It can be surprisingly difficult to put yourself first. In fact, sometimes it can seem impossible, especially if you have competing priorities, such as work and caring for others. It doesn’t always help to have people tell you that you need to take some time for self-care either. That can make it seem like just another chore and as though you’re failing on yet another front.
Yet it really is true that if you don’t take some time for yourself, there will come a point where you can’t be there for anyone or anything else either. Sometimes, it can help to identify a bare minimum of concrete actions that you can take even when everything seems overwhelming. This gives you something to build on and helps to remind you that don’t need the time and money to go on a week-long retreat to take better care of yourself.
Get Your Checkups
Taking yourself to the doctor and dentist might seem like more unappealing than empowering and not something that comes to mind when you think of pampering yourself. However, a good baseline of health is important to keeping up with a demanding schedule. On top of that, you may be experiencing some physical symptoms that you don’t realize can be easily addressed. For example, your doctor may find that your exhaustion is linked to low iron. It can be especially easy to neglect your dental health when there isn’t an emergency happening, particularly since dental care can be expensive and often isn’t covered by health insurance. However, this is another necessary facet of looking after yourself.
If you’re concerned about costs, you can apply for a payment plan that will allow you to pay in installments. When it comes to dental work, you can apply for dental loans online to get needed treatments now that you’ve been putting off. You can ask your practice for their unique application link. It only takes a few seconds to apply, and it won’t affect your credit score. Making the medical rounds is almost no one’s idea of a good time, but doing so can substantially improve your quality of life and there are multiple options out there for financing self-improvement.
Find Five Minutes
Some self-care advice can be infuriating because of the assumptions that it makes about your expansive time. You aren’t alone if you read that sentence and said, “What expansive time?” Advice that suggests that you get up an hour early or somehow find extra hours in your day operates from the assumption that you’re not using your time well, not that there’s no time at all, and no time really can be the reality. Maybe you work multiple jobs and have children as well. Maybe you’re caregiving for an elderly relative on top of other responsibilities. These types of obligations can leave you with little time to eat and shower and sleep, let alone take an hour or two for deep work or yoga and meditation or to get a massage.
The answer is to start small. You can’t find an hour, but can you find five minutes? Even if you must lock yourself in a bathroom stall to do it, just about everyone can take five. Those five minutes are completely yours. Use them to read a life changing health book, write a few lines in a journal or do some breathing exercise that you find online. Don’t use them to scroll on your phone. Initially, it will be difficult to stop your mind from racing or to resist the temptation to run to the next thing, so it’s a good idea to choose a concrete activity. Once you’re really using your five minutes to either do nothing at all or to do something that’s just for you, add another minute. Alternately, find another five minutes somewhere else in the day. You may be surprised to find how nourishing these tiny pockets of you time can be.
Be Honest
Once you’ve started to grab five minutes here and there, take an honest look at your days. Much of self-care advice is predicated on the idea that people have the luxury of filling their days with things they think of as obligations that really aren’t. These articles often seem to be aimed at single people with no family obligations or at people who can afford to outsource some of life’s more undesirable chores. This can be frustrating if your days really do contain many tasks that you can’t just abandon and if you don’t have much in the way of disposable income.
However, even if this is the case, if you take an unsparing look at your life, you may find places where you can set down a burden you don’t need to carry. Maybe this means to ask for help from those around you. Maybe you need to stop trying to do the work of two people in your forty-hour work week and tell your boss that they need to hire someone. Maybe you have a volunteer position that you worry no one else can fill. See if there’s one thing you can drop from your life to give yourself some breathing room.
Make Connections
This can be one of the most difficult areas in which to find the right balance. Maybe you feel stretched thin by others and making connections sounds like the last thing that you want to do. In this case, think about focusing on quality over quantity. It’s possible that you’re surrounded by people far too often, but you aren’t connecting with them in a meaningful way. On the other hand, perhaps you’re genuinely more isolated than you should be. You don’t have to be the life of the party or cultivate a wide circle of friends, but even introverts need some interaction with others.
One way to make those connections is just in your routine life. A brief, friendly conversation or even exchanging a smile with a cashier, a bus driver or the person beside you in line can go a long way toward making you feel a little more rooted in the world. You can also work on deepening existing connections. Sometimes, all you’ll have time for is a quick text message exchange or a video call, but if you can see someone in person, that’s even better.
