Balance – Work, Family, And Fitness
I’ll be real with you: Life is busy. I have a demanding job where sometimes I’m working late into the night. At times, the job is stressful. The late hours, things going wrong, having to react at a moments notice, all of these things raise the stress levels (which releases a hormone called cortisol, which is not good. I’ll explain later).
Along with that, I have my family: Three young girls who really love spending time with their daddy. I’m glad they do, and realize when they are older it may not be that way, but it takes time to spend time with them.
With all of this, how do I find time for my fitness, and how can this help you?
First, realize that you have to make time for you. You need to find time to sleep, and you need to find time to take care of your body. For me, this takes some discipline. I’m a big believer of exercising when it fits your schedule. I never know how long I’m going to work one day to the next. I never know if I’ll have to log in at night. The only thing I do know is that first thing in the morning I have time to myself, so that is when I exercise. I generally wake up between 5am and 5:30am to exercise, get ready for work, prep my lunch, eat breakfast, and get out the door.
At night, since I’m waking up early, I try to make it a point to be in bed around 10pm. Now, I’m not always successful, and that is not good either (lack of sleep also fights your body’s ability to lose fat). I am for 7-7.5 hours of sleep a night. My goal is to eventually push this to 8 hours, but that requires even more discipline in some areas for me, such as prepping my lunch the next day ahead of time, or even better breakfast planning
Doing this allows me to work, come home, spend time with the family, cook my supper, help get my kids to bed, and then focus on the other things I do each night.
Along with that, unless work has me tied up, I choose to spend Friday night with my wife. It’s the one night a week where we unplug and I actually watch some television. This is our “husband and wife” time, which I believe is very important to our marriage and my stress levels.
What are you doing to balance out life, work, family, etc? We can all learn from each other here.
