If we want to care for ourselves we must take the time to do it

FINALLY IT seems that lockdown is easing and we are about to start to enjoy a life that we recognise more. However, there has been one challenge that I have seen that hasn’t gone away.

Self care, to me, is such an interesting area of self development as it is often a chicken and egg situation. Many clients will come to me for help because they want to experience life differently, they are fed up of the stress, the pressure, not feeling like they are reaching their potential, in other words they want to invest in themselves.

However, they can barely find the time to make the sessions. If they engaged more, they would find the benefit they seek, but in order to do that, they have to make the time to invest in themselves. So it’s not uncommon that we will dance around this for a few sessions, before they have a realisation about it and see it completely differently.

So how can we make more time for ourselves, so that we take better care of ourselves, because that is going to be a key learning for all of us, if we are to keep well and stress free?

One of the biggest realisations that my clients have is that they have more time available to them than they think they do.

The other week I asked a group

I was working with, what thinking they did about what they had to do. The response was fascinating. They would think about how long it would take, how difficult it was, what the outcome would be, how much preparation they needed to do, along with a general narrative of how little time they had, how their list was never ending and for those who were juggling home schooling, there was a narrative there about how impossible all of this was and they couldn’t possibly continue indefinitely like this.

I then asked them how long they thought they spent in this cycle of thinking, say in a period of five minutes, and it ranged from one to four minutes, completely in thought and not doing the task in hand. It doesn’t take a mathematician to work out that over a period of an hour, or even a day, that is a lot of thinking.

It’s like our thinking about what we have to do has its own personal R number. A little thought that starts with ‘‘I think this could take ages’’ can turn into a whole conversation in our minds, so that one little thought can create a bounty of thinking and before we know it three minutes of our life has simply passed us by. An easy win, is simply noticing that that is what we are doing and simply sending it on its way.

The other realisation that my clients have is that their thinking often doesn’t know how important tasks really are. It will seek to persuade us that other things are important, often in a sneaky way, either keeping us at our desk, doing that one extra thing for the family, or even scrolling on social media.

Or more persuasively, that it is somehow selfish to look after ourselves over other people. In my mind, there is very little which is more important than self care.

If we don’t care for ourselves, it’s not only that we can’t care for others, we run the risk that they then have to care for us, which is something most of us want to avoid.

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