Many of you have likely heard me speak dismissively about the idea of self-care. I won’t pretend that I don’t do that, but there’s a method to my madness when I do. Today on The Anxious Morning I want to take a few minutes to talk about why self care is - in fact - an important thing. Tomorrow I’ll talk about why I sometimes speak about it the way I do.
I have a bad habit. I treat myself like a machine sometimes. I always have. Clearly, that is not a good strategy. I could make the argument that it’s one reason why I wound up damn near crippled by anxiety and depression multiple times over 25+ years. Nobody is a machine, and nobody - me included - should treat themselves that way.
We may be marvels of engineering and design, but we are not machines. We get tired. We feel the effects of physical exertion, mental exertion, and emotional stress. We get sick. We get injured. We grow old. And while we are incredibly agile when it comes to adaptation, adaptation does not mean that we are armor plated or teflon coated.
I know sometimes people hear me talk about the recovery process, being courageous and going toward fear and mistakenly think that I am urging them to try to run things over and ignore the consequences of doing so. I am not. When I wrote The Anxious Truth, I did acknowledge that rest is a thing and that we all deserve and need to rest.
Self care is important. It matters. It matters physically, mentally, and emotionally.
All three of those batteries need to be recharged and refreshed at times. Heck, sometimes they all need to be recharged at the same time! When life is throwing bricks at us, catching them, dodging them, and fending off the hits gets tiring. It wears us down. We need to take time when we can to disengage, step back, and give ourselves space to rest, recover, and recharge.
This does not make you weak. It does not mean you will not recover. You are not being lazy. You are not being soft. You are just being human, which is not only permissible, but desirable. If we are after one thing along the path to recovery, it would be uncovering the truth that we are entitled to and able handle all of our human-ness, even the parts that require us to take a break now and then.
When needed, do work. When tired from doing work, rest, in whatever form or forms that needs to take at any given time. This is OK. This is allowed. Don’t let anyone give you shit for taking care of yourself, including me.
Tomorrow we’ll talk a bit about what happens when the idea of self care goes off the rails.
97. Why Self Care Is Important