Self care: is it just another thing for the mental to-do list?
We all hear talk of self-care and its importance for our wellbeing. I know deep in my being that this is essential and would certainly fan the flames of anyone trying to establish practices to support it! However, I bumped into a friend today, somebody whose words I listen to and think about; a straight-talking, intelligent woman from my own demographic and this time her words really struck me.
‘Self care sometimes just feels like another thing to do,’ she said.
And I can’t stop thinking about it.
I wondered if I have been promoting an addition to the endless mental to-do list. I wondered if it’s just another way for businesses to get (predominantly) women to spend their money. I wondered who self-care serves and then I stopped.
In this world where we are fulfilling so many roles and holding so many threads in the weave of our lives, lest it unravel, is ‘Woman Who Practises Self-care’ just another ideal for us to live up to? Marketing people might think so. I don’t.
For me, self-care is small actions that come from small habits and that’s how I’d like to explain it to you. Self-care can be going for a spa retreat but who has time, money or, indeed, child care to cover that? Self-care can be small; so small that you don’t know you’re doing it but your mind, body and spirit thank you. Self-care has to be a habit, not a task on a list or it might not really be self-care!
Maybe start with a self-care intention – ‘meditate every morning’, for instance. How likely is it that you can just start that and maintain it seamlessly, becoming the calm, regulated person you envisaged when setting the intention? I know I’d struggle and quickly feel like it was a chore or feel disappointment when I didn’t manage it.
This is where we take the whole activity and ask this question: what is the smallest part of this? In this case, it might be seating myself in a comfortable position and maybe taking a deep breath. That’s your tiny habit: seating yourself in a comfortable position and taking a deep breath every morning. To make it even easier to maintain, why not attach it to something else that you already have as an established habit? You might drive to work – could you do it before you switch on the engine or after you arrive and park? I drink coffee in the morning, I could do this before my first sip. It won’t take any of my mental energy after the first few times, it will be what I do. How else could this tiny habit seep into the fabric of your day?
You can receive real benefits from sitting for a moment and taking a deep breath. You can do it anywhere; it takes seconds but gives calm that affects you for the rest of the day. It might start turning into three deep breaths, who knows? The point is, anything that seems unachievable or onerous isn’t going to make you feel better – not one bit! Start with a tiny habit, allow that to soak into your day seamlessly and you might be surprised at how you can care for yourself in small ways that have a big impact. You might find that you can grow self-care from ‘another thing to do’ to ‘something I always do’.
Some healthy self-care habits and a tiny habit to start with:
Drink more water – fill up a water bottle
Do a self-healing crystal treatment every evening – pick up a crystal in the morning to keep in my pocket all day
Go to bed earlier – set an alarm to remind me to start thinking about moving towards bed time
Take my supplements every day – put the supplements by the kettle (it might remind me to take them when I make my morning drink!)
Do you have a self-care habit you’d like to establish but it feels too big? Share it with me on Instagram and let’s see if we can find the tiny habit to ground it into your reality.
