Creating Breathing Room in Your Life

Five critical areas to create margins and buffers in

It’s dark and quiet as I search the neighborhood.

He can’t be far.

I roll slowly down the street in my patrol car as I look for the shoplifting suspect who fled loss prevention at a store in my beat. My window down to listen for clues above the slow squishy crackle of my tires, I twist the handle of my spotlight, spraying jets of white light in the inky recesses between buildings.

Then I spot someone, walking along the portico of a row of apartments, plastic bag in hand. I can’t tell if he’s a match for the provided description at first. I undo my seatbelt and roll closer, leaning toward my windshield. I scan his clothing again, and this time I spot it.

One shoe.

That’s my guy.

Stealing a glance over his shoulder, the suspect seems to know I know. His fight or flight instinct takes over, and he abandons his loot and starts running through the apartment complex.

Gunning my engine, I gain as much ground on him as the parking lot affords me and then bail out, taking off after him in a sprint. “215, foot pursuit westbound,” I key into the radio mic on my shoulder before I get my stride. Dispatch sounds an alarm tone on air, and I hear a siren in the near distance start to wail as it heads my way.

My footfalls thunder in the portico as my combat boots pound the sidewalk. I look up and see I’m losing ground — my 200 plus pound frame carrying 30 pounds of gear is scant match for the suspect’s wiry form that’s probably a buck forty soaking wet. I turn the afterburners on.

The suspect clears the buildings and crosses a lawn, approaching a wooden fence at the property line. I feel myself despair a bit. I’m in shape, but it’s going to take some pepper to heave myself over a seven foot fence, and this guy’s built for speed — lost shoe or no.

He’s closing fast. A thought springs to my mind:

“Don’t make me tase you!”

I’m pushing all in on a bluff; my Taser is still in my patrol car, as my belt holster hasn’t come in yet. But the gambit works. The suspect slows, crouches to kneeling and puts his hands over his head. I quickly handcuff him, trying to get my breath in a dignified manner as my backup barrels into the parking lot. “215, one in custody,” I radio.

Something isn’t right, though. The exertion is over, but I can’t get my breath. I’m having trouble filling the bottom of my lungs. I fight little alarm bells of panic in the most primitive parts of my brain while I try to diagnose myself. Then I suddenly remember a story one of my squadmates told me — one of having a near panic attack after a lengthy foot pursuit, caused by…by…

…having his bulletproof vest on too tightly.

Handing the suspect off to my backup, I wheel and discreetly unbutton my uniform shirt, reaching in to find the Velcro straps of my vest. Popping them open in turn, I feel instant relief, filling my lungs with sweet night air right to the dregs. A few deep breaths and I’m ready to get back to work. I’ve got a community to serve, after all.

I button up and head back to the store for positive identification, then whisk Dr. Stickyfingers off on his all expenses paid trip to jail.

Breathing room. It’s something we don’t know we need until we don’t have it. We live in a world that’s constantly demanding we max ourselves out, keep our needles at redline. The problem here is that all it takes is one unforeseen obstacle to put us into a tailspin.

So how do you stay efficient in life without risking flameout? By creating and maintaining mindful space, buffer, breathing room in your life. And it takes mindfulness, and determination, because few around you will truly care if you’re able to breathe or not. That’s on you.

Here are five areas to mindfully maintain breathing room in. The margins you create in them will give you the buffer you need to absorb unexpected blows and stay on course and in control:

Create breathing room in your schedule. We’ve all seen them — the calendars of the overachievers. They look like Jackson Pollock paintings from a distance, strewn with different colors of ink, almost totally devoid of whitespace. What a marker of success, you think. To be so in demand, so needed in life.

Consider the implications, though. What happens when that inevitable black swan event flies into your path and smacks into your windshield? When someone in your life circles is in the hospital, your kid is sick, you get injured? A schedule drawn that tight with no slack is going to snap at its weakest point: You.

When you’re mapping out your calendar, no matter your field or level of influence, block off hours and days of flex time. Block them off for yourself, your partner, your children, your pets. Make it an authority to appeal to when someone asks for time you can’t afford to give them — there’s a big difference to someone’s ear between “I’d rather not,” and “My schedule won’t permit it.” They don’t need to know if it’s an hour you set aside to meditate or daydream, a date night with your partner, or time to play with your kids or pets. All they need to know is it’s off-limits to them.

Now, will things occasionally arise that demand your attention during those times? Of course. But that’s the whole point. Now instead of an additional stress of canceling on someone else when those things come up, you can absorb unforeseen issues into a schedule you made purposefully porous. You remain in control, and a sense of control is the cornerstone of peace.

Create breathing room in your mind. There’s a million things you need to do. Listen, I get it. I’m a stay at home dad starting a farm in Yukon Territory, where winter is hurtling toward me like an icy comet promising to devour all my firewood and freeze all my pipes. But if you go through your days simply shifting from one task to another until you go to bed mentally drained, you’ll suffer.

Your mood will suffer. Your sleep will suffer. Your creativity will suffer.

Make sure that, amidst the chaos, you create margins for your mind to expand into. Take time every day, even if it’s five minutes, to set aside the agendas and meetings, the lists and ledgers, and set your mind to idle. How that looks for you will depend on your personality, interests and temperament. It might be some flavor of meditation or yoga. It might be some form of contemplative prayer. It might be free association daydreaming.

Whatever form it takes, create the time to do it. Trust me, nobody is going to give that time to you. Lots of my best ideas have flowed out of my idle brain as I stared at river currents and the sparkle of leaves in a forest, and markedly fewer from staring at a computer screen or paper-strewn desk. Your brain isn’t a squishy machine — it’s an organic, living thing that needs to breathe and stretch and run free sometimes. Let it.

Create breathing room in your wallet. Most of us have probably heard the rather problematic $400 emergency statistic by now. Regardless of the finer points of that polling, though, the principle stands: Having liquid financial buffer at the ready is a corollary of lower stress levels. It’s important to have financial margin in your finances to absorb the unexpected blows life tends to offer.

The path to this is — surprise! — mindfulness. Be intentional in how you spend your money:

1. Find an online tool to track your finances, and actually make the time to analyze what it finds. If you’re archiving those emails unread, all you’re doing is giving the company in question free marketing data.
2. Don’t roll credit balances over — interest is literally a tax you pay for not having money. Either hustle extra cash, cut expenses or both until you can zero your account every month.
3. Don’t let others dictate how you spend your money. When a credit card company gives you a credit limit, that isn’t a goal. It’s a limit. When a mortgage company gives you a lending limit, that isn’t your price range. It’s a limit. And those limits aren’t there as a courtesy to you. Lenders want you to max your spending out exactly to the point where they worry you won’t be able to eventually pay up — whether you suffer in the process is irrelevant to them.

Create breathing room in your spaces. There’s something to be said for the peace of mind that comes from literally getting your house in order. As much as you like to tell yourself that your personality just thrives in chaos, white noise in the spaces in which you work tires your brain.

Consider taking an hour, an afternoon, a day and resetting your spaces:

1. Clean out your night stand.
2. Organize your bathroom storage.
3. Clean out and rearrange your pantry and fridge.
4. Clear your desk of anything you won’t need imminently.
5. Clean out your car (and maybe give it a wash and vacuum, c’mon, you’re an adult now).
6. Dump your wallet or purse and get rid of the irrelevant business cards, the nail polish that’s turned to cement, the lint crusted quarter roll of breath mints, and the coupon that expired two years ago for the place that closed last year.

Do any or all of that and tell me you don’t feel a little more in control of things — that there’s one less thing for your mind to process. Besides that benefit, the time you’ll save not hunting for stuff you need will probably more than make up for the time you spent cleaning a couple of minutes at a time.

Create breathing room in your relationships. You can’t give something you don’t have, so if you want to give your best to someone you’re in a relationship with — and not just romantic ones — ensure you’re taking care of yourself. First and foremost in striving toward this goal is communication. Nobody else sees the world just the way you do, and making someone else understand what your eyes see takes communication.

You might think your needs in a relationship to be so obvious as to be self-evident, but think about it this way: If your unspoken needs are going unmet in a relationship, either the other person is completely callous and uncaring, or your needs aren’t as obvious as you think.

If you need, want, lust after something in your relationships, say so. The other person will either accommodate or show themselves disinterested, and both outcomes are instructive.

Consider:

1. Have you thought about pressure valve protocols in your relationship with your business partner — a means by which one or both of you can recognize that further conversation won’t be helpful in the moment and then safely create space?
2. Are you comfortable enough with your romantic partner that either of you can disengage to be alone and recharge for an hour, an evening, and not be judged or face repercussions for it?
3. Have you established boundaries with your kids in terms of their ability to encroach on particular timeframes or spaces within your home? Given they’re of an appropriate age, are you able (and willing) to create a sanctuary space and/or time you, your partner or both can retreat to and call your own?
4. Do you need to reframe the expectations your boss or clients have of your time, and your willingness to conduct business off-hours?

There’s an analogous question for every relationship in your life. Everybody needs and is entitled to their bubble, whether it’s physical or virtual. Its size will vary between people and between relationships — it might be a micron with some people, and the diameter of Earth with others. Whatever it is, identify it and do the work to maintain it.

Think of your life as an orchard.

There are people who carry an ax and want to take more than they’re entitled to, to profit at your expense; keep them at bay.

There are others who bring baskets and merely want to enjoy an abundance which you can replenish; draw them near.

Maybe you’re a little winded of late. You can’t quite relax, can’t quite get to a point where you feel replenished.

Start diagnosing yourself.

It might be something is squeezing you to the point you can’t catch your breath. Start undoing what needs undone, find the straps that need loosened, and when you find the oxygen you need, draw it deep and then get back to work.

You’ve got a community to serve, after all.