Imagine for a moment that you're sitting in the office and it's a busy week at work. There's an important presentation that you have to deliver, some budget deadlines you need to make, a marketing campaign that you need to spearhead, and loads of small tasks and events that have filled up your calendar. How do you make sure that you get all this done? Well, if you're like most people, you put your head down and you get to work. You ditch your workouts, you eat less meals with your family, and you stop calling your friends back. As things get busier, it's likely that you'll continue to give up the things in your life that might actually be pretty nourishing to you, but feel optional, so that you can focus on what seems most urgent in any given moment. While this may allow us to check off all the items on our to-do list, it's a lousy way to go through life. Contrary to popular belief, workaholism is not a virtue. Overwork and the accompanying stress and exhaustion makes us less productive, more disorganized and leaves us feeling emotionally depleted. It can also lead to all sorts of health problems, from anxiety and depression, to insomnia and heart disease. Too often, we wait until sickness arises or fatigue brings us to our knees to address this issue. We're so afraid to take our foot off the gas that we're willing to risk losing our connection to ourselves, our health, and to our most precious relationships. Now, we're not entirely at fault for this. If you live in a Western culture, it's likely that you've been told that practicing self-care is a privilege, selfish, shameful, indulgent, even lazy. We've been convinced that we have to keep pushing until we're utterly exhausted and that we should keep moving through life at a breakneck pace or else we'll fall behind and never achieve our dreams. But this mode of constant doing isn't sustainable, and it's not healthy, and it's not our only option for a productive and meaningful life. In this module, we'll be focused on finding a healthy balance between the things in our life that nourish us and that we need, and the mountain of tasks that deplete us so that you can avoid running on empty. You'll spend some time identifying the activities and people that fill you up and restore your soul, and we'll talk about how to prioritize those aspects of your life without sacrificing your competence as a worker, or parent, partner, or a friend. We'll also talk about how the mind actually works when it comes to forming and maintaining habits and how mindfulness can help us hack into the brain's natural reward system to create positive and lasting behavior change. We'll finish off the module focusing on how compassion, not criticism, creates the conditions that support goal achievement, health, and happiness. The content in this module is some of my favorite to teach and is really a culmination of the work you've done so far in the course. I hope you get great things from it.