The First Step to Sustainable Self-Care
When people hear the word “self-care,” many imagine bubble baths, a glass of wine, a day of rest, or a good massage. While a bubble bath may be a helpful reset every once in a while, it is likely only a temporary fix to an ongoing problem.
Many of the popular forms of self-care involve doing anything that temporarily gets our minds off of our problems so we have a chance to reset. But when we return to those problems, they are often just as bad as we left them.
Don’t get me wrong, the popular forms of self-care are helpful for most people, myself included. However, these forms of self care need to be paired with more sustainable practices if you want to improve (instead of just maintain) your overall well-being.
Want to know the first step to accomplishing this? Keep reading.
For the Busy Bodies
This post is for anyone who considers themselves a “busy person.” It’s for the people who work hard and would love to have unlimited energy and time. More specifically, it is for anyone who says “I don’t have time for ______ because of ______.” (And if this is you, you probably say stuff like this way more often than you realize).
If you’ve had moments where you worked yourself to exhaustion, felt like taking a day off wasn’t an option, skipped sleeping for your homework/job, or cried tears on your overly filled schedule, You need to hear this.
You Have Time for Self-Care
When I was in college, I said I didn’t have time for things all. the. time. In fact, the words “I don’t have time” left my mouth every single day for years. My schedule was packed to the brim with full-time classes, two part-time jobs, a collegiate marching band schedule, and a whole lot of activism on the side.
I felt like I needed more time to get it all done. In fact, during my freshman year, I would stay up until 4 am every night and wake up at 8am just so I could get it all done.
I slept very little, deprived my body of recharge time, and ended up wearing down my immune system. Long story short, I got sick for three months at a time.
And I did this not once, but several times throughout college.
Now that I look back on it, this was my way of never allowing myself to truly relax. After doing this for years, I resented myself for “not having time for the things I really cared about.” I genuinely thought relaxing was not an option for me.
But I was so wrong.
We always have time for what we prioritize.
If you’ve never heard that before, I’d suggest reading it again.
And when I say always, I really mean always.
Every person is granted the same amount of time on any given day as every other person on the planet. You get 24 hours. I get 24 hours. Your best friend, your boss, the human who bagged your groceries the other day, all of us get 24 hours. And, unless you’re in prison, you mostly get full control over how you choose to spend those hours.
No matter how busy your life is, you always have time to do whatever you choose to prioritize. This means that when I was wide awake at 4 am in my college dorm room telling myself “I don’t have time to sleep,” I wasn’t being honest with myself.
It was never that I didn’t have time for sleep. In fact, I had as much time to sleep as any other person. But I wasn’t making sleep a priority in my life. I had decided that getting good grades was the most important thing (PSA: it’s definitely not). So, I sacrificed sleep for good grades.
People do this all the time with any number of things.
Some more extreme examples include prioritizing….
- a job over one’s marriage
- looking good/rich over being careful with money
- the joy of desserts over reaching one’s goal weight
If a person truly loves their job more than their significant other or wants to look good more than they want to be financially stable, they are entitled to that preference. If someone wants to enjoy desserts more than they want to be fit and healthy, that’s 100% their choice. However, plenty of people prefer the latter options, and yet act as if they prefer the former ones. And they don’t even realize they are neglecting something potentially important to them by over-prioritizing something else.
This brings me to…
The First Step to Self-Care
To put it simply, the first step to self-care is to get our priorities straight.
In some ways, this is easy. In other ways, it’s a lot harder than it sounds. The easy part is: all you need to do is take some time to assess your own priorities. Then, figure out whether your actions reflect those priorities. If not, then brainstorm ways to adjust your actions to reflect what is truly important to you.
The hard part has two parts:
- There may be things that are more important than you realize.
- You’ll have to think hard about whether “your” priorities are yours or priorities that other people told you to prioritize.
For example, when I told myself I didn’t have time to sleep, I foolishly thought I wouldn’t face any consequences later on. I thought I would be rewarded for working as hard as my body would allow, and that working late into the night just meant I had what it took to be successful.
But my body said N.O. to that. I found out (to my surprise) there are serious consequences for not allowing myself to rest. Getting enough sleep was way more important than I thought.
Once I graduated college, I realized working as hard as humanly possible was a priority set by other people in my life: my teachers, my dad, my parent’s friends, politicians on the news, and american culture as a whole. Everyone was telling me to work my butt off to get ahead. All those social influences led me to believe that more hard work would always be a good thing.
Unfortunately, I went overboard with that priority. So much so that I didn’t allow time for other things that were just as important (if not more important). So to regain balance, I had to make my health (and therefore sleep) a higher priority.
Too Many Priorities
I can hear a lot of readers saying “but I have so many things I NEED to do!,” or “I don’t have the option to not do those things, they’re all important to me!”
Trust me, I have SO been there. And whether you’re someone trying to achieve your dream career, a student trying to get a degree, or a single mom trying to give your kid the best life possible, hear this:
Making something one of your top priorities will require de-prioritizing other things.
If you feel like you can’t get it all done, then you need to decide what things are more important to you than anything else. Then make some cuts.
The first time I did this, I was forced to by a counselor. I had originally gone to see her because I was feeling perpetually overwhelmed and was hoping she could teach me how to talk myself through it. During one of our sessions, she made me write down all the things I was involved in and the number of hours I spent on each thing.
After writing everything out, I realized why I felt overwhelmed, I genuinely did not have enough hours in the day to do everything I wanted to do, let alone to do those things well. The counselor told me I would need to make some cuts, and damn was it hard. I really wanted to keep doing everything, because I felt like everything I was doing was important, but eventually, I did it.
I started sleeping more, stopped reading every single page that was assigned to me, and quit one of the organizations I was involved in. Surprisingly, my grades didn’t suffer at all. I felt more well rested and started performing better at the things that were most important to me.
So if you are like me and care about a whole lot of things, just know you’ll be a lot more effective if you focus your energy on a few of the most important things instead of spreading yourself thin.
Conclusion
It can be tempting to claim that we don’t have time for the things we really want to do. As busy people, it is also tempting to believe that we don’t have time to take care of ourselves. Realistically, however, we always have time for whatever we choose to prioritize.
And if we don’t prioritize things that contribute to our own well-being, then we should expect to eventually feel unwell.
So take it from me. Self-care is worth putting among the top items on your list.
Once you get the hang of organizing your priorities, it is SO empowering to be able to say “no” to something, not because you don’t have time for it, but because it’s not at the top of your priorities right now.
By assessing what is (and isn’t) a top priority in your life, you can start making space for the things that really matter to you.
Now THAT is a sustainable form of self-care.
Did this post resonate with you? If so, I’d love to hear from you! Leave a comment or send me a message to share your thoughts. For more uplifting content, check out some other posts on my blog, follow me on instagram @morgan_barbret, or sign up for the Self Love Atlas Newsletter!
Cheers,
Morgan Rita Barbret
