We’ve heard a lot about work-life balance. Will unbalanced personal life lead to unbalanced professional life or vice versa? Do you know how to start being more balanced? In this article, read how four daily routines – bedtime, wake up time, exercise, and eating habits – will bring you to success or failure of finding a balance in your life and why self-discipline is the key.
Bedtime first
Self-discipline in our daily routine is the key to work-life balance. If not managed properly, it will affect every other thing in your life. First is your bedtime; second is your wake up time; third is exercise and fourth are your eating habits and diet. If you have self-discipline over these four routines, your personal life will be more balanced and it will boost your productivity and satisfaction.
Why is bedtime so important? And why should it come first? People who sleep early and have quality and enough sleeping hours tend to wake up early and fresh. Yet, it’s so hard to sleep early, right? Why? Because you can’t finish your work or chores, or you’re addicted to TV series or Netflix, or you’re busy playing Instagram or Tiktok. Some reasons can be controlled but you can’t control them while some are uncontrollable. Let’s focus on things that are under our control.
Before placing self-discipline in the front stage of control, it starts with your commitment and time management too. If you’re committed to do something early in the morning like travel abroad, can you manage your time to wake up early? It’s just that you can’t make it your routine, right? Our commitment comes from our motivation or inspiration on something. Then we manage our time to make it possible. But when the time comes, sometimes or many times, we can’t control ourselves to follow the plan. Why? Because we don’t have self-discipline. How to develop this character? I’d say just do it… again and again. Don’t give up though some days you fail.
Sticking to the plan
Self-discipline also means you control yourself by letting go of something else and sticking with what you plan for. If you just go with the flow, no way to sleep early especially when we have so many interesting things to attract us to stay awake at night. Fun activities are always at night time, right?
Imagine if you can sleep before 10 pm, there’s a high chance you can wake up at 5 am as your body has enough sleep. To wake up early means you have time to do something else worthwhile for your life like exercise and proper meals. On the other hand, if you sleep late, you tend to wake up late and no need to mention exercise or eating. Many times, you go for a cup of coffee, or any fast food knowing well that it’s not a healthy lifestyle but you just can’t get out of this loop just like you can’t control yourself to sleep early. I will not touch much on why having self-discipline over exercise and eating habits will also affect your work-life balance but I do offer a course on it both online and offline.
I myself started this quality since I was quite young as my mom always called me to sleep early and I could not bear not to obey her. And I could compare my mood between waking up early and waking up late well, so I decided to have a cheerful day by sleeping early in order to wake up early and be in a good mood. Even when I had an important exam the next day and I still had not finished reading a book, I would just let it go, meditate, and sleep instead of continuing reading late at night. I feel my brain functions better when I wake up early especially in terms of memory. That’s how I gradually developed self-discipline.
Empowering the mind
As for my current work, I do the same though it’s more difficult these days as your colleagues can send you messages at the time you want to sleep. Yet, I have my self-discipline to manage it as it has become my habit. It’s not too hard to control when you’ve been used to do it. Rather if you don’t do it this way, you feel you go against yourself.
I’d also suggest meditating every day as it will speed up the habit development on self-discipline. Meditation can strengthen the ability to control yourself as it gives power to your mind. If you don’t have power over something, you can’t control that thing, right? Same to the mind. Meditation empowers the mind so you have the willpower to do things you want to do. In order to develop self-discipline, meditation will help in the process and vice versa as you need to have discipline to do meditation as well.
If you want to start a journey towards yourself, join our online self-development program, and download our Mind stories app.