The myth of balance

Maybe life was never meant to be balanced. Maybe it was meant to move.

The mirage of equilibrium

For most of my life, I thought balance was the goal - that perfect midpoint between effort and ease, giving and receiving, ambition and surrender. I treated it as a mark of maturity, a sign that I’d finally learned how to live without tipping too far in any direction. I built habits, boundaries, and morning routines like scaffolding around a life that I hoped would stay upright.

But balance, as we tend to define it, is the kind of calm that requires holding your breath.
It’s the stillness that exists only if you don’t move too much, feel too much, want too much. I used to believe it was the reward for self-control, but now I think it’s just another version of perfection - serenity as performance.

Because the truth is, nothing alive stays balanced for long. The tide doesn’t. Breath doesn’t. Even the heart - that constant symbol of steadiness - is in motion every moment. To be alive is to sway.

How balance became virtue

Somewhere along the way, balance became a modern form of virtue. We started praising it like enlightenment - the sign that you had mastered yourself in a world that kept demanding more. “Work-life balance” became shorthand for doing it all without breaking. “Emotional balance” was code for composure, for keeping the edges of our grief or anger politely trimmed.

The wellness industry turned it into aspiration. There are charts, meditations, supplements, detoxes. All designed to help us maintain symmetry - as though the messy parts of living could be rearranged into something orderly, digestible, controlled.

For years, I chased it too.
I split my energy into perfect halves, organised my days into predictable rhythms, and called that steadiness peace. When I lost momentum, I called it imbalance. When my body revolted - fatigue, inflammation, flare - I treated it as deviation instead of message. I thought being “balanced” meant never having to come undone.

But maybe coming undone is what keeps us alive enough to grow.

The body’s counterargument

The body doesn’t want balance. It wants rhythm.

Every system inside us relies on movement to survive. The heart’s beat-to-beat irregularity - heart rate variability - isn’t a flaw but a sign of adaptability. A perfectly steady heart rhythm doesn’t mean you’re calm. It means you’re in distress.

Breath tells the same story. Every inhale is imbalance; every exhale restores it. The body remains stable not through stillness but through oscillation. Physiologists call this allostasis - stability through change.

Even the nervous system pulses between activation and rest, contraction and release. Safety isn’t a static state. It’s a rhythm - one that lets us move toward and away, effort and ease, doing and being.

When we demand balance, we interrupt this dance. We trade aliveness for control.

The science of sway

Decades ago, Nathaniel Kleitman discovered our ultradian rhythms - natural 90-to-120-minute cycles of focus followed by fatigue. Push through those dips and performance drops. Honour them, and energy restores. The pattern holds true at every scale - cells, organs, ecosystems, even emotional life. Everything living moves in waves.

Bruce McEwen, who coined the term allostatic load, showed how stress accumulates when we force constancy. Each demand on the body - physical, emotional, cognitive - adds to the load. Recovery isn’t about balance; it’s about movement. A body that can sway is one that can heal.

Even trauma recovery follows the same pattern. Peter Levine describes pendulation - the nervous system’s swing between tension and release, contraction and expansion. Healing happens not by staying calm but by allowing the movement between states.

The science keeps saying what the body already knows: stability isn’t a fixed state. It’s an ongoing conversation between motion and return.

Learning to move again

I’m still in the middle of that conversation. The flare has softened but not disappeared. Energy arrives in fragments, dissolves without warning. Some mornings, I wake clear and bright; by afternoon, I’m folded back into stillness, the day’s structure quietly erased.

Balance feels impossible right now, and maybe that’s not failure, but truth. My body is still recalibrating. I’m learning to follow its rhythm instead of trying to correct it.

I sleep at strange hours of the morning. I work during odd hours. I stop when I need to, even when it feels inconvenient. Some days hold clarity. Others hold nothing but rest. The rhythm is uneven but honest. It’s teaching me that the body isn’t asking for perfection - just participation.

I used to think recovery meant getting back to how things were. Now I see it as learning to move again, even inside limitation. I’m still swaying, still listening, still returning to myself one uneven day at a time.

What belonging feels like

Maybe what I was chasing through balance wasn’t peace at all, but belonging - the sense of being at home in my own rhythm.

Balance made me appear composed. Rhythm makes me feel real.
In rhythm, I don’t have to prove that I’m okay. I just have to keep moving with what is.

When I say I’m trying to find balance, what I really mean is I want to feel safe. Because safety isn’t about standing still. It’s about trusting motion - the rise and fall, the ebb and return.

The world keeps telling us to steady ourselves, but steadiness isn’t the same as strength. Strength is knowing when to sway.

So when the next wave comes - whether it’s fatigue or joy, relapse or renewal - I’ll try to meet it without bracing. I’ll let it move through me, and I’ll move with it.

Because balance may be beautiful, but rhythm is what keeps us alive.

If this met you where you are, share it with someone who might need a gentler way to see themselves today.