How to Audit Your Body Kindness List

[This is the continuation of a series of posts.]

So, you’ve done your 10 minutes of initial brainstorm listing for ways you take care of your body these days and ways you push it too hard, possibly also some neutral/mixed examples and/or some things you might like to do more or less of. Maybe you’ve given yourself a day or three to let more examples trickle in. Now what?

Here are some questions you might ask of your lists, solo or in conversation, to help them help you do good thinking, maybe planning, and definitely appreciating.

If you do some classifying of the items within your looking-after category, what do you find? The first interesting thing to do might be to sort this list into as many themes as make sense. For me, there are probably seven: movement, stillness, posture, manipulations, clothing, skincare, and food and drink. Then you can look at relative numbers (e.g. I have 6 kinds of movement and only 3 stillnesses (hot tubs, sunbathing, and lying on the floor), but then my 5 “manipulations” (e.g. foam rolling and a massage gun) feel like they complement the stillness category nicely, and 2 of them happen most days.

This brings us to questions about frequency. What kind of balance do you have between little things you do most days, medium-sized weekly or twice-weekly things, and either regular or sporadic things at lower frequency? I’m surprised to realize that most of my things (18 out of 27) actually happen most days, 5 of them relating to food and drink, a few about skincare and clothing, some about movement and others about relaxing.

If I order the others by frequency, they range from yoga (about 3 times a week) to full-body massages (every couple of months) to osteo sessions (sadly not happening much these days because I’m 5500 miles away from my osteopath), plus one I didn’t quite know how to classify temporally, “choosing to live in a warm dry sunny climate” (which feels pretty body-decadent after decades of British gloom).

If you have little going on at the daily level and mostly irregular and/or infrequent things, your body-directed kindnesses are perhaps likelier to be fragile—because they may cost significant money (e.g. massages) or time (hiking) and so be easy to find yourself finding reasons not to do. Additionally, consider whether other people are involved (that can be really helpful, as with a regular class or reliable companion, but also tricky if your other person/people are flaky or far away) and what the cost structure is (e.g. upfront costs like gym membership or pool / hot tub access may work well for you as motivators, or they may not).

If you don’t have much everyday stuff on your list, it may also be the case that you simply haven’t yet paid attention at quite the level of granularity that will reveal lots that “counts”. Perhaps one of the easiest things to overlook is things that it’s a kindness to your body to not be doing. Of course, the list of ill-advised body-damaging things you could in theory be doing is technically endless, but it may feel nice to highlight any where the norm is otherwise or where your decision to do things this way feels particularly deliberate.

For me, the kindnesses of not-doing include not wearing much makeup, not wearing high heels, not wearing jeans or other harsh waistbands, not being “on a diet”, and very rarely drinking caffeine. All these not-doing’s contribute in substantial ways to my day-to-day bodily happiness. What can you discover in your daily routines that involve the specific kind of looking-after that comes from rejecting commonplaces?

Your list is a snapshot of your life as it is now, and that may be particularly valuable if you’re in a period of transition—whether in recovery from an eating disorder or other illness, or adjusting to parenthood, married or single life, or a new city or country. Your rejections, in times of change, may be very actively of things that past you used to do. My eating disorder is in the distant past now, but “eating big breakfasts” and “eating lots of fat” are a nice encapsulation of what’s different now from how it used to be in the cold dark hungry years of eating nothing until nearly bedtime.

Perhaps the most important thing about this list is how it makes you feel when you read it. If you’ve put anything on it that doesn’t give you a warm feeling of “oo yes, I love that” or at the very least, “I really value that”, you might want to ask whether it should be on there. If your gym routine actually fills you with more dread than pleasure, it’s probably not in fact a way of looking after yourself. If you pay attention to the feelings that come up, in response to the items individually and in aggregate, you may generate ideas for the sub-list of “things I might like to do more or less of.”

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The Quiet Radicalism of Looking After Your Body

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These might include wholly new things (e.g. that people you know enjoy, or that you find intriguing) or things you’ve done a bit of or used to do more of. Or they might be new approaches to old familiar things (e.g. in the past couple of years I’ve been lifting less frequently and much more intuitively, without writing everything down and trying to improve on last session’s numbers as I used to).

If you come up with anything you’d love to do more of, get specific as you transition from the “Options” in the GROW coaching model to the “Will”. You could consider, for instance, whether you’ll need any props for the new thing, and make sure they’re prominent if so—and the reverse if there are things you want to reduce or eliminate (if yoga has been getting a bit compulsive, keeping your mat in the middle of the bedroom floor probably isn’t helping). Ask where it’ll sit in your day or week, and what can make it as easy and appealing as possible for you.

If you included a “neutral/mixed” list as I did (mine included infrequent showering and hair-washing, dyeing my hair weird colours, cycling quite a bit to get around [good for cardio, can tighten up the quads too much], and alcohol [many benefits, also obvious drawbacks]), you might come up with ideas for making these more wholly positive (e.g. I could make a point of doing a bit of foam rolling when I get home on my bike). But they can also just stay random and hard to classify!

And finally, there’s the list of “ways I expect too much of my body”. How it stacks up in overall size relative to the looking-after list is an easy metric to begin with. But even a single item can be doing significant damage if it’s an all-the-time thing. You could ask what damage limitation you’re already doing (I have plenty of candidates for counterbalancing my “working long hours at the laptop” items) and what more you might do, or whether a more radical shift is needed.

If you found this interesting and/or useful, you could set a calendar alert to repeat it—quite soon if you’re in a phase of change, maybe not for 6 or 12 months otherwise (I chose 3). Doing a new version then, before comparing it with your first one, could be quite revealing.

There are so many influences created by other humans that encourage us to ignore and mistreat our bodies. Perhaps these little lists—making them, appreciating them, remembering them—can be a way to defend ourselves against them, and protect the primacy of self-directed kindness, friendliness, and looking-after.