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Key points
- Identify mental and emotional barriers like perfectionism and unworthiness that hinder self-care.
- Combat excuses like "I don’t have time" by acknowledging self-care as a necessity, not a luxury.
- Replace harsh self-talk with kindness to foster courage, resilience, and emotional healing.
Regardless of your age or challenges, self-care can play a pivotal role in meeting or even exceeding those challenges. The simplest self-care, like pausing to take a deep breath or reassuringly placing your hand over your heart, might be all it takes. More highly developed self-caring skills and abilities, like replacing harshly critical and condemning self-talk with words of kindness, support, patience, and encouragement can activate courage and compassion—and diffuse fear and anxiety. Good healthcare, including eating well, getting enough rest and exercise, and calming our monkey minds, can put us in game shape for enjoying our best possible futures.
Self-care also involves knowing when to say "Yes" and when to say "No." Choosing well and taking concrete steps to prioritize your health and well-being can afford you the strength, energy, and resilience to face significant losses, changes, challenges, and setbacks. Making smart choices, we also harvest and build upon life’s greatest opportunities. Life may be an unpredictable affair, but caring for yourself is the best insurance you have for meeting and living well in each moment and day.
The importance of self-care has been evident for a long time. Self-care products and services rake in billions of dollars. Sadly, mass-marketing campaigns telling us to "give yourself a break today" have too often promoted products and services that are poor representations of actual self-care. Knowing who and what we can trust and what’s actually going to get us to take better care of ourselves are key.
To discern who and what we can trust, we need education. Learning about the self-care products and services that are going to fit our needs takes patience and research. We need to do our homework, which may involve seeing a trusted doctor, nurse, or caregiver who can help us better understand our health needs so we can create a self-care master plan.
Second, we need to identify what's been keeping us from caring for ourselves. The conspicuous absence of self-care habits, practices, and behaviors, a condition I call self-care deficit, is often connected to mental and emotional barriers that prevent us from taking better care of ourselves. These self-care saboteurs that get addressed in my workshops are
- Excuses: "I don't have time" or "Everyone else needs me" are common justifications that keep us from prioritizing our well-being.
- Fear of judgment: In certain environments, taking time for self-care is seen as selfish or indulgent. Fear of losing respect or trust can deter us from much-needed rejuvenation.
- Feelings of unworthiness: We may not believe that we have earned the right to or deserve to rest, especially if we don't feel worthy of care.
- Perfectionism: The unrealistic desire to be flawless can prevent us from pausing to recharge. The desire to be perfect keeps us from listening and attending to our needs.
- Fear of losing status: Some of us are driven by the fear that if we take time off, we'll lose our place as the go-to person for everyone else's needs.
- Avoidance of conflict: Speaking up about our needs might also lead to conflict. However, avoiding conflict too often comes at the cost of our health and well-being.
- Self-punishment: Some of us are trapped in self-critical thinking and find fault in ourselves by allowing care, compassion, or rest.
Third, we need to find the motivation to change. It's often fear that gets us reprioritizing our health and well-being. Understanding the risks and consequences of denial, indifference, passivity, avoidance, self-neglect, or self-destructive behavior that results in (otherwise preventable) illness, burnout, addiction, injury, and even death can awaken us. And with the increasing pressures of modern life and aging, a transition from self-care deficit to abundance makes sense. When the debt comes due on those things that we have allowed to wreak havoc on our health and hold us back from becoming the healthier, better, and even more attractive version of ourselves, change can become a necessity.
The roots of self-care neglect take hold growing up in environments where survival was prioritized over well-being, rest and replenishment were seen as a luxury, healthcare and nutrition were rarely modeled or prioritized, and abuse (alcohol, domestic violence, sexual, etc.) was often allowed. This didn't give us much of a chance to learn how to take care of ourselves. Even sitting down for five minutes to rest, going for a walk, asking for help, or saying "no" can feel unreasonable. Self-care can remain elusive or impossible without the permission and motivation to make time for our own needs.
Fourth, we need to create a viable self-care master plan. After taking ownership of the things holding us back, and finding the motivation to change, we are ready to imagine our best possible future and plot our critical path to success. The motivation to make our well-being more of a priority creates an opening for imagining our best possible futures. We create common-sense solutions that fill the pages of our self-care master plan as we take responsibility for our health and commit to meeting our self-care needs. Not surprisingly, the benefits of improved self-care begin to ripple outward to our relationships. As we outgrow whatever used to stop us from taking better care of ourselves, we become role models and advocates for health-enhancing practices with our partners, kids, friends, family members, co-workers, and communities.
Creating a balanced life where self-care is integrated into our daily routines is within reach. Find the inner motivation to change, rise above your saboteurs, and develop a self-care master plan. Take steps to bring out the very best in yourself and those around you. Take responsibility for and prioritize your needs. And delight in becoming the healthier, happier, prouder, more vibrant, energized, and at-peace version of yourself.
