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.