Several years ago, I was discussing self-care with a wise friend of mine who also happens to be a pastor. One piece of our conversation stood out. She said that self-care is not generic. It is not a “get a monthly massage and you will feel better” type of thing. To be effective, self-care should be viewed as a targeted approach to solving a problem.
In other words, self-care needs to be directed toward an area of specific need AND is an activity that is beneficial to the individual.
My friend asked me what I do for self-care. When I admitted that I was spending quite a lot of time on social media, she asked me (without judgment), “Is that fulfilling your need for self-care?” The answer was “no”.
Like pretty much everything else in life, self-care is unique to a person and a situation.
I am more targeted with self-care now, and one of the things I have been doing for years is mindfulness training. I have Generalized Anxiety Disorder, and mindfulness training helps me deal with the runaway doomsday scenarios that my beautiful brain likes to present to me at random moments.
Funny (not funny) thing is that one day, I sat in my bathroom weeping because my brain was inundating me with a detailed scenario that my wise friend above had died. She hadn’t. She wasn’t in imminent danger of death. It was awful because I had committed fully to the “story” my well-meaning brain was weaving.
Here’s my process to address my anxiety through self-care:
Problem: Perseverating on bad things that have not happened, and likely won’t.
Specific Need: Training my brain to “unhook” from disturbing thoughts and focus on what is happening in the present.
Self-care tactics that work for me: Therapy, mindfulness training
And as a bonus:
Things I was doing for self-care that weren’t working for me: Escaping through social media
During a meditation session (using the Calm app) a few months ago, I learned about a taxonomy of self-care that resonated with me. I offer it to assist you with targeting your self-care efforts toward activities that will be effective and productive.
6 types of self-care according to Dr. Robyn Gobin
Dr. Gobin defines self-care as “Doing what is needed to help you feel healthy, happy, and effective in your life.”
She specifies 6 targets for self-care activities:
- Physical – Taking care of your body (e.g., eating, movement, rest).
- Social – Being connected to people you love.
- Emotional – Making space to feel and express your emotions.
- Vocational – Caring for yourself when work gets challenging. Finding a good balance between work and life.
- Spiritual – The recognition that you exist beyond what you see in the mirror. Nourishing the spirit inside.
- Intellectual – Keeping your brain sharp. Challenging your beautiful brain to tackle problems in creative ways.
Here’s how I think we can use this taxonomy.
- Identify the problem you need to solve. Write it out.
- Make preliminary predictions about what category of self-care activities from Dr. Gobin’s taxonomy might address the problem.
- Gather data. Try some things you think will help for a finite time. Talk to people who love you and get their perspective on the issues with which you are struggling. Read more about what experts recommend that could address the problem.
- Assess the impact of your preliminary actions and data gathering. Is the problem lessening? What are the gaps between what you are doing and what loved ones and/or experts recommend?
- Determine your next steps. Implement new tactics as appropriate. Go back to step #1 and see if you have better insight into the problem now.
In other words, follow the Scientific Method. Tried. True. Effective.
I hope that you will target your self-care activities to things that are right for you. Remember that what works for someone else may not work for you. I also hope that you don’t confuse self-care with “numbing” like I did originally with all the social media. For more on numbing, follow Queen Brene Brown, Ph.D.’s work.
Is self-care selfish?
Short answer: of course not.
Longer answer: Dr. Gobin asserts that selfish acts only benefit you. Self-care fills up your bucket and other people benefit from the overflow. They get the best version of you.
I would add that it’s still okay to do things for yourself and no one else. I tend to think of selfish people as those who don’t give a flip for anyone else and will do things with little consideration of their (likely negative) impact on others.
Once you have your oxygen mask securely in place, you can help others. If those others happen to be kiddos in your life, here are some free resources that I have incorporated into my new Crazy Productive offerings.
Self-care is contagious
I pride myself on the quality of self-care that I offer to my clients, particularly to people whose problems lie within the Vocational arena. I help people. I change lives for the better and that knowledge is my self-care when business gets rough, and I just want to give up.
One-to-one coaching is the most direct way that I get my “happys” from my work. I get to see a person transform from session to session. There’s nothing like that nourishment I receive though direct observation of the impacts of my work.
Because I know I won’t offer coaching forever, my legacy is The Crazy Productive Academy. I have smushed decades of coaching, hundreds of blogs/vlogs, and dozens of training courses delivered to thousands of people into an affordable monthly membership program for you.
The Crazy Productive Academy encompasses the kindness, support, humor, expertise, honesty, and accountability that you should always expect from me.
Check it out! Perhaps this is the self-care gift you need to address a problem you are experiencing.
In the meantime, I will continue meditating because a new venture like the Academy is so anxiety-provoking that I can hardly express it. “Hello fear of failure, it’s been a minute!”
I’ll finish this post using the same words as one of my meditation coaches…
Much love to you, my friend.
Years ago, my BFF and I concluded that somewhere along the line, cautious people taught their children that perseverating about all the bad things that might happen would inculcate us against the bad things that might happen. If we could fully imagine the worst, then when the worst came, it would not hurt so much. It would be n intriguing double-blind experiment except for the fact that we learned this, not through tutelage, but by osmosis, such that we seem unable to stop performing the experiment. This is to say, you had me at “hello.”
I think, for most of us, the idea of having an intellectual approach to what we see as an emotional situation (because, I suspect most of us consider our brains having meltdowns not as thinking, but of our emotions faking being thoughts) is foreign. If you’re having a meltdown, how do you stop having a meltdown to think, logically about talking to friends or reading what experts have to say? The problem is that we have to do the self-care before we need the self-care, like changing the oil in our cars before the car is about to go kerplunk in the middle of the highway. Beyond that, I imagine it’s much easier to schedule a massage or eat a cookie than it is to risk the vulnerability of connecting with others or expressing emotions.
The wisdom of approaching this taxonomy is obvious. But on one’s own, this is a toughie. It’s a good thing your Crazy Productive Academy is there to hold people’s hands, like a self-help concierge equivalent of the mechanic who reminds you to schedule your oil change. People in your academy are going to feel so much better!