Find yourself doing a lot?

Between work, family, daily chores and friends, are you finding time for yourself? Or are you always overdoing?

This post is all about balancing the “do” in everyday life. Do. We are constantly in doing mode, and often even overdoing! It’s important to consider balancing our schedules, our activities, and the energy that we put out into the world if we want to “do” from a place of wellbeing.

There are so many aspects to this. But let’s just hone in on this idea of balancing the doing, the giving, the go go, go with the time that we spend in rest or restoration or things that charge us up. I’m not talking about rest at the end of the day. Because clearly we have activity and we have sleep, but I’m talking about the balance of our energetic expenditures during the day, and balancing out the overdoing.

So, this all comes down to energetics.

The time that you spend doing things takes energy. And overdoing drains energy even more. So the question is, what does your schedule look like? And I don’t just mean your work schedule, but your to-do list, the things that need to happen and that your own dedication and energy brings to fruition.

Maybe you are going off to work, you’ve got to get ready, you’ve got to take care of things at the house. Maybe you have to leave the home to work. Maybe you’re taking others off to work or to school, and then your day begins. All of the things that you schedule for yourself that spontaneously come up or happen throughout a planned day. These are the doings.Hopefully we can bring our attention to these doings and have some choice in the matter.

Because really to feel great, to have wellbeing in our lives, comes down to a matter of being rather than doing.

So think about it. Are you the kind of person that runs your life by lists? Or your planner or your meeting schedule? Maybe your appointment calendar tells you what’s happening in your day.

If you’re like most of us who are living in this fast paced modern world, you are busy! But think about it. What are the reasons that your schedule may get overly busy? What comes up for you?

There are many reasons why we might catch ourselves in being too busy, busy, busy, busy. Do, do, do more, more, more go, go, go. Overdoing.

And I just wanted to highlight a few of those for you to think about and bring up in your own mind as to how they resonate with you. Obviously, the first one is necessity. Sometimes it’s just truly necessary for us to be in this kind of perpetual working mode from the minute you get up till you drop at night.

Now I know a lot of people who have lived this kind of lifetime. And it’s really a challenge to get into a place of wellbeing when this is the kind of service that you are either being asked of or demanded of for yourself.

It’s really hard to only go, go, go without truly recharging. Necessity, such as having little kids that you’re taking care of or caring for someone else.

Perhaps it is something that you have to do because there’s a project coming due at work, or you have a goal in mind or any number of reasons from the family or the environment that you live in that you just have to live this pace.

Luckily, if you’re reading this right now, you already know the benefit of self-care. Right now, you’re taking a few minutes to consider and contemplate how you can create more well-being in your own life. How you can stop overdoing.

So I really commend you. If you’ve been searching for support in that endeavor for wellbeing, taking care of yourself, you are on the right track! Absolutely keep it up. It’s a challenge in our world. So necessity is one of the reasons why we go, go, go, do, do do.

But the problem is that necessity can become a chronic behavior, simply a hard-wired habit, even when the necessity itself is gone.

Sometimes we bring it upon ourselves. We have a culture of going so much, doing so much, having so much. Overdoing. I mean, just think about it. If you look at the media, it always is pumping our brains full of the next thing we need. And to get that thing, we need more money. So there’s this entire cycle that has happened in the last numbers of decades, when it used to be referred to as “keeping up with the Joneses.”

Those were the neighbors that always seemed to get the next best thing. Maybe it was the next best car or when I was growing up, people were getting boats and RVs and beautiful things, new homes. This was a different economic era.

In fact, in the fifties, it was commonplace in the US for the middle class Americans to have one person working. So usually the dad went off work, and the mom stayed home to take care of the kids. So for a lot of you reading now, this was like your grandparents’ era right? Back in the day, maybe even before that, this used to be the norm.

Today, the norm is not like that at all. Our norm in the US is a two-person household working, both people work. Oftentimes even when there’s kids at home, it’s normal to have both parents working. And it all depends on what’s right for you. There’s no right and wrong about it. But unfortunately there’s a lot of people that have to have both people working to even afford today’s economic needs, rent and all the things that there are. Another problem with this kind of work go, go, do, do, is the breakdown of the nuclear family. This is a sad result of overdoing.

You know, we are living at a time where we don’t have to stay together as two parents to raise our kids. Sometimes it’s better for people, a lot of people have chosen to go on their own. And often this requires more overdoing than optimal! Now, often one person is working two jobs. All across our economic strata, there are scenarios requiring people to be overly busy- sometimes by necessity, but sometimes by choice.

So I’d invite you to consider, what’s your schedule look like? What are your personal demands of yourself and why is that the case? Is it really true that you need to put in as many go, go do, do hours that you do? Or maybe you’ve got this handled. Maybe you’ve come through this conundrum and you’ve found a way to balance your own schedule and master this “overdoing.”. If that’s you, that is awesome!

Even now in my six decades of life, I’m constantly looking at ways to calm my schedule, not over do. And I’ll tell you a funny story.

If you’ve been with me for a while, you might have heard about this before, and this is my doo-doo story. So once I lived in a wonderful yoga retreat center when I was young. I was serving in this beautiful ashram in India, doing the medicine practice and washing dishes and chopping, and really living this life of service in order to, you know, grow myself, self-development, spiritual growth and I loved it.

I was so gung ho that in retrospect, as I looked back even though in our schedule, we had a nice long full work day, Jeannie in retrospect, tacked several hours of work onto her day to do extra. Why? It was my do, do, do mode. And in those days, with the doing and doing and doing, I was trying to prove to myself that I was worthy.

That’s a whole other topic. But maybe you are driven by some kind of demon or inner story? Something that propels you to do so much, do more, more, more. Maybe it’s something inside of yourself that you might want to look at? I’ve been wrestling with this doing, doing, instead of being for many decades of my life.

Sometimes it was by necessity and sometimes it was just because I was running to try and prove a point. So while I was living in the ashram, at one point I got caught in my overdoing. My teacher saw my schedule, saw what I was up to and looked at me with the biggest grin and told me, “Doo-doo stinks!” and she laughed hysterically. And you know, this has been one of the greatest teachings in my life!

I carry it forward today, 40 years later because I always remember, oh yes, doo-doo stinks! It makes me laugh every time I catch myself overdoing. And yes, I still do.

May you also laugh if you catch yourself doo-dooing! 🙂 Here’s to stopping the overdoing, by empowering our own energy of awareness and choice.

What’s happening for you? If you’d like support to enhance your own energetic wellbeing, please visit my Energy Tools Mentoring program today. (Enrolling now.)

All Blessings & Love,
💛 Dr. Jeannie Arunimā