How I Practice Self-Care: What Self-Care Means to Me

My life revolves around taking care of myself.

I don't think you need to have a chronic illness for self-care to be your highest priority, but managing my mental health symptoms has forced and encouraged me to put such high stock in it.

I tried for over a month to write this post, but kept finding myself overwhelmed with the seemingly impossible task of summing up every aspect of self-care that keeps me going. So, I'm breaking it into a couple different posts. This first post will detail how I define self-care for myself. I'll follow up with two more posts further elaborating on how I specifically practice self-care.

A disclosure: I am not a mental health professional. I cannot advise what will help with mental health symptoms beyond sharing what has helped with mine. Everyone is different and experiences their symptoms differently. What I have to say about self-care comes from my personal and academic experiences, but not professional by any means. If you or anyone you know is struggling with mental health symptoms that poorly affect their lives, please seek professional help.

Self-care, for me, has four main dimensions. The first is unconscious, the second is conscious, the third is daily, and the fourth is as needed. For me, self-care looks like one of those graphics that rates the cross of two separate scales. I have unconscious daily habits, like checking in with myself; unconscious as-needed actions, like meditative exercises; conscious daily habits, like feeding myself; and conscious as-needed actions, like dunking my head in a bowl of ice water (I swear it works).

Unconscious habits:

In the eight years that I've been in regular treatment for depressive and anxious symptoms, I've been learning and adopting healthy coping mechanisms. These coping mechanisms replace the approach to life that I'd developed in desperate self-preservation. My habit of eating sugar developed when I didn't have the energy to plan/shop for/cook good meals but still needed the energy to get through the day, but it only serves to make me more tired and less likely to eat well in the future. Other unhealthy coping mechanisms include toxic thought patterns and isolating social behavior.

When I first learn these unconscious, healthy coping mechanisms, they take attention and effort to practice. It can be difficult and even annoying to institute these coping mechanisms into my life, no matter how small. But the more I practice them, the less attention and effort I need to put into them. These coping mechanisms have largely become habits that my brain leans on without my prompting.

Conscious actions:

When I'm learning new coping mechanisms or I'm in a particularly emotional/triggering situation, I have to sit down and think about how to utilize this kind of self-care.

They can be as little as reminding myself to floss or as big as developing an emergency plan to keep myself going when I don't feel safe.

This includes the kind of activities I think people usually think of when they think of self-care. Going out of your way to incorporate a nice bath, a shopping spree, etc. into your day is absolutely a valuable conscious form of self-care. But that is a slim percentage of what self-care actually is. I'm going to keep bringing that point up throughout this series. I don't mean to rain on spa days or curling up with a good book. I simply mean to expand on our understanding of what it means to develop lifestyles that allow us to take care of ourselves.

Daily:

Whether once or dozens of times a day, I practice these self-care habits regularly. This is the self-care that gets me through life without just feeling like I'm barely keeping my head above water.

Sometimes, though, it does enable me to just barely keep my head above water. This is less-than-ideal, but still ok. Sometimes, I have a lot of days like this. Sometimes, I have very few. I am doing what I need to to stay alive, I think, and working on finding even better ways to stay alive in the future.

As needed:

In all honesty, there's a lot of overlap between conscious self-care and as-needed self-care. Most of the as-needed self-care I engage in IS conscious. It has to be conscious, or I wouldn't know to just do it occasionally.

Engaging in as-needed self-care requires me to do a lot of routine work to stay in touch with myself. How am I feeling at any given moment? What are my 5 senses experiencing? Am I hungry? What are the words I can put to the emotional state I'm in? How long have I been feeling this way? 

Being aware of how I'm doing all the time does take a lot of energy, but the benefits (including the energy I gain by addressing any negative feelings) absolutely make the work worth it.

Now that I've shared what self-care means to me, I'm going to write an additional two posts detailing the daily and as-needed forms of self-care that make up my routines. Will you have to wait another 3 months to read the follow ups? Quite possibly. 

OOTD: What I'm Not Thankful For

I am thankful for so much. I am also pointedly not thankful for some of the things in my life.
Whenever I'm confronted with something inconvenient or difficult for me, my initial reaction is to be bitter and/or feel sorry for myself. Unfortunately, neither of those emotions help me or the situation.
It's important to acknowledge and validate my initial emotional reactions, but I don't need to give them any more power than they deserve. This is easier said than done, but it's true nonetheless.

My parents always told me that if I don't like something, instead of moping or whining about it, I should change it. Problem-solving is a useful tool to use when confronted with something that makes life more difficult, but it's not the only tool. Accepting that which you do not like is important both in situations when you can make a change and when you can't. 

When you can change what you don't like in your life, acceptance is the first step to acknowledging something is off in your life. From there, you can truly address the problem head-on.
When you can't change what you don't like in your life or the changes you can make are slow to take effect, acceptance can help you go through life without being bogged down.

When my therapist first started talking to me about acceptance, I had a hard time accepting (lol) this as a method for dealing with things that make my life harder. For one, it sounds like it means you have to invalidate your emotions. For another, it sounds a lot like giving up.
True acceptance is neither invalidating nor giving up. Society often preaches ignorance disguised as acceptance, but that is not true acceptance. True acceptance does not mean ignoring your feelings or the problem. It means openly acknowledging and validating your feelings, being honest about the problem, and accepting the reality of the situation. From there, you can start to live without being weighed down by the misery of a problem you can neither solve nor, in your mind, live with.

This was supposed to be my Thanksgiving week post. The Monday before Thanksgiving, however, I was put into a really difficult situation with the lease on my apartment. What it boiled down to was that I would need to move out the week of December 1st, a full month before I was expecting to have to move out. I'd been leisurely looking for roommates and apartments under the impression that I had until the end of my lease at the end of December, but I hadn't even so much as arranged to meet anyone or see anything yet. I felt scared, angry, and hopeless at the prospect of having to move out in 12 days without anywhere to go.

Luckily, this was a difficult situation I could change. I could (and did) look at a number of apartments before the real estate offices closed for Thanksgiving. I could (and did) arrange a fall-back option if I couldn't find a place to sign a lease. But before I could do any of those things, I had to stop wasting all my energy by thinking about how I didn't want to leave my apartment, how I wasn't ready to look for places, that I was scared I wouldn't have enough time to find the right place or the right roommates, that I was angry I had to do any of this in the first place. I had to accept the situation I was in so I had the energy and mindset to be able to find myself (and Luxe) a place to live. Even though I didn't want to, I had to move, and I had to move soon. Accepting that made it so much easier for me to look for a place in a time crunch and start packing up to move with so little time.

Acceptance is a tool I'm still working on. However, it's something I feel content to put the energy into, because it's a tool that really helps me so often.

This belt was provided by Top Tier Style. If you would like to purchase your own, use the coupon code BLOG15 for 15% OFF everything on their store!

OOTD: Transparency

Photography by Cassidy Hopkins

We all do embarrassing shit. We all do stuff we think others wouldn't approve of. We've all used our roommate's shampoo, kissed a friend's ex, or written a strongly-worded and not factually-sourced tweet about a current event we're not actually familiar with. When we realize what we've done or realize the likelihood of someone finding out, we're stricken with shame.

If you've made it far enough in life to be able to read this (and even if you haven't tbh), you are likely very intimate with shame. It's the feeling that accompanies not fitting into your environment and perceived failure. I say "perceived" failure because people often feel ashamed of life experiences that others wouldn't consider negative. You think there's something wrong with you, that you can't get anything right, and that others see you this way as well. You get that pit in your stomach and just want to disappear from sight.

A common response to shame is to vow to not reveal one's misstep to anyone. You've just done something wrong, something you may have even known was wrong. If our actions speak louder than words, doesn't doing something someone might consider wrong make you a little big wrong?

I've written about how talking about the not-so-perfect aspects of life on social media can contribute to an honest and positive social media environment. Now, I'm advocating that your honesty doesn't need to be blasted onto the internet for all the world to see for it to benefit the world. Being vulnerable and admitting your faults and missteps to a couple people will make you feel better.

I know, I know: One of the immediate symptoms of shame is to want to conceal your perceived shameful behavior from everyone. Hear me out. If you're experiencing shame without having your shameful behavior actually exposed to the world, you're feeling embarrassed in anticipation of what others might say. Just because you feel like you need to crawl into a hole doesn't mean that others think you should.

If you don't know how others are going to react — and you don't know unless they're actually reacting — there's often no point in trying to imagine. You can work with yourself to change how you perceive this failure. Telling others about your perceived failure can actually help you receive the validation and empathy you need in that situation. It can also lift the giant burden that accompanies keeping a shameful secret. Now, the experience gets to just be a human experience instead of a gross one.

To demonstrate the power of transparency when one is experiencing shame, I'm going to share a shameful secret of my own. I only shower once a week. Not wash my hair once a week, shower once a week. Everyone I know showers a couple times a week. Some people shower every day. I've met people who often shower twice a day. I know that once a week is not very often to shower, and I'm very ashamed of my showering habits. At the same time, this habit doesn't affect me negatively enough for me to divert any energy away from the more important things I'm working on to change it. I recently started telling people about this shameful habit of mine when it comes up in conversation. Instead of lying about why my hair looks nice and shiny on day 5, I answer honestly when someone asks: I haven't showered in 5 days. I don't even justify it with a lie about how often I use dry shampoo. I'm just honest.

And guess what: I'm still here, feeling better than ever! Most of the time, people move on pretty quickly, and I realize that this thing I've been feeling gross over for years isn't actually a big deal. Sometimes people even empathize, which makes me feel even better. Honestly, sometimes people express disgust. Maybe one day I'll shower more often, but it won't be because a couple people have told me my shower schedule doesn't match theirs.

So, you see, transparency can make your life better. Just like this transparent bodysuit has made my life better (I feel so sparkly and fun!). Except, unlike this item of clothing, honesty will never go out of style.

What do you do when you're experiencing shame? If you've tried honesty (either in certain situations or as a policy), how has it affected your life? Let me know in the comments below!