Do as I say, not as I do: what I know about self-care

One of my friends asked me about self-care and it seemed to merit a post. So here goes.

The concept of self-care comes from a resource model of well-being.

Here’s the way I see it. I have finite resources. There are activities that grow my resources (e.g., food, sleep) and activities that use my resources (e.g., cleaning, difficult conversations). I can only use resources I have. Therefore, I have to make sure that I have enough resources.

My definition of self-care is ‘activity that replenishes my resources’.

My well-being is broadly proportional to my willingness to make self-care a high priority

There is a lot of discourse around self-care. I get sucked into it easily, thinking that self-care activities are selfish or a waste of time that I could use more productively. My experiences as a coach and in my own life, however, tell me the opposite. If I want to be useful, then I am required to care for myself. What I have to offer others is a function of how well I am resourced. Rather than being a luxury or a waste of time, self-care is a necessity if I want to do good in the world, and the more time I give to self-care, the more good I will find myself doing. Self-care is not self-indulgence, which often drains resources. (Similarly, self-care is not self-improvement. Self-improvement generally uses up resources, although not invariably. That’s a different post.)

The other important thing is that my experience of life is almost entirely a function of how much self-care I am practising. I have lost count of the number of times I’ve had people on the phone lamenting some minor circumstance, and the answers to the questions ‘when did you last eat?’, or ‘how much sleep did you get last night?’ or ‘how’s your health?’ have been ‘well, actually…’ The solution is almost never to fix the minor circumstance. The solution is to eat or rest or recuperate and then the minor circumstance no longer seems like a problem. So lack of resource is a vicious circle, because we end up using the meagre resource we have in stressing about things that would not occupy our attention if we had more resources.

There are no rules for self-care

Self-care is hard to generalise about. I can make a list of the activities that drain me and the activities that re-energise me, and my list will be different from anyone else’s. So, for example, work, socialising and gardening all fall into the category of activities that will be energising for some and draining for others. Self-care for introverts often involves solitary activity, whereas self-care for extraverts often involves communal activity. It is contextual.

Also, ‘one day at a time’ is a classic for a reason. I am very good at making elaborate plans for self-care, and they always fail, because I am a bit different every day and because I am not always good at working out what I need. Put differently, the question ‘how should I care for myself today?’ is much, much easier to answer than ‘how should I care for myself in life?’ It may be that every day’s answer is a bit different.

Here are some things that constitute self-care for me (in no particular order): Singing. Listening to music. Dancing. Meditation. Swimming. Sitting in the spa pool at the gym. Cooking. Doing spiritual work. Mentoring. Pilates. Collaging. Being with people I love. Shopping. Playing with my wardrobe. Playing with the cats.

For a lot of people, that list would be Very Hard Work Indeed. Everyone needs to make their own. Pro tip: try and put easy ten-minute activities on there as well as the ones that take an hour and require travel. That’s harder than it looks.

Start with the basics

When I am coaching someone whose self-care is all over the shop – which happens much more often than you would think – my starting point is this: (1) try to eat healthy food and not to drink too much. (2) try to go to bed on time. (3) try to get a few minutes of exercise a day, and (4) try to get outside for a few minutes a day.

I am not suggesting that these things are easy. I struggle with them. But they do not require dramatic life change and they tend to deliver about 80% of the self-care requirement. Most specifically, they tend to deliver enough of the self-care requirement to get into a stable place from which one can then say ‘okay, what is the more difficult stuff that I now need to do?’

I am quite good at trying to start with the more difficult stuff (e.g., going to yoga classes, doing creative work) and then finding that I don’t have the stamina to keep going because I am not doing the basics.

Stop doing the things that drain resource.

That’s often not all that dissimilar to the above, because for many of us eating unhealthy food, drinking and staying up late are the main ways in which we dissipate our resources. Pissing around on the Internet is another. For me, there are sites that I need to stay away from, and I am less well resourced today than I was yesterday because I managed to stay away from them yesterday and I haven’t today. (This makes me sound like an Internet porn addict. I’m not one, honestly, although I don’t condemn them.) Mostly it comes back to remembering in the moment that actions have consequences and being willing to take responsibility.

The other big anti-self-care activity for me is brooding. Getting lost in the thickets of my mind is easy, and it is a bad place to get lost. It drains resources more quickly than everything else put together.

For me, antidotes to the above are: meditation (even 5m will do), or making a call to someone who can help me remember not to believe the inside of my head, or actively choosing an activity that I will really find rewarding instead. If the only alternative to pissing around on the Internet is work then I will probably choose PAOTI. If I allow myself to go to the gym and sit in the spa pool instead, I’ll end up with more resources and I’ll end up getting more work done. (H/t Lloyd for yesterday’s timely reminder of this.)

As per title of this post, do not assume that I get this right all the time, or even much of the time. But I do my best, and when I take the action, it works.

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