Don’t Use Self-Care as an Escape
Today, self-care can bring us visions of lying in a bathtub filled to the rim with bubbles, soft lighting provided by candles, a glass of wine, and some fancy dark chocolates as a way to escape the pressures of our everyday lives; but long-lasting self-care comes with the consistent and sometimes difficult work to become that favorite version of yourself so that you can enjoy life every day without the need to escape.
As an analogy, imagine the lint trap in a clothes dryer. When the clothes dryer is doing the work it was made to do, it collects lint with every load of clothes. This is similar to the tasks, thoughts (both positive and negative), and goals you collect through living your everyday life. If you don’t handle the lint, it will decrease the efficiency of the dryer, make the dryer work harder and longer, and could possibly cause the dryer to go up in flames.
Self-care is doing the work, cleaning out that lint trap – setting boundaries, keeping the promises you make to yourself, being truthful about your situation, choosing and sticking to your goals. Self-care is not about escaping life – it’s about creating a life that you thoroughly enjoy so that you can continue to evolve into that favorite version of yourself.
Self-care means taking stock – looking at your life realistically. It might mean considering your failures and disappointments – do you hold them against yourself, or can you forgive yourself and take the time to consider new goals and strategies?
Self-care might mean not having a perfectly clean house, or the six-pack abs, or not keeping up with the neighbors. It might mean re-evaluating how you compare your insides with everyone else’s outsides and always coming up short. Self-care is determining your standards and goals, establishing an action plan to bring them to life, and finding a way to harmonize this with reality.
Self-care will be our theme for 2022 and if you truly want to care for yourself, follow us to learn more about eliminating negative self-talk, keeping promises, setting goals, evaluating limiting beliefs, uncovering triggers, creating a healthy lifestyle, identifying perfectionism tendencies, creating healthy boundaries, etc. to live life as your favorite version of yourself.
