When I hear the word balance, I picture a tightrope walker. They’re completely focused, every muscle is tense, their eyes fixed on a single point. One wrong move, and they fall. But surely emotional balance doesn’t look like that?
When you mention a tightrope walker, I’m reminded of the time I was recovering from a broken leg and going to physical therapy. Once my cast came off and I no longer needed crutches, my physical therapist explained that maintaining balance requires the body to be both tense and relaxed at the same time. Every step works because one side of the body engages while the other remains loose. If my entire body tenses up, I can’t move forward. That experience taught me that balance isn’t about rigidity, it’s about knowing how to alternate between tension and relaxation.

How does that lesson translate into our emotions?
It’s about creating equilibrium regarding what our lives contain more of at any given time. In my case, every day and every week is different and brings different kinds of pressure. That means I have to remember to intentionally add things that help me relax and restore balance. That’s my responsibility. In fact, it’s everyone’s responsibility. When I’m hungry, I need to eat. Once I’m full, I should stop eating. When I’m well rested, I should be active. When I’m exhausted, I should allow myself to stop. Most of us have a much harder time with rest, relaxation, and unwinding than with stress – stress tends to find us on its own. Just turn on the news. The real challenge is making room for the opposite. Especially since many of us believe that rest and relaxation are viewed negatively by society. We even have a paradoxical admiration for those deprived of rest.

It’s that belief that resting isn’t okay. If I’m lying on the couch and someone walks into the room, I immediately get up.
I remember that from my own home growing up, and over the years I’ve heard countless people tell similar stories. The underlying message is always the same: if you’re lying down, it means you have nothing to do, so someone will find something for you to do. Lying down, sitting quietly, or simply being bored are activities we tend to avoid. Yet they could be exactly what balances out the tension that everyday life gives us.

Let’s explain a few basic terms. What do we mean by balance, equilibrium, and mindfulness?
Let’s start with mindfulness. The closest Polish equivalent of  the term is uważność, or mindful awareness. It’s one of the tools we can use to cultivate balance. As for balance and equilibrium, I think it’s fair to treat them as near synonyms, although equilibrium suggests a perfectly equal state, whereas balance is more about integrating two opposing conditions – tension and relaxation.

So equilibrium is theoretically even harder to achieve.
If it’s possible at all. People often ask me about work-life balance – the idea of achieving a perfect balance between work and personal life. I wish it were something we could simply attain once and for all. But I think it’s actually a continuous process of searching, finding, losing, and searching again.

There are times when work simply demands more of our time. The important thing is giving ourselves permission to rest afterward. The question is: are we actually capable of doing that.
You’ve captured exactly what I was trying to explain earlier. Let me use my own life as an example. In the Gallup Strengths assessment, my second strongest talent is Achiever – the part of me that loves being productive, completing tasks, and accomplishing goals. I like that part of myself. It has helped me get to where I wanted to be. The downside, however, is that it’s very easy to lose perspective and start believing that slowing down or finding balance has no value – that I only matter when I’m doing something. Whenever that happens, I think back to a relationship I had years ago with a professional soccer player. He once told me that the more professional you become in sport and the more seriously you take it, the more seriously you have to take everything that happens between training sessions: recovery, nutrition, and sleep. I don’t know Robert Lewandowski, Iga Świątek, or Marcin Gortat personally, but I imagine that athletes competing at their level don’t succeed because they train twenty hours a day. They succeed because they know how to push themselves during training – and then allow their bodies to recover so they can perform again.

It’s difficult because, besides work, there’s everything that needs to be done at home. I see a messy room and start cleaning. The kids come in and need help. There’s always something waiting to be done.
The difficulty comes from the idea that we should be able to do it all. We’ve convinced ourselves that if the house isn’t clean, we’ve somehow failed. One of the most important skills in finding balance is learning to let go or deciding what matters most in this particular moment. Because maybe a messy house isn’t the end of the world. Maybe I can lie on the couch, look at the mess, and think, “Today I’m Robert Lewandowski recovering for my next game”.

Can we actually learn to do that?
Absolutely. In fact, we have to. The first step is examining our beliefs about rest and sleep. Maybe you grew up in a household where, if someone saw you lying on the couch, they immediately found a chore for you to do. So now, at forty, whenever you hear someone walking into the living room while you’re relaxing, you instinctively jump up even though there’s no rational reason for doing so. It has become an automatic response, something that happens almost outside your awareness.

What should we do in that moment?
First, notice the pattern. Second, recognize that it’s an old habit. And third, experiment. What happens if I don’t get up? Dare to find out. And if someone comments, “Oh, I see you’re lying on the couch”, simply reply, “Yes. I’m tired, and I need to rest”.

Rest is one tool for maintaining balance. What else do we need?
Emotional awareness. Emotions are energy. In different situations, especially stressful ones, that energy rises. The real skill is first becoming aware of what we’re actually feeling. If I’m working intensely on a project and I’m anxious, that’s perfectly natural. If things aren’t going the way I hoped, I may feel tension, sadness, or frustration. There’s nothing wrong with that. The question is what I do with them, let’s say after operating in high gear for a month. Will I then create space for myself to experience the opposite – to feel calm, relaxed, at peace, and able to unwind? That’s one of the purposes of mindfulness. Relationships matter as well. They can act as emotional buffers. The challenge is finding people who help restore our emotional balance. Sometimes I need someone who will pull me out of apathy or melancholy and encourage me to take action. Other times, I need someone who helps me release the tension I’ve built up.

Relationships are important, but we all know people who seem to lose their balance very easily. Why do some people remain calm while others can be thrown off balance in a matter of seconds?
Imagine that each of us is like a DJ mixing console covered with buttons. Throughout our lives, we encounter people who know how to switch some of those buttons off, or, on the contrary, push several of them at once. Those buttons were installed a long time ago. We can replace them, but we all enter adulthood with different tendencies. For example, loud, extrovert people may irritate us for some reason. But perhaps they do because, as children, we were constantly told to be quiet – “Children should be seen and not heard”. Deep down, we may actually wish we could speak freely and confidently ourselves, but we don’t believe we’re allowed to. So we become angry at the person who can. Not because of what they’re doing, but because we still believe we can’t do it ourselves. Just as with emotions, it’s important to notice these patterns. Which people irritate us? What situations trigger us? What sparks our anger? Because beneath frustration and irritation, there’s often something we long for ourselves.

So our reactions aren’t really about the other person – they’re about us.
And although that’s difficult to accept, it’s actually good news. It’s much easier to judge someone else or blame them than to look inward. But once we understand what’s happening inside us, we finally have an opportunity to work on ourselves and to change those old patterns.

Do all emotions need to be balanced? Or should we allow ourselves to fully experience both suffering and overwhelming joy?
The only thing we truly have to do when it comes to emotions is experience them from beginning to end. Because emotions are like ocean waves. Something triggers them – that’s the starting point. Then they gather strength, reaching a peak where they deliver the message they were designed to convey. Their purpose is to tell us what’s happening inside us. Our job is to read that message. Eventually, the emotion subsides and fades away.

So every emotion matters.
Yes, absolutely. We’re usually happy to experience joy and happiness from beginning to end. But emotions like fear and anger are often suppressed because society considers them less acceptable. Women, for example, are often taught that they shouldn’t express anger, while men are taught that they shouldn’t show fear. But an emotion is like a messenger carrying an important piece of information. It has to deliver that message. If we suppress it, it will return with even greater intensity. If we don’t want our emotions to accumulate or remain trapped inside us, we need to learn how to experience them fully. Every emotion – pleasant or unpleasant (I intentionally avoid calling them positive or negative) – arrives with some information. Our task is to read it. Anger, for example, is often understood as a signal that our boundaries have been crossed or that we ourselves have crossed them.

What does that mean?
If I find myself becoming irritated with myself, incoming emails, phone calls, another meeting, it usually means I’m angry because, while planning my work and filling up my calendar, I exceeded my own limits. Or someone else overloaded me with responsibilities. Anger is there to help me recognize that and try to change it. What often makes this difficult and what can undermine our sense of balance is having to disappoint other people.

Especially if we’ve always been available for everyone.
We function within systems – our families, communities, schools, and workplaces – that have their own established balance, and changing just one element can disrupt that balance. So if I’ve spent years staying late at the company Christmas party, but then one year decide to leave earlier, I’ll probably have to tolerate the disappointment of everyone who expected me to stay. Otherwise, I’ll end up right back where I started.

Are there areas of life where balance is the key to success?
Health. For a while, I can fool myself into believing I don’t need much sleep or that I can live in a constant state of tension. Our bodies are genetically equipped to buffer stress. But somewhere around our fortieth birthday, the body starts telling us that it can’t spend the next forty years living that way. This isn’t about a midlife crisis. It’s more of a wake-up call. If we fail to take care of our bodies and our health – through nutrition, movement, exercise, and mindfulness – they will eventually stop functioning properly. And without our health, everything else becomes far more difficult. Fortunately, we live in a time when taking care of yourself has become trendy.

What warning signs from the body should we never ignore?
The body speaks many different languages. Sometimes it’s insomnia. Sometimes chronic migraines. Sometimes burnout – a state in which you’ve simply run out of internal resources. There’s no hidden reserve left to draw from, no extra pantry stocked with energy. Nothing you do feels meaningful anymore, regardless of the work you’re doing. I experienced this myself two years ago. My professional life was expanding at an almost exponential pace. In a single year, I launched a digital platform for psychological development, published a book, conducted training sessions, and spoke at conferences. The energy I was expending was enormous, yet I kept forgetting to replenish it. One of the defining features of burnout is the feeling that nothing you do has any purpose. I’m a psychologist, so my work is meaningful by definition. Yet at that time I felt something entirely different and it was simply the result of exhaustion that I had ignored for far too long. Other signals the body may send include stomach ulcers and chronic infections.

What should concern us before we reach the point of ulcers or burnout?
This is where mathematics – more specifically, statistics – comes in handy. To understand the scale of the problem, ask yourself questions like: “How many nights a month do I sleep poorly?”. Or: “Do I always sleep badly on Sunday nights because I know I have to go to work on Monday morning?”. Or perhaps you notice that every time you go on vacation, you get sick. That’s often a sign that your body has been holding itself together during work, only allowing itself to fall apart once it knows it’s finally safe to rest. That’s one important area to pay attention to. The other is relationships. Can I maintain meaningful relationships? Or have I become so busy that I no longer have time for them? Research consistently shows that one of the strongest predictors of a good life is our ability to build and maintain close relationships.

Can another warning sign be when the person I love, the person I choose to be with, starts irritating me?
Yes. When we’re living with chronic stress, insomnia, or burnout, our threshold for irritation drops dramatically. And because the person we live with is simply around us the most, they naturally become the one who seems to irritate us most often. Work becomes more irritating, too. An email that wouldn’t have bothered me at all three years ago suddenly makes me think, “Seriously? What now?”. Awareness helps us notice these changes. It’s worth asking ourselves how quickly the same trigger – a child, a partner, work – now causes a frustrated reaction compared with before.

Are there people who actually function better with either
an excess or a lack of stimulation?
Some people need a certain level of pressure to enjoy life. They thrive on tension – it’s the deadline that finally motivates them to act. Others, however, are paralyzed by anxiety or a sense of urgency. They know they come up with their best ideas when they give themselves more time, or when they wake up at six in the morning just to enjoy an hour of quiet before the day begins. There’s nothing wrong with either approach. What matters is understanding how you function and organizing your life in a way that allows you to experience balance as often as possible.

What tools can we use so that difficult situations or crises don’t completely throw us off balance – so that we wobble instead of falling?
Tools and techniques are like pieces of cutlery. You choose them depending on the meal. In the same way, different situations call for different strategies. Sometimes it’s crying, which allows built-up tension to find release. Sometimes it’s screaming. A scream is energy generated deep inside us, and expressing it outward can be incredibly relieving. I often grab a towel, press it over my mouth so I won’t alarm the neighbors, and simply scream into it. It may be exercise. It may be a conversation. We may choose therapy, mentoring, or coaching, or practice mindfulness. For many of us, spirituality or religious life also plays an important role. Yoga is a practice that integrates both the physical and the spiritual, making it another valuable way to restore equilibrium.

Let’s talk a little more about mindfulness.
The word mindfulness is rooted in the idea of paying attention – of giving something your attention, making it the focus of your awareness. Our task is to be attentive as often as possible: to notice what is happening within us and why, and then respond accordingly. I often ask the people I work with to try what may be the simplest exercise in the world. I suggest they set four alarms on their phones at random times, for example, 7:30 a.m., 12:48 p.m., 3:13 p.m., and 7:17 p.m.
Whenever an alarm goes off, they are to ask themselves two questions: “What am I feeling?” and “What do I need because of that?”. In this way, we can develop the habit of staying in conscious contact with ourselves.

Balance often sounds like calmness, predictability, and stability. But doesn’t personal growth begin when we leave our comfort zone? In your book, you quote psychiatrist Kazimierz Dąbrowski, who argued that growth requires the disintegration of the personality – or at least part of it – and that development sometimes demands a temporary loss of balance.
That’s both good news and bad news. The good news is that if you know this, it won’t catch you by surprise. The bad news is that the process is usually uncomfortable. Nature works the same way. If you want a seed to grow, you have to bury it deep in the soil. Down there, it’s dark, damp, and dirty. Yet that’s exactly where it begins to sprout. For adults, it ultimately comes down to choice. Will I stay in a relationship that no longer serves me? If I know that coming home every evening fills me with tension, will I do something about it? Growth requires letting go of what is familiar in order to move toward something new – something uncertain and unknown. Professor Kazimierz Dąbrowski called this positive disintegration. Sometimes we have to fall apart – like LEGO bricks – before we can rebuild ourselves into something stronger.

We often try to avoid that discomfort.
And that’s completely human. If I had a piece of celery and a cookie in front of me, my insides would be shouting, “The cookie! The cookie!”. But my rational mind would remind me that while the cookie is tempting, the celery will ultimately do my body far more good.

How does Joanna Chmura restore her own sense of balance?
Lately, I’ve become a huge fan of sleep. [laughs] For years I believed sleep was unnecessary – a waste of time. Then I discovered just how much happens while we sleep and how profoundly restorative it is, both emotionally and physically. At this point, getting an extra hour of sleep does far more for me than waking up at five in the morning and going to the gym. Another realization has been that, instead of yet another cardio workout, I can choose to go for a walk. I have a wonderful professional life that I truly love, but there’s a lot going on in it – conferences, workshops, speaking engagements, interviews. It’s an enormous amount of energy that I give, receive, and manage, so if I want to stay balanced, I need to restore that balance. That’s why, especially during periods of overload, going to the gym may not be the best solution. A walk or a gentle yin yoga session can be a better choice, as they help reset our inner system. The Dr Irena Eris Hotel in Wzgórza Dylewskie is a perfect place for that kind of recovery. Being able to allow yourself this kind of relaxation – to enjoy a massage or a spa treatment, eat delicious meals you didn’t have to prepare yourself, and spend time in such beautiful surroundings – is an important part of restoring balance. This morning I woke up and realized how long it had been since I’d heard birds singing. I opened the window and felt the cool, fresh air – something that’s hard to find in the middle of a city. While we were preparing for this interview, I could hear frogs croaking outside. Their voices brought me such unexpected joy. The sound was surprising, yet strangely familiar. Here, I found the very sounds I usually have to play on my phone to experience them.

Joanna Chmura
A psychologist, trainer, and motivational speaker. For years, she has supported both individual clients and organizations in building courage, authenticity, and inner leadership. She is the founder of the personal development platform onmyway.pl and the bestselling author of “To nawet lepiej. Jak obracać trudności w szanse”. She also hosts the “Story to Tell” podcast on YouTube and Spotify. She is a certified facilitator of Dare to Lead™, Daring Greatly™, and Rising Strong™, methodologies developed by Dr. Brené Brown at the University of Houston. Her articles and interviews have appeared in publications including Vogue, Forbes, Newsweek, and Harvard Business Review.