How Thinking of Your Life Like A Dresser Can Help You Find Balance

How many different areas of your life are you trying to keep in some type of balance right now?

Work. Family. Friends. Hobbies. Sleep. Rest. Play.

It’s a lot to squeeze into 24 hours and Ashley Simon,Director of Creator Marketing at Medium, argues it’s nearly impossible. She doesn’t strive for day-to-day balance and thinks about it as a long-term concept instead.

Her therapist encouraged her to view life as a dresser. Each area of her life was one drawer in the dresser. If you try to keep all them open at one time, it inevitably topples over. Crash. Burnout.

Yet if you open one or two at a time whilst keeping the other closed then it stays upright. You have stability. It doesn’t mean you abandon the other drawers as you can’t wear the same clothes all year round. The seasons change and close the open drawers and pull out others instead.

I’ve been guilty of trying to maintain balance on a microscale and it doesn’t work out well in busy periods. The dresser analogy will help me to look at the bigger picture and I hope it helps you too.

This article is based on the Mindful & Driven episode with Ashley. You can listen here or find the YouTube video at the bottom of this article.

Urgency is often overrated

I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve run around like a headless chicken for deadlines which don’t matter at all. I need to do this now because I’ve told myself so isn’t a good enough reason to risk burnout. We lie to ourselves all the time with such confidence.

Ashley had a toxic voice inside her head which told her she isn’t working hard enough and she would never be successful. Negative self-talk can eat a person up from the inside out. What’s worse is her conscious voice would reply “that’s true.”

It wasn’t until her late 20s that she realized she didn’t have to believe her own thoughts. Now when she attacks herself she stops and pauses. She doubts the voice in her head and is far more compassionate to herself. She knows she isn’t superhuman. One question helps her:

Do I really need to have this drawer open right now?

It’s a simple question yet sometimes the answer is much harder than you might think. You might keep trying to come up with valid reasons but realize they sound ridiculous. We do things on autopilot because our brains have a weird sense of laziness. It would rather force future us into more stress to avoid being uncomfortable now.

Shift your mindset to think about how to reduce your overall stress instead.

The work drawer can be closed

A former colleague of Ashley’s quit her job to take a break and rest up. Yet despite not having a job, she was even more stressed than before.

After being productive for so long, her friend felt guilty about giving herself the time off she needed. She was sabotaging her own happiness by forcing herself to go to networking events and keep her mind sharp.

It’s strange the way we’ve been conditioned in the modern world where we can ignore our health or friends for long periods without an issue but our identity is so tied to our work.

If you’ve worked hard and have enough surplus to just live for a few months, there’s no shame in letting go. Ashley’s friend didn’t need a job for the income, she desired it because she felt lost without it. Ashley seeded the idea that there were no real career consequences from taking a break.

It would help in the long run as she would be in a better state of mind for whatever her next project was. The same might be true of you. You might be trying to fit something into your life out of shame or worry of what others will think of you rather than because it needs to be there.

Work is perhaps the hardest of all the drawers to close because it can become so wrapped up in our self-worth but you can always pick up your career again.

You need to take the rest you deserve.

I hope you found these tips useful and can see ways you can apply them to your own life. If you’d like to hear Ashley talk about it with me in more detail, check out our conversation in the video below.