How Can We Find More Balance and Set Better Boundaries?

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Find more balance and set Better boundaries? This is JJ Virgin, four time New York Times bestselling author, celebrity nutrition expert, and Fitness hall of Famer. I've been on a lifelong quest for answers to the toughest health questions, and now I'm sharing what I found with you. Welcome to Ask the Health Expert.

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On Instagram asks, how can we find more balance and set better boundaries? Balance is more and more elusive for me, especially with working from home. Hey, it's JJ and I've got New York Times best selling author of the Urban Monk and the Art of stopping time, Dr. Pedram Shojai with me to answer this question. He's a qigong master and Taoist abbot with a practical approach to modern living, using Eastern thinking and practices to help overcome the westernized challenges of everyday life. And in his spare time, that is when he's not skiing the Black Diamonds of Deer Valley, he he's producing compelling docu series including Interconnected Origins and Exhausted. He'll be right back to answer this question. Stay with us.

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This whole coronavirus thing has created a lot of opportunities for us to grow. Yeah, it sucks. There's a lot of things that are terrible. There's a lot of human suffering. People are dying. The flip side of that is we are now burning less petroleum getting to these places called offices. We're getting an opportunity to hang out with our families a bit more. Our dogs get to see us. We don't have to go to the dry cleaners. There's a lot of things that are changing with this. And for a lot of people, it's crunchy, right? If I don't lock my office door, my kids come in here. We're homeschooled. So there are a lot of areas where the work life balance gets challenged. And so boundaries are an important thing. And they're more important than ever right now, obviously. So we have to establish them better. For me, it's all about morning routines. I get up in the morning before anyone wakes up, do my qigong and my meditation. I do the things that Pedram needs, the things that I need to feel whole. And then I'm the guy that's down there making breakfast. I feed the dogs, I feed the goldfish. I put on a pot of coffee. My wife, she's with the kids all day. Let me be family guy for a minute. And so I run down there, I make their breakfast, I sit down with them, we have a morning. Everyone spends a lot of quality time around the table together before 8 o' clock comes around and schooling starts and the day starts to spin. At that point, I go walk the dogs, spend a minute with them while the kids kind of get into their classroom thing. And then I come back, lock my office door and say, I'll see you guys at 11. What's 11? We call it PE. My wife and I exercise downstairs. The kids get to go play in the woods or exercise with us. But you start to set the frame for things that you're doing throughout the day. 3 o' clock I take a break from work. We go walk the dogs for half an hour, they come back, they do their thing, I lock my office door, I go back and my job is to be done, done, done by 5:30. And so, you know, I've taken a few breaks during the day. I've spent a little bit of time with managing, being a dad and being a householder and also working from home. But then when I'm done, I'm done because they deserve my undivided attention. And when my door's locked, it means leave me alone because work deserves my undivided attention. Divided attention, doesn't it? So boundaries, boundaries, boundaries. You need to get better at boundaries. There's boundaries around time, there's boundaries around energy, there's boundaries with words. The word no is a very important word for boundaries, and that's something we go over in the book a lot. But it's something that needs to be added to your repertoire. It needs to be a skill set that you own.

This is JJ with Ask the Health Expert.

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