Self-care because Healing is a Form of Protest

As I mentioned in my first post, self-care (caring for yourself in all your various life roles with compassionate action and attitude) is the first step to creating change and making new habits stick. It’s part of what sustains us and creates the capacity to deal with what life brings. Self-care is the first step to getting outside our comfort zone and learning information that makes us uncomfortable. It’s also a form of protest.

Our society idolizes busyness and productivity. People brag about working too many hours and boast about exhaustion. We often work past the point of efficiency because employers expect it, it’s the way we pushed through school, and we’ve internalized that doing something is more important than doing “nothing.” We often view resting as doing “nothing” and other forms of self-care, especially the ones that feel good, as a luxury.

We’ve seen some pushback on this idea since the Covid pandemic began. People who can are embracing different ways of working and being out of necessity, and we don’t want to give them up as the world tries to go back to its old ways of working and being.

Self-care is a process. It’s not a one-and-done or a specific technique. What works for one person won’t work for another. What works for you today, may not work for you tomorrow or next week. So understanding the process and having several techniques in your toolkit can help you find and maintain your center. Practicing makes it a habit so it’s easier to do when you’re thrown for a loop.

The process of self-care is an end in and of itself. While the benefits are amazing,

• It reduces stress
• It improves emotional resilience
• It increases your resistance to illness
• It lets your mind rest
• It reminds you that you matter, too
• It increases your capacity to love yourself and others
• It increases your self-knowledge and self-esteem
• It makes you more efficient

you don’t need to justify self-care with plans to be more productive or the other benefits. You don’t have to earn the right to rest or play. I say this for myself as much as anyone else. Even though I know this is true, I still catch myself working late sometimes to justify binge watching a show or the time I want to spend painting or drawing. (Remember last time I said knowing something isn’t the same as doing it?)

The process of self-care is simple, but not always easy. It can be hard to focus when we need to meditate or to stop thinking about work when we need to throw ourselves into creativity and let things marinate in the background. It can be hard to choose healthy foods when we are stress eating or remember to move or belly breathe to get ourselves out of our heads and back into our bodies.

The process I use in my workshops and in the Inspired by Indigo membership is this:

1. Get in your body – that means moving, breathing through your belly, singing, laughing, whatever it takes to get you out of your thought pattern for the moment.
2. Get still and figure out what you’re feeling - not knowing what we’re feeling screws us up. We often react to people based on how we’re feeling instead of facts or what they said or did. And when we don’t know what we’re feeling, we mess up. We react in anger or frustration about something unrelated to what’s happening in front of us and then wonder why our relationships are difficult. So be quiet for a minute or so and just breathe through your belly. Identify your feelings.
3. Figure out what you need and do it – if you need emotional support and you’re focused on a physical answer, you might feel a little better, but not completely grounded. Many self-care techniques have benefits for more than one area of self-care, and using the right tool is important.
4. Build your self-care toolkit – as I said above, the same tools are not always going to give us the same results. So it’s important to know more than one way to soothe and ground ourselves.
5. And finally when it comes to racial equity and social justice, having an attitude of no blame, no shame, no guilt goes a long way to getting us out of our own way to take action despite our fear.

Self-care is more than just making ourselves feel good. If doing what was best for ourselves always felt good, we’d all be doing it! Sometimes is means going for a walk when we’d rather veg out on the couch. It means meditating when we want to watch TV. It’s balancing our bank account when we’re afraid to see the balance. Or apologizing to someone when we’re nervous about how they will respond.

So many of us don’t even know what kind of self-care we need, where we’re already doing a great job, or where we fall short. I’m a big fan of knowing where you are and figuring out what you need before taking action. That’s how I learned to assess communities in need and create effective action plans to change neighborhoods, and it works for personal goals, too.

It’s important because if we use the wrong tool for the job, we’re quick to think there’s something wrong with us when really we just need a different tool. For example: if you’re feeling tired, you might think you need more rest. But fatigue can be a symptom of emotional, mental, physical, social, or spiritual imbalance, and each may need a different solution. Identifying the cause can help you choose the right solution.

Symptom: fatigue

Need                                                              Solution

Emotional                                                     Have a good cry/go out in nature
Mental                                                           Watch a comedy/do some art
Physical                                                         Take a nap/stretch/get a massage
Social                                                             Spend time with a friend or family member
Spiritual                                                         Sit quietly/meditate/pray

You’ll notice that even though the symptom is the same – fatigue – the solutions for different aspects of you are different. AND there’s more than one possibility! Maybe you don’t like comedies, so color or paint instead. Maybe you just can’t sleep, so try stretching or getting a massage. The point is that knowing what’s out of whack, not just the symptoms, can help you choose a tool that works.

I invite you to take this self-assessment for physical self-care by TherapistAid.com. It’s part of an overall assessment available to members of Inspired by Indigo to help you choose one small goal that will make you feel better and increase your capacity to deal with life. For the 10 statements below, choose 1, 2, or 3 to describe how often or how well you do each statement.

Physical Self-Care

1 I do this poorly/I do this rarely or not at all

2 I do this OK/I do this sometimes

3 I do this well/I do this often

___ Eat healthy foods

___ Take care of personal hygiene

___ Exercise

___ Wear clothes that help me feel good about myself

___ Eat regularly

___ Participate in fun activities (e.g. walking, swimming, dancing, sports)

___ Get enough sleep

___ Go to preventative medical appointments (e.g. checkups, teeth cleanings)

___ Rest when sick

___ Overall physical self-care

Now choose just one of the statements that you marked with a 1 or 2 and commit to improving or doing that one thing more often. Choose how often or what actions you will take to improve.  Write it down somewhere where you’ll see it and be reminded. Do it.

Want access to the rest of the self-assessment? Join Inspired by Indigo for this and more!