Building the Self-Care Habit
Self-care is hard. Self-care is, ultimately, how we maintain our social, physical, emotional, and psychological lives. It gets tricky when you have mental illness, neurodivergence, physical disability, chronic pain, and other chronic ailments. Part of it is attaining the executive functioning to accomplish the thing in the first place, but it's also because it's complicated and variable. We are inundated with what "healthy" looks like, which is discouraging and infuriating in itself, but we can't always accomplish it all (or at all). How do we prioritize important self-care without depleting our resources (or spoons or spell slots)? What does healthy look like to us? How do we keep up with it at our worst? There isn't a singular answer, obviously, but I'll try to take my own methods and expand them into something that can be a bit more general.
Honesty
The most important part of developing my self-care habit is being honest with myself. I'm not just talking about being honest about my conditions, though knowing my symptoms and cycles has been vital. I also needed to understand what motivates me, how I learn, what activities recharge me. A significant portion of self-care is doing unpleasant things to feel better in the future or to minimize the impact of low points/flare ups, and I am learning how to treat myself the way I treat my friends - with compassion and actionable advice.
My biggest hurdles to self-care are defeatism, executive dysfunction, and exhaustion. These three work closely together and feed on each other - why should I try to start something (like cleaning or writing) if I don't have the time, energy, or motivation to finish it? It's so much easier to curl up under my covers and stare at my phone, watching my friends share their progress and perspectives on FaceBook, than it is to do something. It's hard to push myself to take care of my self - exercise, take my medication on time, shower - when it feels like I'm just going to fall apart, again. But the truth is that I am falling apart less frequently for significantly less time. It has been a long time coming, and I still have a long way to go, but it's easier to trust myself when I'm honest with myself.
Being honest with myself also means recognizing what I need to feel healthy. Knowing how I recover energy and what I find fulfilling has been a challenge. I have tried to cling to things that I have loved in the past, but I have outgrown or don't bring the kind of joy I remember. I try to hold onto the identity that I consciously built, which is no longer serving me or was built on what I thought people needed me to be. Knowing myself has allowed me to let go of a lot of those expectations, has allowed me to find who I am, at my authentic core. It's a long process, and far from easy, but it's tremendously rewarding and has helped me understand what I need to be as healthy and whole as possible.
Tracking
I have been monitoring my health most of my life (early signs of hypoglycemia and depression will do that), but I have been much more actively tracking my moods and pain over the last few years. I tend to swing wildly between blindly tracking - just checking the boxes without thinking about it - and hyper-focusing on the data, as if it holds some secret I'm not seeing and I'll find it if I stare at it long enough. The truth is, it does hold secrets, but not the ones that emerge when you hold it too tightly. Trying to strangle understanding from trackers is like clutching sand in your fist or trying to glean insight from a single grain. I have had the best luck with a gentle, but precise, analysis and a lot of trial-and-error.
Tracking my hygiene and exercise helps me recognize my mood and pain cycles. I can see what self-care is the first to go when I enter depressive cycles (usually, cleaning and hygiene), but the tracker also gives me a boost of motivation from just being able to check that box off. Knowing that taking a shower or washing even a load of dishes might not fix everything, but it will make the next few days easier or will minimize backlog from the mood crash can be enough to overcome that defeatism. Tracking also allows me to have a kind of plan. I know I need to do at least 30 minutes of cleaning a day. I need to have a shower three times a week. I need to eat at least two meals a day. I need to have at least 2 bottles of water (about 48 oz - an absolute minimum, but it's more than none). I need to write at least one poem a day. I need to take my medication and vitamins in the morning. I rarely meet every one of these milestones, but having them helps me a great deal.
Compassion
I'm awful at being kind to myself. I have been actively working on it, but it's very difficult for me. I tend to deride myself for not doing enough, especially when finances get tight. I started with changing my internal narrative to neutral terms. Instead of calling myself lazy, I say that I'm not being as productive as I'd like. Instead of calling myself worthless, I say I'm having a bad brain day. Over time, I began actively talking to myself like I would talk to my friends. I try to be as gentle and forthright with myself as I am with them - things are hard, you have a lot stacked against you, but you're doing your best. You know what your goals are and you're actively working toward them. It's okay if you don't do it all in a day.
Building compassion for yourself is vital. It's a long process, but having people who are willing and able to help you with that can take some of the burden off of yourself. Being kind to yourself does also involve pushing yourself - asking yourself why you aren't able to do something, reminding yourself that taking care of yourself is looking out for future you. Every step is important and a bad day doesn't mean that it was all for naught.
The Things I Do
Honesty
The most important part of developing my self-care habit is being honest with myself. I'm not just talking about being honest about my conditions, though knowing my symptoms and cycles has been vital. I also needed to understand what motivates me, how I learn, what activities recharge me. A significant portion of self-care is doing unpleasant things to feel better in the future or to minimize the impact of low points/flare ups, and I am learning how to treat myself the way I treat my friends - with compassion and actionable advice.
My biggest hurdles to self-care are defeatism, executive dysfunction, and exhaustion. These three work closely together and feed on each other - why should I try to start something (like cleaning or writing) if I don't have the time, energy, or motivation to finish it? It's so much easier to curl up under my covers and stare at my phone, watching my friends share their progress and perspectives on FaceBook, than it is to do something. It's hard to push myself to take care of my self - exercise, take my medication on time, shower - when it feels like I'm just going to fall apart, again. But the truth is that I am falling apart less frequently for significantly less time. It has been a long time coming, and I still have a long way to go, but it's easier to trust myself when I'm honest with myself.
Being honest with myself also means recognizing what I need to feel healthy. Knowing how I recover energy and what I find fulfilling has been a challenge. I have tried to cling to things that I have loved in the past, but I have outgrown or don't bring the kind of joy I remember. I try to hold onto the identity that I consciously built, which is no longer serving me or was built on what I thought people needed me to be. Knowing myself has allowed me to let go of a lot of those expectations, has allowed me to find who I am, at my authentic core. It's a long process, and far from easy, but it's tremendously rewarding and has helped me understand what I need to be as healthy and whole as possible.
I have been monitoring my health most of my life (early signs of hypoglycemia and depression will do that), but I have been much more actively tracking my moods and pain over the last few years. I tend to swing wildly between blindly tracking - just checking the boxes without thinking about it - and hyper-focusing on the data, as if it holds some secret I'm not seeing and I'll find it if I stare at it long enough. The truth is, it does hold secrets, but not the ones that emerge when you hold it too tightly. Trying to strangle understanding from trackers is like clutching sand in your fist or trying to glean insight from a single grain. I have had the best luck with a gentle, but precise, analysis and a lot of trial-and-error.
Tracking my hygiene and exercise helps me recognize my mood and pain cycles. I can see what self-care is the first to go when I enter depressive cycles (usually, cleaning and hygiene), but the tracker also gives me a boost of motivation from just being able to check that box off. Knowing that taking a shower or washing even a load of dishes might not fix everything, but it will make the next few days easier or will minimize backlog from the mood crash can be enough to overcome that defeatism. Tracking also allows me to have a kind of plan. I know I need to do at least 30 minutes of cleaning a day. I need to have a shower three times a week. I need to eat at least two meals a day. I need to have at least 2 bottles of water (about 48 oz - an absolute minimum, but it's more than none). I need to write at least one poem a day. I need to take my medication and vitamins in the morning. I rarely meet every one of these milestones, but having them helps me a great deal.
Compassion
I'm awful at being kind to myself. I have been actively working on it, but it's very difficult for me. I tend to deride myself for not doing enough, especially when finances get tight. I started with changing my internal narrative to neutral terms. Instead of calling myself lazy, I say that I'm not being as productive as I'd like. Instead of calling myself worthless, I say I'm having a bad brain day. Over time, I began actively talking to myself like I would talk to my friends. I try to be as gentle and forthright with myself as I am with them - things are hard, you have a lot stacked against you, but you're doing your best. You know what your goals are and you're actively working toward them. It's okay if you don't do it all in a day.
Building compassion for yourself is vital. It's a long process, but having people who are willing and able to help you with that can take some of the burden off of yourself. Being kind to yourself does also involve pushing yourself - asking yourself why you aren't able to do something, reminding yourself that taking care of yourself is looking out for future you. Every step is important and a bad day doesn't mean that it was all for naught.
The Things I Do
- Rest. This rest ideally includes writing in a journal and reading for leisure, in addition to my instinctual scrolling social media and playing phone games. I love deep thinking and analyzing my world, but I rarely give myself time for it and my mood, health, and cognition suffers for it.
- Creative outlets. I am one of those people who doesn't feel whole unless I'm creating. I get a gaping hole in my core when I'm not writing or working with creative people. I have prioritized carving out time to go to open mics, write, and build content for Patreon.
- Be social. I am also an extrovert, so staying at home too much is not good for my brain. I need to be engaging with people and spend time with those I love. It's easy for me to "buckle down" and hide behind my work, especially when I'm feeling particularly vulnerable. Making sure to have planned events where I must get out of the house has helped me avoid the hermit cycle.
- Minimum daily goals. I listed a bunch of them in the "tracking" section. Having specific things I need to do in a day helps me keep my priorities front and center. Knowing that I need to take the time to take care of myself, and having them clearly visible, makes it much easier to actually do them.
- Long term goals. I'm a planner. There's no question of that. If I don't have something I'm working towards, I become lost and hopeless. It's hard to stave off suicidal ideation when you don't have anything specific to look forward to. My goals include self-improvement (such as the above "be nicer to yourself"), creative goals (like my Patreon, my blogs, and a poetry book I'm working on), and professional goals (like business plans and building skills for my day job). I'm particularly ambitious, so don't be too hard on yourself if yours are "go to the gym next week."
I'm not a master at self-care. Honestly, I had a hard time writing this post because I felt like I am ill qualified to give advice on taking care of yourself or I was just going to be saying the same platitudes that become so tiresome. I hope that some or all of this is helpful to you. If my advice isn't, please know that you're not alone.
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