How To Build Margin Into Your Life To Free Yourself From Overwhelm, With My Husband Chris Blue

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In today’s episode we have my husband, Chris Blue, back on the show, and we’re talking all about a topic that is so important when it comes to improving the overall quality of our lives and freeing ourselves from overwhelm, and that is margin.

Margin is the white space or the buffer that we need to build into our lives, to allow us more ease and to safeguard a little bit of our space and energy to be creative, dream bigger, and enjoy all that life has to offer.

In this episode, we’re talking about why it is so important to build margin into our lives, our lived experience of when we have and haven’t had margin, we’ll be sharing our advice on how we create this margin and we’ll be sharing questions you can ask yourself to help declutter your life and mind.

So if you’re currently feeling overwhelmed or overloaded right now, don’t miss this episode.

In this episode, we discuss:

The definition of margin according to Dr. Richard Swenson as being “the gap between our load and our limit. It’s the difference between rest and exhaustion. The space between breathing freely and suffocating.”
Just as in Parkinson’s Law, which says our work will expand to fill the time allocated for it, this is true across all facets of life. This is why it is so important to be intentional about creating margin in our lives because it’s natural for us to fill up whatever capacity we have, and lose the all-so-important space that allows for freedom, creativity and the unexpected.
The process of creating margin is ever-evolving because yesterday’s margin won’t fit the same as today. As our life and goals evolve and change, we need to continually revisit the topic of margin and preserve some white space.
Just like the margin that’s left on a page, it’s vital to create and safeguard this blank space because we know there will be a need for it in the future. Things will arise in our lives, whether we like it or not, and so by creating and preserving margin, we can tackle these things while still being able to breathe.
Creating margin isn’t just important when it comes to time and your schedule – it’s important to create margin in your energy, your thoughts, your finances, etc too
The side effects of not having margins in our life include reduced empathy and imagination, underdeveloped critical thinking and a lack of creativity
The importance of slowing down and resting; in our hustle culture, we are so driven by productivity and results that it can sometimes feel uncomfortable to slow down and recharge, but it is necessary to be able to function fully and enjoy life to its potential.
Questions you can ask yourself to declutter your life and create margin:- Firstly, ask yourself the question, what really matters? And secondly, will this really make me happier? This applies to our thoughts and emotions, as well as physical belongings! Is this emotion making me happier? Is it helping me or hindering my day-to-day?