Kate's Nuggets

Self-Care: It's Not What You Think It Is
Episode 10

Podcast Opening over Theme Music:
Hello and welcome. This is Kate's Nuggets, the podcast where I share bite-size nuggets of wisdom about self-leadership. I am your host, Kate Arms. I invite you to listen lightly, let these ideas wash over you. Take what you take and let the rest go. You can always come back and listen again.

Kate Arms:
Today I want to talk about self-care.

This is a really complex issue because some things can be self-care, self-soothing, self-indulgence, or actually harmful, depending on how and why you're doing them.

In any specific moment, you may be the only one who knows whether you are doing those things as a kind of self-care or not, and if it isn't self-care, you may be very tempted to lie to yourself and say that it is.

Self-care often consists of doing the hard or slightly unpleasant thing right now in service of your enhanced ability to meet your life goals. You have to learn to pay attention to your deeper needs and your surface challenges and balance what would feel good right now with what is good for your whole self beyond the limits of your present feeling.

I think of self-soothing as sort of emergency recovery and self-care as what you do proactively to make sure that you are healthy and strong and moving forward in your life to the best of your ability.

Most of us have a sense that the perfect version of our life would have us in flow all the time. We achieve flow by applying our full capacity to a problem that is just challenging enough that it requires our full attention and we can succeed.

The trouble with flow, though, is that as our capacities and resources change, we need different levels of challenge to get into that state and our capacities and resources are always in flux. If we are hungry or tired, we have fewer capacities. If we've learned new skills, we have more capacity. We need different levels of challenge to respond to all of this.

So staying in flow is very difficult and most of the time we are not in flow, which is why it feels so special when we are.

We need to find the correct amount of stress in our lives, and part of self-care is getting the right amount of stress because not enough stress is as bad for us as too much. If we believe that we have 100% chance of success in meeting a goal, life gets boring, and if that level of competence is sustained, we instinctively create additional problems simply in order to feel interested in life.

We create drama if we are not interested enough in our lives.

One of the things about paying attention to our lives is that we become more curious about our lives.

So, if there's not enough stress in our lives and we're starting to feel bored, rather than creating drama, self-care consists of cultivating curiosity and finding something to ask a question about.

If we feel that we have a 70% to 99% chance of success at a task, we are in prime learning mode. The closer to 70%, the more stressful and difficult the learning feels. The closer to 99%, the more likely we are to feel like, "I've got this. This is all coming together now."

When we don't feel like we have at least a 70% chance of success in a task, we tend to feel like it's impossible and either we overcommit because we know we should and we burn out, or we give up, or we suffer paralyzing anxiety or depression.

The heart of self-care is about keeping ourselves under the right amount of stress to feel alive without feeling overwhelmed.

Our big goal is to maximize that sense of flow. We create that sense of flow for ourselves by setting goals implicitly or explicitly and pursuing them with enough success to feel good about ourselves.

Although the specifics vary, we all have goals of positive feelings, physical security, a sense that we matter, a sense of belonging and connection, a sense of accomplishment, and a sense of agency. Without enough of any one of those, we feel like something is missing, and if we don't identify what's missing correctly, we frequently struggle with self-care.

The most common problems with self-care come when we try to increase the wrong aspect of those goals, typically either choosing things that feel good, optimizing for things that interfere with our ability to accomplish the other goals, or pushing ourselves to pursue the other goals without enough cultivation of positive feelings.

One aspect of self-care is taking the time to assess which area of our lives we are not having enough success in so that we can apply some effort into that area of our lives.

When we apply effort to areas of our lives that are not good feelings in the moment, we need to break the goals down into specifically attainable milestones that are within that 70 to 99% sense of likelihood of success and celebrate our accomplishments along the way, and this allows us to create different positive feelings.

We create pride, satisfaction in a job well done, a sense of being well used, a sense of being of service, a sense of I matter, a sense of purpose, a sense of competence. These are all good feelings.

The other thing that can happen with self-care is that we can confuse self-indulgence with self-care.

Some people who resist taking care of themselves feel like they are being selfish and self-indulgent if they take time for themselves. They often push themselves too hard and burn out.

This is an extreme example of a natural tendency, which is, we bite off a little bit more than we can chew and we overwhelm our systems. When we overwhelm our systems, we need to give ourselves time to reset. We bite off more than we can chew because we're trying to pick a challenge that will require our full capacity, and if we get it wrong and we don't actually have that capacity, we're going to fail. We need to give ourselves time to reset.

The way our body naturally does this is to withdraw for a while and rest. Depending on how overwhelmed we've been, this can be as simple as taking a few deep breaths or a nap, or as complex as retreating to a mental realm where we sink into ourselves, everything seems futile, so we give up taking action until our body has recovered.

We have natural recovery systems that when those systems are working, they cause us to rest until we have the energy to reengage, but if we overtax those systems, they themselves need to be healed. That can be something that really benefits from some outside help and we need to put extra effort into healing and recovery of our natural recovery systems in order to reengage successfully.

Self-soothing is about creating comfort or distraction from the difficult things in life, enough to recover the energy to reengage. As such, it is not an inherently bad thing. It can however be dangerous because when overused, it can be narcissistic self-indulgence and it can actually be self-harming if it becomes a very common cycle.

The way it becomes self-harming is it becomes a habitual response to stress and instead of reducing the stress and increasing your capacity, if you consistently self-soothe, you create a cycle where you soothe, you soothe, you soothe, you feel great, you feel okay, everything's okay, and then you stop soothing yourself.

All of a sudden you're faced with the things you didn't have the capacity to deal with before and without a support structure that is helping you build that capacity, your instinct is going to take you to self-soothe again, and then you come to the point where you need that self-soothing all the time in order to function because when you stop that self-soothing, you don't have the capacity to deal with anything else.

The journey to mature self-treatment is a journey from being a child who didn't have the capacity or the authority to do the things that were required to take care of themselves, to being an adult who is functioning as their own best friend, their own ideal inner parent, and the person who is currently living through the present moment.

We have to take care of ourselves as being ourselves.

Self-soothing sells, and it's often sold in the name of self-care. You earned this luxury vacation, you deserve this car. This outfit will make you feel beautiful. This drink will make you feel alive. This bed will make you feel cared for.

But the reason the advertising works from a company's perspective is that they show you what's wrong with your life and then they give you a Band-Aid that will make you feel better for that moment.

It won't actually solve the problem because they want you to keep buying the Band-Aid, and if you solve your own discomfort problem and your own capacity problem, you will stop buying the Band-Aid.

Even worse, often the Band-Aid actually prevents healing. Band-Aids can be things like binge-watching TV, buying a fancy item of clothing, going to a show, long bubble baths, fancy food and drink, comfort food, alcohol or other mind-altering drugs, massage, hot tub, time off from responsibilities of childcare, home care, sex, exercise, adventure.

They're giving you something positive to focus your attention on that relaxes your nervous system. They provide distraction or comfort in difficult times. They do not solve the difficulties, but they do provide ease.

When we are overwhelmed by life, we do need soothing and nurturing behaviors and things in order to reengage, but if we do not take the steps to build our capacity to handle the struggles of life, we fall into a cycle where we constantly need to get self-soothing or we're constantly overwhelmed.

The soothing becomes addictive.

Whatever it is we use to soothe ourselves becomes something we need in order to survive, in order to get through the day. It can be easy to miss that we've done this if we spread the self-soothing across many different things.

It's actually quite easy to notice, though not quite easy to do anything about it, if you always use the same thing to self-sooth. If you always pick up your phone when you're anxious and check social media, you see that, but if sometimes you pick up your phone and check social media and sometimes you play Candy Crush and sometimes you turn on Netflix and sometimes you channel surf and sometimes you dance in your living room and sometimes you go down the pub and get drunk and sometimes... You see what I'm getting at?

It can be hard to notice because you're spreading it across all of those different things.

You may not be overindulging in any one of them enough to think you have a problem, but if you're always doing these things, you have the same problem as someone who's always doing any one of them.

Something that looks like self-care or feels like self-care is easy to justify as self-care, even if it's actually being self-indulgent because it's only self-care for the present version of you that is not feeling good about something. It may actually be making your future the same or worse than your present, and you are about to become the you that's living in that future.

If you skip the dishes to watch Netflix, when you get off Netflix, the dishes will still be waiting. If while you're watching Netflix, the food on the dishes will have hardened, you're making your future harder, whereas you could do the dishes and then watch Netflix, you're still going to have to do the dishes.

There's a piece of self-parenting that is of self-care, that's about choosing to do the hard thing now, and there's also a piece that's about building your capacity to get through the next phase of your life with less need to self-soothe and more ease.

This can involve getting a coach to help you build new habits, going to therapy to heal from things that happened in the past that you haven't let go of, saying no, standing up for our values, finding our voice, committing to what matters to us, or making sure that your physical body is healthy, getting a full night's sleep, eating well and getting enough exercise, getting the right amount of exercise, not the amount of exercise that you need to escape into the endorphins of a runner's high, but enough exercise to keep you healthy.

Living within our means and taking control of our finances, both in terms of short-term budgeting and long-term care of our finances, is a way of taking care of ourselves, of providing ourselves with physical and psychological security and care.

Getting regular checkups, going to the dentist, brushing and flossing your teeth, putting some proactive practices in place that are growing your capacity to be with discomfort in the world. Meditation, which can help you deal with mental discomfort.

Yoga or weight training are really great ways of stretching into discomfort through your physical body. You know when you're in a yoga pose and you're stretching just to the point where it's uncomfortable, but you know it's increasing your flexibility or weight training where you do that one last rep that is so hard and you know you're going to have delayed onset muscle soreness and it's going to feel meaningful discomfort because you know you're making your body stronger. We can do that with every aspect of our lives and it's a form of self-care.

Developing the habits and the skills that allow you to create relationships that make you feel like you matter and belong and that help you create relationships where you are connected person to person as equals and they are helping you to fulfill all your other goals.

Most of our goals require other people to help us achieve them. If we use relationships as means to accomplish those goals, then we sacrifice the intimacy of the relationship and the sense of belonging and connection to meet those other goals.

To meet those other goals and the goal of belonging and connection and positive relationships, we need to find a way to partner up with people, and we typically do that by offering ourselves in service of their goals.

The challenge of all of this is that we can't do enough of this on our own.

We are dependent on the others and the world around us.

Self-care involves community, requires community, is interdependent with community.

We cannot get out of the cycle of addictive self-soothing without the ability to spend quite a lot of time on individual self-care. We do not have the ability to spend quite a lot of time on individual self-care if there aren't the community and social structures to support that. It's all part of self-care. They're all part of taking care of ourselves, and they are necessary for taking care of each other as well.

All of this stuff is complicated, it's nuanced, and requires self-awareness because some activities when undertaken with the intention of doing enough to keep me healthy are the same things that are not healthy when over or underindulged.

Exercise and food are the most obvious examples of things where you need to get the balance right. You can get addicted to the endorphins that are caused by exercise or you can sit on the couch or you can do a reasonable amount of moving your body.

A very useful question to start asking yourself is, am I avoiding something or am I preparing myself to be able to handle something?

Am I healing myself and getting back enough energy? Am I building my capacity to be able to step in and continue working towards the goals that really matter to me?

Because when it comes down to it, that's what self-care really is all about.

Self-care is about taking care of yourself sufficiently so that you can stay in the process of accomplishing your goals.

End Theme and Credits:
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Here's to Thriving! Catch you next time.
Kate's Nuggets is a Signal Fire Coaching production. The music is adapted under license from Heroic Age by Kevin McLeod.