Why we Struggle to Find Balance
#AskMadelaine
This is the corner of the internet where you bring the things you’re actually thinking about — the ones that don’t fit into tidy boxes.
Not advice. Not fixes.
Just real humans asking real questions — and me meeting you there: real, raw and honest.
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QUESTION:
“I’m trying so hard to stay in control, but life keeps pulling me off track.
Part of me keeps thinking I should be able to hold everything without being so affected by life and what’s happening around me.
Why do I struggle so much to find balance?”
– D
What a beautiful and layered question. It goes right to the heart of a pressure so many big-vision humans carry — that quiet belief that if we were somehow “doing life right,” we’d stay calm, centred, steady… all the time.
It reminds me of a popular quote you may have heard:
“If your work costs you your peace, it’s too expensive.”
It sounds beautifully simple — but taken literally, it’s misleading. And here’s why:
Chasing “perfect balance” isn’t just unhelpful; it can be damaging. If you’re doing deep work, building something meaningful, leading humans, raising a family, creating at the edge of what’s possible — it will cost you something. Sometimes it will cost you sleep, stability, nervous-system ease, illusions of safety, or the fantasy that meaningful work always feels calm.
If you waited for perfect inner peace before doing anything hard, you’d never start a business, raise a child, release your art, or sit with someone in real pain. Some cost is simply part of being alive, ambitious, sensitive, and wired for depth. That’s reality — not failure.
But let’s not swing to the other extreme either: believing everything must cost you, that suffering is inevitable or required. So how do you recognise a meaningful cost… versus a cost that’s quietly eroding you?
For me, the line is here:
“If the chronic cost of your work is a life lived permanently dysregulated, resentful, numb, or self-abandoning — something fundamental needs to change.”
In other words, there’s a huge difference between being stretched for a season because you’re birthing something big, and living in a constant state of panic and calling it normal. So yes: big work will challenge your inner peace. No: you don’t need to be regulated 24/7. And no: chronic overwhelm is not noble or necessary.
The Myth of Perfect Balance
I’ve had clients who believed that if they could just fix everything in and around themselves, they’d finally reach a place where nothing ever knocks them off centre again. I understand that longing — I had it myself.
After burnout, I thought the path back was an idealised version of balance: a state where my nervous system was always calm, my emotions tidy, my mind steady, and life couldn’t touch me. But the more you know, the less you know. Every level of awareness reveals another layer, another edge.
Balance isn’t a destination. It’s a dynamic, a rhythm, a continual adjusting between steadiness and stretch. Sometimes you’ll be off-centre. Sometimes your system will wobble. Sometimes your emotions will spike. That isn’t failure — that’s being human.
The point isn’t to control life so these moments never happen. The point is to adapt, respond, return, recalibrate.
When I stopped chasing the fantasy of “never feeling off centre again” and started working with what my system actually needed, everything changed.
It wasn’t about perfect balance — it was about responsiveness.
Why Simple Quotes Seduce Us
Quotes like “protect your peace” feel comforting because they give us the illusion that complexity can be solved with simplicity. It’s easier to reach for something polished than to sit with the messiness of being human. It’s easier to believe there’s a clean pathway to perfect balance than to face the truth that life does not fit inside tidy boxes.
But growth isn’t linear — and balance isn’t an end destination.
It asks us to sit with discomfort rather than rush to clean it up.
It asks us to meet ourselves where we actually are, not where we wish we were.
It’s not as tidy as a perfectly packaged quote — but it’s real, and that’s far more powerful than pretending everything can be neatly controlled.
What Research Tells Us (kept simple)
Research shows that mindfulness reduces harmful rumination and increases flow, and the Job Demands–Resources model demonstrates that demands alone aren’t the issue — imbalance is. With enough inner and outer resources, big-vision humans can carry a lot. Without those resources, even small things can flatten us. It’s not about eliminating cost; it’s about having the capacity to hold it without abandoning yourself.
The Real Question
Meaningful work will wobble your inner peace, but it doesn’t have to consume it. And the goal was never perfect balance. It’s responsiveness, awareness, adaptability, discernment.
So instead of trying to create a life where nothing ever knocks you off centre, ask yourself:
Where is the cost of your work meaningful… and where has it crossed into something chronic?
Be honest with yourself. It might actually be a relief to realise that feeling off at times is part of what it means to feel in balance. Think about it: You wouldn’t recognise balance without its opposite. You need both — the steadiness and the wobble — to know where you stand.
This is where being resourced becomes essential — not just externally through support and structure, but internally through awareness, responsiveness, and the ability to feel what’s actually happening inside you.
The truth is: we don’t have a “work life”, a “home life” and a “creative life.” We have one life. That’s it. One body. One nervous system. One self moving through all of it.
When we fixate on achieving perfect balance, we miss the point. We start organising life instead of living it. We prioritise tidiness over truth. We chase harmony as a permanent state instead of letting ourselves be fully immersed, fully human, fully here.
Balance isn’t something you hold — it’s something you lean into. And when you stop fighting the ebb and flow and start engaging with your life as one whole, integrated experience, everything becomes freer, lighter, and more honest.
Love, Madelaine