The 1 Thing Getting In the Way of Your Self-Care
This morning (it’s a Sunday as I write this) I found myself pulling out the waffle iron and then turning on our karaoke set-up (yes, it’s a system that is at the ready in our home which is truly a dream come true for me).
It was a little early to subject my family to the Sheena Easton/Kenny Rogers duet I had stuck in my head, but truly, I don’t know if there’s ever a good time to subject them to my singing…so I marched onward.
And it felt so good to sing. I drove everyone from the room except the dogs and then eventually one of them left too. But I couldn’t stop. I was having fun—which feels like a rare thing in quarantine.
As I was singing to myself (and my dog Oh-Hi whose loyalty has been noted) I noticed an accusatory thought creep into my head:
You didn’t work out this morning like you said you would - you should be working out instead of doing karaoke - it’s your self-care. You’re NEGLECTING your self-care!
And then I started doing squats while I was singing.
Because I wasn’t about to stop singing. And having fun is self-care. But there’s a part of me that has a hard time remembering that.
I’ve spent much of my life equating productivity with self-worth. And it’s very easy for my self-care to feel like something on my to-do list. And once that happens, it no longer feels like self-care. It’s a bit of a bind.
Self-care is essential. We all know this. So why do we struggle to implement it? Why does self-care start to feel like another thing I need to get done? Something I’m not doing right?
For some of us, having a need for self-care in and of itself can feel confusing. Needs can feel confusing.
It may have been seen as the better thing to be super independent, ‘get over’ things quickly and have few needs in our family when we were little. So when needs crop up as adults, it’s easy to feel ambivalent about them, let alone turn toward and tend to them.
We can say we value self-care but if tending to our needs is, at its core, something we liken to weakness or see as a vulnerability that holds no value, it will be hard to do.
Perfectionism can sneak in too and make our relationship to self-care confusing.
From the perfectionism place inside, one we often don’t realize we’re acting from, it’s easy for it to feel like 10 minutes of yoga isn’t as good as a 90-minute power yoga class, a quick call to a friend to vent some feelings isn’t as important as journaling every day or that karaoke isn’t a workout so, it doesn’t count.
It’s okay that we feel confused about the nuance of it all.
It simply means we may need to pause and consider our relationship to self-care—to notice where it gets sticky, and remain curious about why.
From there can we start to track what we need and what might help it feel better. Think of it like your appetite. What is it like to notice when you’re hungry and then eat what would actually satiate it?
Pausing to get curious about our relationship to self-care could then become a form of self-care, one where we are truly nourishing ourselves, even when we’re craving karaoke for Sunday brunch.