Self-Care for Real Life: The Impact of Small Incremental Changes

There are so many things that go in to taking care of ourselves. And it can feel kind of overwhelming at times when we hold an all-or-none mentality to taking on self-care. Often times, we create routines of activities catered to our most ideal and optimized self.

Maybe your ideal-self wakes up every morning at 6am, drinks a glass of water with lemon, eats a nutritious breakfast, takes a shower, brushes your teeth (and flosses!), goes to work, goes to an hour long fitness class, eats a nutritious home cooked dinner, cleans the house, makes a nice cup of tea and read a chapter of your book before going to bed at 10pm. And you notice how great you feel and you decide that you will make this your daily routine.

But then life happens. Maybe you are dealing with a life change, like a break-up or a loss, or you suddenly have to move, or things get really busy and stressful at work. And now, you are off that routine your ideal-self created. A new routine might take its place. You might snooze your alarm for an hour, rush off to work, come home and collapse in front of the tv, eating take-out, going to bed and staying up until 3am scrolling on your phone. It can feel almost impossible to get back to that ideal-self routine when it feels so far off from how you are living your life now. But the fallacy is that all-or-nothing thinking.

When I ask clients if they have a movement practice in their lives, they will often respond by saying something along the lines of, “no, I mean I used to go to this gym 3 times a week, and I guess I could try to go back, but I’m just so exhausted when I get home from work.” Their ideal self created that routine, but that didn’t account for today’s life stressors, so now there is no routine.

So what do you do when life gets in the way of your self-care practice?

The solution here is to make any aspect of self-care scalable. Break it down into categories, like exercise, hygiene, diet, sleep, etc. For each category, think about how you can make it scalable. If you can’t go to the gym 3 times a week, can you do a home work out? If that feels like too much, think of the smallest increment that makes you go, “Oh, I can do that.”

For me, my ideal-self goes to the yoga studio at least 3 times a week for power vinyasa classes. I am not my ideal-self at the moment, and that’s okay. So I ask myself, what is my “oh, I can do that” form of movement. Some days it’s a 30 minute HIT workout. Some days it’s a 5 minute Yoga with Adrienne video at home. Some days it is going for a walk around the block. Some days, it’s taking one really deep, mindful breath and stretching my arms over my head. I make it scalable to what I can do that day. And I don’t judge myself for not being up to my ideal-self’s standards. Because today I take one deep breath, then tomorrow I can do a 5 minute home yoga routine, and maybe next week I can do a 15 minute home practice, and before I know it I’ve built some momentum and might find myself ready to get back to the yoga studio.

I also apply this concept to hygiene. Our ideal selves might shower daily, wash our hair every other day, brush our teeth twice a day, etc. When a client finds themselves struggling with depression, this goes out the window. For me personally, in the months following the death of a close family member, I found showers suddenly so exhausting that I’d have to sit down in the shower. So I sat down in the shower. Then I started taking baths in the morning. Some days, I couldn’t bring myself to get in the water at all, so I would use shower wipes (like the kind you’d use when you go camping). By making it scalable, I was able to make sure that staying on top of my hygiene was still a priority, so that eventually, taking a stand up shower felt doable again.

So that’s my advice for anyone who is finds the idea of self-care overwhelming. Make it scalable. Find that smallest increment of doing it that you go, “Oh, I can do that.” If doing all the dishes feels overwhelming, can you wash two dishes? If you can’t commit to your full yoga practice, can you try a pose in the kitchen while your tea steeps? If you can’t figure out how to eat a balanced diet, can you make sure you take your multi-vitamin today? A small step in the direction you want to go is bigger than not moving at all. And that small step creates momentum, so that you might find yourself building capacity and better habits, and you might find yourself back in your ideal-self routine. And you’ll know how to get there should life happen again, as it tends to do.

Therapy can be a helpful resource to work through any blocks that have emerged in your self-care practice and brainstorm how to get you back on track. If you’d like support on this journey, reach out.