Beyond Balance: Why You Need Occupational Harmony for 2026
- Rebecca Mattie
- Dec 8, 2025
- 3 min read
(A Special Year-End Reflection for Parents, Caregivers, and Providers)
As we wrap up 2025, the pressure to find "balance," that elusive, equal split of time and energy, is everywhere. But what if the goal we're chasing is flawed? As an occupational therapist, I’ve found a much more forgiving and sustainable framework, one that allows us to thrive across our many roles: Occupational Harmony.
Let’s put the concept of "balance" back on the shelf, and embrace the rhythm of harmony for the year ahead.
What is Occupational Harmony?
As OTs, we know "occupation" is not just your job. It’s everything that occupies your time, all the activities, roles, and tasks that are important to you. This includes being a parent, a therapist, a spouse, a sibling, and simply a person needing rest.
Occupational Harmony is the concept that these roles and activities don't have to be equal; they just have to support one another.
Think of a symphony: not every instrument plays at the same volume at the same time. Sometimes the strings (the role of parent) need to be loud and center stage. Other times, the percussion (the role of provider/therapist) demands attention. Harmony acknowledges that your needs and focus will shift with the seasons of life. You give yourself permission to focus on one area while maintaining an adaptive, background rhythm in the others.
The Essential First Step: An Occupational Audit
You cannot build harmony until you know where the dissonance lies. The first step is an Occupational Audit, a simple time or activity audit to honestly assess where your energy is truly going.
Write down where you spend your time and energy today.
Write down where you want to be spending your time and energy.
The gap between these two is where your stress lives. To bridge it, you must first know yourself. I encourage you to look at self-knowledge tools, whether it's personal self-reflection, your zodiac profile, a Working Genius profile, or even Human Design, to identify what is naturally draining your energy versus what genuinely lights you up.
For providers, this is particularly critical. If your profile demands intentional rest (as mine does), pushing through out of guilt will only compromise your clinical presence. For parents, understanding that your introverted child needs decompression time means you likely need it too.
The Practitioner's and Parent's Paradox
We all know the phrase: “You can’t pour from an empty cup.” We teach it, we preach it, but we often fail to live it. This failure often stems from the "All or Nothing" trap.
As providers, we feel a specific kind of guilt: We are the experts! We know all the good practices: meditate, journal, exercise, eat perfectly. We create a long, long mental list. Trying to accomplish that entire list every day is not sustainable; it’s just another source of stress. It moves us away from clinical grounding and toward overwhelm.
As parents, we see self-care as a luxury we’ll get to after the kids are taken care of, creating a cycle of depletion.
Harmony means accepting that you don't have to "master" all wellness habits at once. It means releasing the pressure to be the "best" at self-care so you can simply be consistent.
Making Micro-Shifts
If you’re drowning in your long list of "shoulds," it’s time to embrace the snowball effect, a concept well-articulated in James Clear’s Atomic Habits. Small, incremental changes make huge shifts over time.
Instead of aiming for an hour-long yoga session, try this:
The Old Way (All or Nothing) | The Harmony Way (Micro-Habit) |
“I must meditate for 20 minutes every morning.” | Start with 5 minutes of mindful breathing while sitting in the school pick-up line. |
“I need to journal for 30 minutes to process my week.” | Start with 3 minutes of journaling in your car before you clock in, integrating thoughts from the day before you start seeing clients. |
When that micro-habit becomes a regular, guilt-free practice, it starts to snowball. That five minutes of breathing will feel great, and you’ll organically want to add a minute of gratitude journaling the next day. This is how you integrate what you need into the flow of your existing roles.
Your harmony is not defined by how many things you do; it’s defined by how regulated you feel while doing them.
Closing Reflection for 2026
Take a moment today to look at your roles and occupations. Stop trying to find balance and start looking for harmony. What is the one small action you can take to make your own "music" feel more supported, more whole, and more you?
Thank you so much for being part of this community. Here’s to a harmonious 2026.
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