It's easy to tell others to use self-care, it's a totally different thing to do it for yourself

One thing that I always heard growing up was “do as I say, not as I do.” When I was a pain in the ass kid I didn’t like when adults said that and now that I am a “grown up” I find myself not just saying it, but also practicing it as well. To me, the saying and the act is just a refusal to take my own advice. If I wouldn’t take it, why am I giving it out? This is what brings me to this blog which has been a long time coming now. One thing that is so important is self-care. Taking care of your mind and body when you are rundown, overwhelmed, anxious or just need a break. I am a huge advocate for it. Having said all of that, I’m the first person to tell you to engage in self-care but often times I am the LAST person to do it for myself. Does this happen to anyone else?

This past year with school being full-time my initial thought was “I got this, I can handle the stuff that’s on my plate no problem.” When I started this website and this blog in January I had a semester of school under my belt and I really thought that just one more thing would be totally fine. A few weeks and two blog posts into it and I couldn’t keep up. It was one of the first times in sobriety that I had to make a tough choice in regards to this idea of self-care.

For me, self-care when it comes to work and activities that are aligned with work means going at a SUSTAINABLE pace. It’s really easy for me to say “yes” to absolutely everything but often times I’ve found that when I say yes too much, I can’t give a full effort into all of the things that I have said yes to. What ends up happening then is just a classic snowball effect. Because I can’t give the full effort and attention that I want to, I don’t do as good of a job as I would like, then I am embarrassed about the work that I’ve done and I immediately go down the rabbit hole of “I am terrible at everything and everyone knows it.” Objectively, I know that none of those things are true but it’s so hard to be objective about something when I am totally immersed in the feelings I have about it.

So, with that idea of a sustainable pace in mind, I decided to actually take my own advice and utilize a little self-care. The blogs and website could wait, I needed to allocate my time to school and work. At first it totally sucked having to drop something that meant so much to me. However, when things got hectic, I realized that I made the right decision for myself even though it was something that in the moment, I was not happy about.

I’ve realized that when it comes to listening to my own advice about self-care, the idea of admitting I can’t handle something is what gets in my way. When I sift through that a little, it’s really that I get in my own way. Being able to say no to something was so beneficial in the long-term and it allowed me to give 100% to a few things instead of 50% to a lot of things. Life is a marathon, not a sprint and I need to remember that moving at a sustainable pace will help me get closer to the finish line