blind. Love for even an ideal can make us blind and we can end up interestingly, getting more out of balance, chasing that ideal than if we had never heard of the ideal in the first place.

So ideals as great as they are, and I’m an idealist, they can make us feel desperate. And then we start asking the wrong questions. The question we start asking is, how can I fit everything in? And when you ask that question, the mind will take that question in and start giving you answers. Oh, do this.

Oh, do this. Learn how to become more efficient. Learn how to do this. Oh, you could actually squeeze this in here if you just shorten this a little bit. You could fit this in and then you’d still be able to do that. This is how the mind responds to the question, how can I fit everything in? It will give you answers and you will become more efficient, but it actually is not getting you where you may actually want to be going, which is to a more balanced place.

Fitting everything in is not the same as being balanced. You may have a lot of different opposing things that you’re doing in your day that look like balance from the outside, but it doesn’t feel like balance because you’re now using every available second, and it may just start to feel like too much.

So what happens is if you keep. Feeling attached to this idea and keep chasing that attachment. You’re going to start trying to be more and more efficient. But there’s a limit. Problem is more stuff keeps coming in, more ideas come in, more things you’d to do, come in. More things other people need you to do or want you to do, come in and you just keep getting input, bombarded with so many different things that.

Becoming efficient is not going to actually be the solution. Trying to balance it all is never going to actually be the solution. It’s infinite, and so we have to recognize that we are limited. Our time is limited, and we can’t actually fit it all in. When we come to grips with this scary truth that. We are limited and our time is limited, and we can only do a few things.

It’s like scary to face, but if you can start to feel into it and start to accept it, you may start to find that you can get a lot of joy and a lot of your life can feel like it’s more balanced if you’re focusing on the few things that actually interest you. So how do we loosen the attachment so that we can start enjoying this imperfect life?

One of the best ways to work with attachments is to question your thoughts. Question your wants, question your needs. I want to do everything, or I need a perfect balance. I need to do this. You can make a list of all the things you’re trying to fit in and question each one. I need to do this.

Is it true I want to do this? Is it true you may want to do it, you may not. And then how does it stack up against everything else that you’re wanting to do? I like to ask a different question. Instead of asking how can I fit it all in? I like to ask, what do I really enjoy doing? This is a very different question to put into your brain because when it gets that question, it doesn’t start looking for how you can fit everything in and come up with efficiency answers.

It starts looking at, okay, what feels most appealing to me? And you start scanning all the things that you want to do and you’re like, oh, that. Is that one really, I really enjoy that and I really enjoy this. Now you can go crazy and start really enjoying everything, and that’s certainly possible. But I also what I’m really asking is what do I enjoy doing most?

And this can start pointing you towards your highest priorities. What is it that makes you feel alive? What is it that actually is you want to do? And you want to make the kind of center of your life, then you can take a shortcut and make this your priority actually to the exclusion of other things.

And I think this is the key point. There has to be some exclusion happening for you to find that feeling of balance, which is basically saying no to other things that you want. That just aren’t as they’re just not the one that you want to focus on. When I think about my projects, I always have lots of things I want to do, but I’m really only focused on one or two at the most, three projects at a time, and I really have just one main priority, maybe one or two main priorities.

And everything else has to fit in around the edges or not. And so what happens to me is that I actually find myself dropping things and it, it seems strange, like it feels irresponsible, and I stop worrying about certain things. Okay, yeah, I’d like to get this area of my life optimized. But it’s not that high of a priority.

I’m just gonna let it go and let life take care of it, and I’ll do the best I can. But my interest is in where my joy is, what appeals to me, and what I can go deep with. So time is limited. You can only do a few things. What will those th those things be for you? So the feeling I’m left with today is there’s no such thing as perfect work life balance.

You literally can’t do it all to be happy. You have to pick something and let the rest take care of itself. In this episode, we looked at why the allure of a perfect work life balance appeals to HSPs, and it’s because maybe we’re perfectionists or we tend in that direction. And because we have more needs for taking care of ourselves and we have more limited amount of time than other people, so it makes us want to be able to make it all work.

Also, we looked at how attachment to this ideal can cause disappointment and stress, and it’s because if you’re wanting something and you don’t know how to get it, it can drive you crazy. It can make it make you more stressed. And finally we looked at how to loosen this attachment so that you can start enjoying an imperfect life.

And I love thinking about it that way, an imperfect life, one that’s not perfectly balanced, but that is good enough. It, I’m living in a world of limitations and I’m accepting those limitations, and I’m focusing on the most important things for me and letting the rest slide. So thanks for listening. It’s great to explore with you.

As always, this program comes out three times a week on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. Join me next time for Breakthrough Mondays, where I share success stories and helpful insights for highly sensitive people on the path towards inner freedom.