Shifting Your Attention and Over-Compensation

When a specific area of your left gets out of control, you may over compensate in a more manageable life area. For example, you may be behind in the your work or school life, and instead of dealing with those looming issues and tasks associated with them, you’ll spend your time cleaning a out an old closet or your the trunk of your car. Once you finish cleaning that closet or trunk, if you ever really finish, you get a temporary sense of accomplishment and satisfaction. You may truly believe that you’re much better off not that you’ve accomplished the task, and you may very well be. The problem is that you’re still most likely feeling the stresses of work or school.

Certain life categories such as physical fitness, mental welling being, and self-education commonly take a back seat to more pressing and less important life categories. You can get so caught up and consumed in life that those significant life areas tend to fall by the waist side. Your level of physical fitness can take a nose dive, your stress level can go through the roof, and your marriage or relationship with friends and family may suffer. The worst part is that by time you realize that this has happened, it’s too late. You’ve been so busy worry about other areas of your life that never take a good look at the others.

Spinning the Plates of our Lives

Life comes at you fast, and it has a way of pulling you in a thousand different directions. Many people feel like an octopus trying to do everything all at once. There are many different areas in our life. These life categories include, but are not limited to, areas such as personal finances, work, school, our marriage/ relationship, personal organization, family life, and so on. It is difficult to find a balance among these areas. It is even harder, if not seemingly impossible, to have all these categories of your life in check at the same time. For example, at a given moment your personal finances may be in order, but your personal organization and physical fitness will be completely out of whack. When this happens, we re-center our attention around organizational type tasks, and as a consequence the control of our finances may begin to slip.

Often we don’t even come close to getting any of these areas in check. We may complete an organizational based task, but we are not even close to being organized. We spend most of our time an energy shifting our attention back and forth between tasks and putting out fires. You’re life begins to resemble the plate-spinning circus performer. He spins the first plate to provide himself just enough time to go spin the second plate and get back to the first plate before it stops spinning. This becomes a vicious cycle, especially when you start adding more plates. This leaves you feeling frustrated and it can make you think you’ll never be on top of things.