Minute by Minute Self-Care
If you are anything like me, you have probably uttered the phrase, “I don’t have time to take care of myself because I’m too busy taking care of everyone else” at least once. In our American society, we wear our busy-ness as a badge of honor for all to admire. Look at how many things I can take on. Look at how many projects I can accomplish. In the military community, many talk about how late they stay at work like it is a competition and anyone who stays until 2000 (8:00 PM) is the winner. News flash—none of these things are healthy or sustainable without taking time to rest, refuel, and refocus ourselves.
I used to be under the assumption that in order to practice self-care, we need to set aside scheduled time to break away from everything. Self-care equaled taking a full day off work, going on a vacation, or going to get a massage. With a busy schedule juggling work, going to the gym, and spending time with my family, guess who was not getting to go do any of those things? This guy. Who has time for self-care when there is work to get done and quality time to spend in the already fleeting time with my family?
This was the way I lived my life and understood self-care for a long time. During COVID while I was working from home, I came to the realization that I was starting to feel signs of burnout and that I had slowly been blurring the lines and boundaries of a healthy work-life balance. I needed a change and my wife Sophia would agree with this 100 %. Through my company's Employee Assistance Program, I was able to receive virtual counseling to help deal with this overwhelming stress and anxiety I was starting to feel. If you have never been to therapy or have been hesitant, I would highly recommend to try it out. It is great to just speak to someone who will listen to understand you while you share what has been going on for you. It is also great to have that person be trained to hear patterns in your words and behaviors that can offer you helpful advice and tools to change behaviors and thought patterns. One thought pattern that my therapist was able to help me change was the way I was viewing my work. I am extremely passionate about my work. I love to help people and I believed if I did not answer an email back right away, someone might not get the help they needed. I believed if I took time off, then some Soldiers might not receive training and I felt guilty for letting them down. I believed that if I was not present at work, that something might not get done and as a result, someone would suffer. My therapist asked me a question that I will never forget. It was not an earth-shattering question. It was a simple question, but the answer made me stop in my metaphorical tracks. She asked me, “when was the last time I took a vacation for more than a day or two?” I started trying to think back to my last trip but all of them lasted maybe for a weekend and ended with me rushing to get back to work because there was another training coming up. I met with my therapist in the Spring of 2021 and as I tracked it back, I had not taken a full block of leave since January of 2019 when my daughter was born.
Two years.
The first thing I needed to learn was to check-in with myself and assess my own needs because I had been ignoring them or making excuses on why I could take care of myself later. A few weeks after starting therapy, I did take two weeks of leave. I muted my work chats. I muted my emails. I told my manager and co-workers that anything they needed from me could be handled when I returned. Those two weeks were a wonderful relaxing time spent with my family, even if they did occur amidst a lot of the COVID lockdowns that were still in place in Germany. It was nice to be away from the hectic pace of work. Those two weeks were great, but they did not solve the issue entirely. What I needed to figure out was how do I take care of myself during the busy days because I cannot afford to take two weeks off any time things start to feel a little stressful. I started to dig a lot more into articles, blogs, and books about self-care to see what the experts were saying. What I found was self-care is not meant to only happen once in a blue moon. Self-care is a proactive approach to managing the stress of our lives. Self-care is an in the moment skill. Self-care is taking care of ourselves on a minute to minute basis by assessing our needs and taking action to fulfill them. If you are thirsty, do you wait until the end of the week to finally take a drink of water? No, you take a drink right at that moment you become thirsty. Guess what? That’s self-care. You are feeling yourself getting frustrated by your co-workers so you step out of the office for a second to grab some air. Guess what? Also, self-care. Both of these examples are still retroactive examples of self-care. A proactive approach to self-care can also be helpful to create a more healthy environment for ourselves. This proactive approach looks different for everyone based on the time and resource parameters present in different circumstances. For example, I plan to spend one hour at the gym each day of the work week during lunch so I am not taking away any time from my family by having to go after work. During busy times when my day is full of different training events, then I wake up early to make sure I still get my workout in to help me stick to my own personal self-care routine.
This week, I want you to stop and reflect on your own needs and how you can start structuring your environment to practice self-care while still being a highly functioning bad-ass that both of us know that you are. In order to remain always in pursuit, we need to be firing on all cylinders. In order to do that, we need to do some maintenance and care for ourselves. We live life on the offense on a continuous basis by slowing down when we need to so we can ramp back up with it’s go time.
-Daren