Self-Care and the Permission to Enjoy Our Life

Welcome to the July newsletter of The Wellbeing Equation. July brings together International Self-Care Day and Minority Mental Health Month, two observances that invite us to think more carefully about what it means to care for ourselves and why that care can look so different from one person’s life to another.

This is part of what interests me about self-care. We all know what the word means, and we can usually name what our self-care should include. But beneath the usual cliché-sounding advice to rest more, eat better, move our bodies, and take time for ourselves, there is often a harder question: what were we taught we were allowed to need in the first place?

It starts off in kindergarten, maybe first or second grade, with the ringing of a bell. By the time we are young adults, we know what that means: sit still, pay attention, and answer the questions in front of us in the way we are supposed to. The bell does not only tell us when class begins and ends. It also begins to teach us something about how the world works, whether or not that world makes any sense to us.

In essence, we are taught to listen respectfully while someone else tells us what they believe is important for us to know. School makes this especially clear. For a large part of the day, we are not asked what we would like to learn or where our interest naturally goes. We may get some room for that outside of school or on the weekends. But for the most part, the structure of school carries a different message: this is what you need to focus on now.

Over time, we can get the message that what we want or need is not what we are supposed to be paying attention to. And if that happens frequently enough, we can lose sight of the importance of giving ourselves enough time and attention to explore what our needs and desires are.

Jim came to see me for stress and irritability after his primary care physician referred him following a mild heart attack. When we began talking about the stress in his life, Jim spoke a great deal about family. He took his responsibilities seriously and was proud of being someone his family could count on. From a young age, he would come straight home after school and do two hours of homework. After this, he had to work on his family’s farm, help with the chores, and make sure the animals were fed and well cared for.

He had four other brothers and sisters, and Jim’s family had a hard time making ends meet. In high school, Jim played football, but after practice he still needed to tend to the chores, finish his homework, and make sure the animals were taken good care of. When he turned fifteen, he took a part-time job bagging groceries on weekends at a local supermarket to help with family expenses.

Jim chose to move back home after college and work the family farm. He had earned an agricultural degree from the local university and was happy to return. This also allowed his sister to stop working on the farm and go to college as well. A few years ago, Jim’s father died from heart complications. After this, Jim and his wife decided to buy the family farm.

Now as an adult, Jim is married to his high school sweetheart and owns his family’s farm. He has three children under the age of ten and, much like his younger self, is busy from sunup to sundown. He still takes pride in caring for his animals and is teaching his young children how to do this, even at their age.

Because Jim felt he was always moving from one thing to another when he was growing up and had missed out on some quality time with his parents, he and his wife decided to homeschool their children. This way, he could be at home and make a real difference in his kids’ lives. But the life Jim was trying to give his children also placed a good deal of stress on him, much as it had on his own father. And now Jim, with his own adult responsibilities, was sitting in my office after a heart attack of his own.

Jim did not need anyone to teach him how to be responsible. He had learned that part of life very well. What he seemed to have a harder time understanding was that his own health and wellbeing needed to be part of that responsibility. Before his heart attack, Jim treated his stress and irritability as if they were merely part of his personality rather than as a sign that his health needed attention. In fact, Jim could pretty quickly tell when something was wrong with one of his animals or someone in his family and move quickly to take care of them. But when it came to himself, he did not respond with the same level of concern.

What Jim’s health issues show is how uneven our responsibilities can become at certain points in our lives if we are not careful. Like Jim, those of us geared toward taking care of others can sometimes be less attentive to our own health.

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In today’s day and age, many of us, like Jim, have become so accustomed to being overly busy that we scarcely think twice about it. But the fact that we have grown used to living this way does not mean it helps us thrive. Living in relation to what we value is important, but not if we do it in a way that neglects other parts of our life, including our health, that also help us thrive. This means we would do ourselves a great service by paying close attention to how we are living our lives and how it is affecting us.

When stress and irritation become a normal part of our life, as they did for Jim, we can begin to feel as though something is wrong with us, yet be much slower to ask whether the way we are living is part of the problem. Oftentimes, it’s not that something is wrong with us per se, but that the pace, or perhaps the way, we have chosen to live our lives is simply not healthy or good for us.

The idea behind a slower pace of life is that when we slow down, our minds and bodies stand a better chance of working and feeling better. And yet a slower pace isn’t the only thing that goes into taking good care of ourselves. Slowing down may not be enough by itself, but it can help the other things we do to care for ourselves work better. Part of the reason is that too much stress and pressure can make it harder to think clearly about what we need to do to take better care of ourselves and how to follow through on it.

Also, when our lives are consumed by busyness and a faster pace of life, we may end up with less room or capacity for other aspects of life that are important to us. One place this can show up is in how much time and energy we consciously give to activities that are both enjoyable and healthy for us.

For Jim, the problem was more complicated because much of what he spent his time doing was deeply important to him. His father had lived a similar style of life, giving most of his time to the farm and family while paying far less attention to his own health. Jim had followed a similar path. Before his heart attack, he had never questioned the pace of his life or considered whether his stress and irritability might be related to the way he was living his life.

For many of us, like Jim, this can mean letting healthy habits that help reduce stress fall by the wayside or putting off things we enjoy until tomorrow, only to find that tomorrow too often never comes. Making our health and enjoyment a priority can become complicated when doing so takes time away from other aspects of our lives we deeply care about.

However, the irony is that neglecting our health and wellness needs for too long can lead to health problems that make it harder to give the same time and attention to the very parts of our lives that may have contributed to those problems in the first place. What this means is that, at some point, our health problems can end up setting limits on how we live our lives in ways we do not prefer and would not choose for ourselves. Thus, the time we spend caring for our health and wellness is not simply time taken away from the rest of our life, but part of what helps us keep doing what we love and what is important to us.

Part of a good life, then, is understanding that our health and wellbeing are not solely about avoiding problems and illness or remaining able to meet our responsibilities. Feeling healthy and alive is also part of what allows us to enjoy our life and whatever we choose to take part in.

As we saw with Jim, if we don’t find ways of intermingling our health and wellness with the responsibilities of our life, we can eventually run into health problems. But there is also a risk that our health and wellness become yet another responsibility, and if we do not enjoy the ways we care for ourselves, our lives can feel like even more of a struggle. To offset this to the degree possible, I find it helpful not only to figure out how to take our self-care needs seriously, but also to find ways of caring for ourselves that we actually enjoy.

And yet there is something deeply personal about what each of us finds enjoyable. As strange as it might sound, this means that part of caring for ourselves is learning what we genuinely enjoy and how we like going about living our lives.

For many of us, though, knowing what we enjoy can raise a harder question: once we know what we enjoy, why can it still be so difficult to incorporate it into our lives? Most of us do not set out to become so serious about adult life that enjoyment gets left out of our wellbeing equation.

In this regard, I often find that this happens gradually as more of our time is taken up by adult responsibilities such as work, family life, keeping a roof over our heads, paying the bills, and making ends meet. In other words, unless we consciously carve out time for the things we enjoy, they can slowly become a smaller part of our everyday life. And enjoyment is often part of what makes life worth living in the first place.

For Jim, though, the problem was not that he had chosen a life he did not enjoy. He had grown up enjoying many aspects of farm and family life, but somewhere along the way those same parts of his life became adult responsibilities he experienced as increasingly stressful and irritating. He had made little time for self-care, such as relaxation and decompression activities, or simply for dedicating some time during his week to having fun. Thus, over time, more and more of the life he cared about began to feel like work and responsibility, with less fun in it.

What Jim’s experience conveys is that we can care deeply about the life we have built and still find ourselves enjoying less and less of it when we give too little of our time to caring for ourselves and having fun.

With this in mind, here are a few practices that can help us look more closely at our own lives and what we may need more of.

1. How Are We Living Our Lives?

When we become accustomed to certain ways of living, it can be difficult to notice precisely how they are affecting us over time. One place to begin is by looking at a typical week and asking ourselves whether its pace leaves us feeling overly rushed, tired, irritable, or unable to slow down. We can also pay attention to whether we are moving from one responsibility to the next with very little time in between. The point is not to decide that our life is wrong or that we need to completely overhaul it. Rather, it is to see whether the way we are going about our lives is making it harder to care for ourselves, relax, or enjoy parts of our life that are important to us. This gives us a bit more to work with than simply telling ourselves we need to slow down.

2. Our Wellbeing and the Attention It Requires

Once we have looked more closely at how we are living, we can next ask what our health and wellbeing need from us. For some of us, it may be getting more sleep or following up on a health concern we have been putting off. For others, it may be finding more regular ways to relax and decompress during the week. Rather than creating another list of things we are supposed to do, we can notice whether some part of caring for ourselves has been receiving too little attention. From there, we can think about one realistic way of giving that part of our wellbeing more time and care.

3. Enjoyment and Its Place in Our Lives

When we think about enjoyment, it can help to ask ourselves what we genuinely like doing and whether those things are part of how we spend our time each week. Maybe it is reading, cooking, being outside, listening to music, or seeing friends. Instead of choosing activities because we think we should enjoy them, we can pay attention to what we actually enjoy and whether we are making enough time for it. If we are not, we can begin with one thing and think about where it might realistically fit into our week. Sometimes enjoyment becomes less a matter of finding something new and more a matter of going back to something we already know we like.

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In Closing,

Perhaps one difficulty in caring for ourselves is that we can become so occupied with certain parts of our life that we stop paying attention to what else we may need to make our lives healthier and happier. The question, then, is not whether our responsibilities are important, but whether our health and enjoyment have been intermingled with them.

👇Comment below: If you feel that your self-care is getting too little of your time and attention in this phase of your life, what do you think would help you change that?

With warmth and gratitude,

Bronce

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