What Self-Care Really Means…
Self-care is selfish!
What do you need self-care for?!
I’m too busy for self-care…
I don’t need self-care – I’ve got to put my family’s needs first.
Sound familiar?
Whether it’s the voice inside your own head or one of someone in your life, these phrases can leave a lasting impression on how we prioritize taking care of ourselves. And how we prioritize ourselves has a ripple effect in our lives. Our self-care affects our relationships, our mental and physical health, and ultimately our experience of life itself.
My mission?
To help you realize self-care is essential for our lives here on earth, and that you can and deserve to have an authentic self-care routine without the guilt. Through this post, I want to help you establish a relationship with your basic and essential self-care needs and create an action plan to tend to those needs daily. And once we regularly tend to those self-care essentials, we can then dive deeper into our process of self-study and evolution.
In this post I’ll share:
What What Self-Care Is And Is Not
How self-care can support your well-being and benefit you
Why Self-Care is not Selfish
Essential Self-Care Checklist
Let’s dive in…
What Self-Care Is And Is Not:
So many people have the wrong idea about what self care really is, it’s no wonder more people don’t make it a priority to practice it. And confession time – I used to be one of those people too! When I thought self-care was just bubble baths, brunch, painted nails, and trips to the salon, I didn’t think I had the time or money for it. That’s not to say there is something wrong with those things, or that they can’t do something for the way you feel about yourself, but the reality is they can only do so much for us in terms of how we feel about and evolve ourselves on the inside.
It’s not our fault we have the wrong idea about what self-care is. We have the wrong idea about so many things in life because of the systems in which we live. Capitalism will always be in favor of being the solution to any and all of our perceived and real wants and needs. But seeking self-care from external sources keeps us reliant on the system and, more importantly, we don’t get the chance to tap into our inner resources to provide for ourselves – and that is the most essential magic of self-care!
So what is self-care?
Self-care is an affirming practice. Self-care is our right to be. Self-care is recognizing that we cannot serve from a place of depletion or lack, and is the necessary steps we take to ensure our baseline is not depleted. Self-care establishes our worthiness within ourselves and in the outside world, and it helps us embody the fact that we are a necessary and irreplaceable aspect of life on earth. Self-care is community care.
How Self-Care Can Support Your Well-Being and Benefit You:
When we seek to care for ourselves from our own resource, we are doing so much for ourselves. First, we are communicating with our innermost self – we’re saying, ‘I am listening to my body, heart, and mind and the needs of my person. And not only am I listening, but I am provided space and time to tend to those needs.’ And that is huge!
Our bodies want to be heard and are constantly communicating with us in many ways, like hunger, pain, pleasure, and sometimes messages just drop into our head out of seemingly nowhere. While it’s true we can only exist because of the presence of the other, it’s only we who can hear and authentically answer that call of our deepest and most urgent needs.
By practicing self-care we are also communicating to our body, heart, and mind that we are worthy of such care. I don’t know about you, but for much of my adult life I lacked that feeling of inherent worthiness. I put others' needs before mine, every time. My self-care practice was outside of myself and was for all the wrong reasons. It was motivated by ego and mostly had to do with presenting myself in a certain way so that I would be perceived by others as worthy. And by neglecting my needs, I was subconsciously reinforcing the programming that others were more worthy than I was of care and attention. The longer we stay in this mindset, the harder it gets to change the way we see ourselves.
Choosing to fill our own cup up also signals to our body, heart, and mind that it’s ok to rest! So many of us are programmed to think we have to ‘be productive’ all the time and that our worth is based on our productivity and achievement. But what is productivity anyway? Who created the standard, how is it measured, and what does it even mean?
No matter how you measure your own productivity and success, resting is productivity. By resting we are renewing ourselves so that we can create our output in the first place. When we’re not rested and renewed it can make it difficult to focus and we end up spinning our wheels more and are less effective at actually getting the things done.
Self-Care is not Selfish. Getting Self-Care without the Guilt:
Let’s talk a little bit more about our programming. As a highly sensitive young person growing up in the South, the messages I got were that I should put others' needs before my own. That I should always be of service. That taking what I wanted or needed was selfish and that I was taking away from others by doing that. I was told that there are so many other people worse off in the world, so stop complaining because you really have it quite well. The idea and modeling of selfless-ness can translate pretty quickly (especially for a highly sensitive person!) into codependency in relationships– ‘I’m not good unless everyone else is good’, and ‘It’s up to me to ensure everyone else’s contentment’.
When we couple that with the American idea that achievement and productivity are measures of success, you get a recipe for burnout, overwhelm, and exhaustion. We have to be empowered to create our own definition of what a successful life for ourselves looks like, without the influence of others. How many of us do you think would choose the number of hours we work and the amount of production we produce to be our measure of success then?
Burnout, overwhelm, and exhaustion are things I’ve not only experienced in my own life, but are things I’ve also witnessed in many of the women that I’ve worked with, served, and learned from. They’ve pushed themselves to the point of burnout – and then keep going – and are *quite literally* living everyday at their breaking point. We have been programmed to serve from an empty well.
With these kinds of messages floating around, it’s no wonder that a lot of us can’t seem to do what we want and need for ourselves without experiencing some kind of guilt around it. And then when we do serve ourselves or try to rest and relax, it can feel so hard because we think we’re taking away from someone else, whether it be our children, partner, or job.
But this couldn’t be further from the truth. It’s impossible to take from others by taking care of ourselves first. By serving ourselves first, we are priming ourselves to be of our greatest and highest service in the world and to the people who depend on us. We are filling up our cup so that we can serve from the overflow.
Audre Lord Quote
The polar bear mother feeds herself before giving food to her cubs. She knows that if she starves her children will certainly not survive. But if she feeds herself first and gives to them second, everyone has a chance at life.
What Essential Self-Care Looks Like:
One thing that might block you from starting a self-care practice could be the idea that we need to jump right in with complicated, long, drawn out rituals on the regular. That idea can be overwhelming, so I always suggest starting small and growing our practice.
Here are some baseline self-care essentials from life.centering (created by nina be) that don’t take much extra time and are SO often overlooked as forms of self-care practices. And with just a few tweaks here and there, these essentials can end up doing heaps of good for supporting our well-being and good feelings.
These self-care essentials to consider and adjust:
How much water am I drinking during the day? A great key indicator for if you need to drink more water or not is to ask yourself ‘How often am I peeing in a day?’ 4 times or less? 10 times or more? If you only go number 1 a handful of times per day, it’s likely you need to focus on your hydration! Our bodies are over 70% water and our body relies on us to literally keep things flowing. I end up drinking about 11-14 cups of water per day, just for your own point of reference.
What is my sleep schedule like? Our body loves regularity, and that includes our sleep cycles. So if you bounce around with your bedtime and awakening time, try choosing an ideal bedtime based on how much sleep you average and need and what the flow of your day looks like. For example: I do my best thinking, writing, and getting-shit-done in the morning, so I love an early bedtime and awakening. I also know I need between 8 and 9 hours of sleep each night, so from there I can figure out when my ideal sleeping hours are, which are, 9:30 pm bedtime and 6-6:30 awakening time.
What kinds of foods am I eating? Processed foods, heavy animal products, and a lack of certain nutrients can leave us feeling depleted of our energy before we’ve even gotten started. So if we eat a lot of processed food, our baseline energy levels are going to be really low. How and where can you incorporate more wholesome foods that give you sustained energy? Now, don’t get me wrong, sometimes processed foods can really help us – like when we’re in a pinch and really need something fast. But by and large, it’s best to make our meals at home from less processed foods. Maybe that means cooking 2 larger meals per week and using the leftovers for lunches and snacks like we do in our home. It saves time and helps us eat more healthily on a regular basis.
How much exercise am I getting? Our bodies are made to move! If you’re sedentary the bulk of the day, making sure you get some movement for your body is gonna do wonders for your mental, physical, and emotional health. Our bodies hold our emotions and significant experiences (like trauma) and releasing our physical body with some kind of exercise helps those emotions move through and out of our body. Have you ever noticed you’re more easily frustrated when you haven’t gotten out for some good movement? Exercise also stimulates the release of the really good stuff – like endorphins – which gives us instant gratification for taking this kind of self-care for ourselves.
Expressing Gratitude Even in our darkest moments, we have things to be grateful for. No matter big or small, expressing gratitude for these gifts is an essential part of our happiness and for cultivating joy in our lives! Practicing daily gratitude can actually change our brains. It helps us move through seemingly complicated emotional states and can really help put things in perspective for ourselves.
If you’re reading this post, you have internet access. You likely have a home with clean running water and food on the table – and that is a stress that many other populations in the world carry with them every day. Commit to a gratitude practice at least once a week in your journal. Thank the Earth and those around you for their offerings and support. Look for the good and positive in your life, because where we focus our energy is where growth and expansion happen. And don’t you want more to be grateful for!?
Give Yourself Permission
It’s impossible to have a sustainable life when we ignore our needs and perform for others. And a lot of us are stuck in overwhelm waiting – waiting to get to the end of our to-do list, waiting for a free moment when we can relax, waiting for someone else to provide us with the magical pill that will fulfill our needs, waiting for the invitation to rest and renew.
We are out of time and can’t afford to wait anymore! The earth, our communities, and our families all need us to be at our best.
We have to take back the agency of our lives and give ourselves the permission to stop and rest. Just like everyone else is responsible for their own self-care and nourishment, we too have to get back in the driver’s seat of our lives and put ourselves first. We have to care for ourselves in ways that maybe only we might understand, as self-care is a deeply personal and intimate act.
I hope that this post inspires you to take self-care action for yourself!