Chasing Balance

The concept of obtaining “balance” in our daily lives is promoted in many ways as the ideal we should strive to achieve, often in connection to our health. Examples: We should strive for balanced nutrition. We should seek the ideal work-life balance. The ideal consumption of just the right foods coupled with the perfect amount of exercise will achieve the sought after balance between “calories in and calories out.” Choose the right pH of your skin care product to assure balanced and radiant skin. And the right balance of sleep and wakefulness to optimize our energy for the vibrant days we all deserve. But is there really such a thing as this elusive balance? Is it an attainable goal or an always out of reach ideal that creates enormous disappointment when we “fail” to find it, as most of us invariably do? Is it perhaps more a marketing ploy that entices us to buy products that promise the magic elixir of life balance?

In my years of working at the intersection of psychology and medicine, I’ve come to find that the concept of “balance” is not very helpful. My work and study has been oriented toward learning how our mind, brain, body, and social nature cooperate. As a result, I have found that creating and managing a healthy “dynamic tension” is a better goal. That’s right! I have found pursuit of tension to be more useful than pursuing balance.

To illustrate this with a specific example, I remember watching a man sitting atop a unicycle while he was talking with a friend. The friend, on the other hand was standing still on his two feet. The unicyclist’s feet, on the other hand, were in constant motion, making small and continuous adjustments, movements that were necessary for him to hold his position relatively stable and without falling off the unicycle.

That unicyclist captured what I mean by “dynamic tension.” There was no perfect balance point he could find and then hold onto. Balance is a static or stationary concept. Life, on the other hand, is dynamic and involves constant motion. The unicyclist’s balance was achieved only through the tension between his sensing when he was off-balance and making small adjustments necessary to remain upright, but only until the next moment when remaining upright was again momentarily lost.

Static or Dynamic - What’s Your Choice

I’ve come to find that learning to manage this tension is what we truly need to maintain vigorous and lasting health. To use some obvious examples, our heart never stops beating. Each contraction is followed by a momentary relaxation, that is then followed by the next contraction. We may say our pulse is 60 beats/minute but if we measure our heart rate variability (HRV), we see that moment-to-moment, our pulse accelerates and decelerates in synchrony with our breathing rate. And our breathing also varies: slower, faster, lighter, deeper, always adjusting itself to the demands of the moment. Sixty beats per minutes for our heart or an average of 16 breaths per minute are just balanced “averages” but our heart and lungs almost never operate exactly at that balance point – nor would we want them to!

Heart rate and breathing rate are just two very well-recognized examples of how we automatically undergo in-the-moment changes to our physiology so that we are optimally adjusting and adapting ourselves to our inner and outer circumstances. While it is comforting, reassuring, and absolutely necessary that these types of adjustments occur automatically, it is also important to regulate our dynamic tension consciously and deliberately.

Sensing Our Role in Our Own Health

Years ago, I taught a course I’d created to help migraine sufferers regain a life not so dominated by multiple day-long episodes of horrible pain. My experience with a client in that course may help us grasp what it means to deliberately manage our dynamic tensions effectively. At the time, a new class of migraine medicines had just been approved by the FDA. They were “abortive” meds (triptans), meaning you took them at the first hint of a migraine coming on. The medicine ideally “aborted” the migraine, hence the name.

I asked the group members, “What do you do when you sense a migraine beginning to develop?” Not surprisingly, most said, “I reach for my triptan.” Then I asked, “What do you do next?” One woman raised her hand and said, Well. I go right back to doing what I was doing before the migraine began to develop.”

I remember being momentarily speechless. Her comment implied that a medicine would restore an ideal biochemical “balance” that would prevent the migraine from forming. Migraine starts. Medicine stops. Ideal balance achieved. All she had to do was swallow the medicine.

There was no recognition that her work pace, diet, sleep, general stress level, barometric pressure changes in the weather, where she was in her menstrual cycle, and much more, were in any way operating as active players in the creation of the pattern of migraine that uniquely affected her and every other member of the course in ways unique to that individual.

The Rhythms of Our Moment-to-Moment Life

And that was precisely what the course was designed to address. By helping this specific individual learn what the various factors were that gradually generated the phenomenon called “migraine” that were specific to her, the more successful she and the other course participants became in reducing the frequency of their migraine episodes, the duration of each episode, and/or the intensity of each episode. In any given week, small adjustments, like those made by the unicyclists, improved the effectiveness of each course participant in adjusting and managing the dynamic tension of the process called migraine.

The idea of managing dynamic tension has also been central to my work with couples seeking therapy. A relationship is not a static process. It, too, is in constant motion. Relationships are dynamic processes that often benefit from ongoing attention to the ebb and flow of each person’s needs and what the relationship needs to remain vital and rewarding.

Sometimes one or the other needs to be alone. Sometimes we crave connection of one sort or another. Sometimes tensions build and need attention and resolution. Other times relationships require adventure, mystery, desire and delight, or actions to foster feelings of safety, security, and the sense of being “seen and valued.” The point is that a relationship that is fixed or rigid is a relationship that grows stale and slowly suffocates.

So, rather than chasing a magical balance point, learn to look at your health and health concerns as made up of many moving parts, each shifting in relation to the others, in a never-ending dance that moves you in each moment closer to or farther from a manageable and sustainable state of lasting health.

Let me know your thoughts. I’d love to hear from you.

Where does envy show up in your life? Can you recognize envy when it is present? What motivated me to create this Substack post reflects my concern that I see growing signs of envy everywhere. I see envy infusing our national and international politics, which is driving greater polarization. I see envy in our communal dialogue where mistrust, disdain, and the unvarnished ugliness of our words erase any goodness or legitimacy in the views and opinions of those with whom we disagree. I see envy in the impulsive need to hide behind the detached wall of social media postings to spew forth criticism at those whose voices challenge our assumptions – including, recently, the Pope himself.

For example, April 5, 2026, Easter Sunday: “Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped un in one, in Iran. There will be nothing like it!!!” DJT threatening devastating destruction all across Iran. Where is this statement coming from? I believe, the statement reveals deep and penetrating envy on DJT’s part about others in the world and their “failure” to give him what he wants and feels he deserves: complete obeisance. In other words, envy.

As the Iran war has exploded across the world’s stage, the current pontiff made several public comments about his disdain for invoking Jesus or God in support of the war, its shape-shifting aims, and of the glory it bestows on our military actions. In response, our elected leader took to social media to issue a series of chastising remarks against Pope Leo.

I see envy wherever humility is lacking, where a generous and charitable orientation to the needs of “the other”, whether defined by skin color, race, financial means, gender, or nationality, is replaced by self-righteous attitudes about the illegitimacy of “the other’s” needs or even their existence. Envy thrives when we seem to aspire to absolute homogeneity through the elimination or total dominance of disagreement. Everyone must be and think just like me – my clone – or their existence becomes a threat to what I want and need and my ability to get it. Enemies everywhere. Legitimate differences, nowhere.

In a recent interview with a guest on my podcast, Transforming Relationships, Naseem Khury, who works as an international conflict manager, said, “sometimes conflict can never be resolved. It can never go away. It’s always simmering. It’s always there and it’s just a question of when it comes back up.” The power of our conversation with Naseem sat with this implicit truth, which recognizes the complexity of interpersonal differences. Conflicts are essential to living together in groups, in communities, and in the multitude of relationships both big and small in which we live. Recognizing and even honoring differences is an important step toward learning to coexist with those differences, even as we collaboratively work to soften the sharp edges created by those differences. Whereas envy might presume the mere existence of differences is sufficient justification to seek their elimination, a collaborative model would see in the differences an opportunity to expand our awareness and acceptance of alternative views and alternative paths to peaceful co-existence.

If we learned to defuse our “choleric” temperament through practices that cultivate tolerance of, and interest in the well-being of “the other”, Hippocrates would likely have noted a change in our complexion. Rather than the yellow-green tinge of envy, he’d have noted a reddish hue that he called “sanguine”. When our temperament is sanguine, we exude an abundance of cheerfulness, optimism, and contentment. Where in your own life have you noticed envy – in yourself or in others? I’d love to hear your thoughts below.

Envy is therefore also a form of excess. In other words, envy is a form of extremist desire that results in greatly over-shooting normal and healthy wants and needs until a person arrives in the land of never enough and forever hungry for more. In that space resides beliefs that nothing is ever good enough, that You are never enough, and that ultimately I am never enough. In that state, envy assures that no matter what we achieve; no matter what we possess, no matter how much we are praised or loved or appreciated, we are still perceived by ourselves as lacking and at the same time someone else (“the other”) is perceived as having more than what they deserve. Moreover, there is the sense that what they have rightfully belongs to us. No wonder that Pope Gregory, in the 6^th century, created a list of extreme sins that came to be known as the Seven Deadly Sins.

These sins included: pride, gluttony, lust, greed, anger, sloth, and envy. If each of these “sins” were dialed back; if their extreme intensity were moderated, they would re-enter the zone of acceptable and even healthy human characteristics. Pride could become a healthy sense of self-satisfaction. Gluttony could become satiation and a feeling of sufficiency and contentment. Lust could morph into satisfying forms of intimate pleasure. Unbounded anger would transition into proportionate and justifiable dissatisfaction that motivates us to work with others toward finding acceptable resolutions. Sloth would evolve into allowing ourselves to slow down, to pace ourselves so that we could feel rejuvenated and refreshed. And envy could become a healthier capacity to attain something through one’s own efforts vs. believing the only path is to take from the “other” and possibly abusing (or worse) them in the process.

Envy has been associated with the color green, as seen in the aphorism, “I’m green with envy.” I’ll delve further into this later in the post. First, what is the link between envy and the color green? The answer to that requires traveling back in time to ancient Greece and Hippocrates of Kos, considered by many in the west to be the father of medicine. For Hippocrates, health was a function of how we lived, how we ate, and how our complexion was characterized by different colors that were associated with different temperaments. Hippocrates believed that the colors that people exhibited or radiated could be used to diagnose what ailed them. These colors were called “humors”, and the four-humor model has shown fascinating utility even in today’s world.

For example, a yellow-green or greenish-brown pallor to the skin was associated with bile, a substance produced by the liver and stored in the gallbladder. Bile gets secreted when our digestive processes work to break down fats. People with a bile-dominant temperament were seen as fiery, irritable, quick to react, and restless. They were described as “choleric”, which meant such a person was unreasonable, bad-tempered, and exaggeratedly angry. What links those characteristics or that temperament to envy?

Envious or Jealous

Envy, unlike jealousy, is linked to rage and an expression of intense, dysregulated destructive anger and desire. While a jealous person may wish they had what someone else possesses, envy reflects the sense that the other person does not even deserve what they possess; that “what you possess rightfully belongs me.” More than that, what you possess – and what I am envious of – is so grossly unfair, unjustified, undeserved by you, and out of balance with what is rightfully mine that I feel entitled to destroy you to reclaim what is rightfully mine, however distorted or delusional that thinking may be.

Jealousy is about wanting and wishing. Envy is about forcefully taking. Jealousy is a petty desire. Envy is a source of hate, rage, and the right to seek vengeance. Envy reflects an inability to inhibit or restrict one’s hot desires. Envy is a product of an unmet or unsatisfied longing that festers, comes to a boil, and can then get expressed through violent rage.

I wonder whether “crimes of passion” are, at their core, crimes of envy. For example, the horrible tragedy involving murder-suicides, wherein a man (usually) feeling jilted by the object of his desire (usually a woman), acts out, kills his lover or spouse and then kills himself. “If I can’t have her, no one will,” may be what this explosive envy may loudly declare. The absolute intolerance of rejection, lack of control, or the capacity to dominate, are a dangerous fuel when mixed with the extremism of entitlement that is associated with envy.

It is no wonder that ancient sources associated the trait of courage with people who demonstrated their capacity to conquer or subjugate their impulsive desires. The true hero is the one who is first able to control their darker nature. Their desires may not be fully satisfied but they don’t translate that into an insatiable drive to aggressively seek ways to fulfill any and all desires. The courageous person can be at peace with having less than the absolute totality of the ideal.

.