One way of reducing stress involves doing acitivites in a number of different areas of our lives such as:

Contribution	Hobby	Leisure
Family	Alone Time	Personal Growth
Work	Relationship	Friends

Susan Jeffers in her book Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway suggests we can split everything we do in life into 9 areas such as those shown above. The key is remembering that we get something different from each of these areas. So work will provide us with something different to leisure and family will give us something different to time alone etc. Therefore to live a balanced and stress free life we need to spend time in all the areas not just one of them.

Imagine a life where we only have one area ie Work

Here we only have one means of meeting our needs = work. One area cannot do this – work is unlikely, for most people anyway, to provide for example health, love, spirituality or peace etc. Therefore in order to have a life that ensures all needs are being met it is important to have activities in a number of different areas. So work cannot be our whole life – in order to function, in order to get what we need to live we need to do other things. In the example above in addition to work we need to spend time in a relationship, on leisure, on a hobby, with family and friends, on personal growth, contributing and alone. It’s not just because other people want us to but in order to meet our unconscious physical, mental, emotional and spiritual needs. Otherwise unfulfilled needs will have a way of making themselves heard just as much as the partner or children who never sees us.