Creating a Self Care Practice That Works for You: a walk through

Self care is highly personal. The practices you choose will depend on what you’d like to focus on, what you enjoy, and everything else that’s going on in your life. Before choosing your self care practice, I recommend reviewing why self care is so hard and exploring the shift most applicable to you.

Because of the high degree of personalization, let’s go through the process of making a self care practice work for you through the lens of Kathy. Kathy is a fictional person based off of some of the typical problems I see when working with people.

Identify the Context: what’s going on in your life

Identifying what’s going on in your life, beyond the problem that you’re wanting to solve, can allow you to have compassion for yourself and helps you see where or how you can get help.

Around the problem

Meet Kathy. Kathy’s having a hard time concentrating during the day because she’s stressed. She’s stressed because she can’t sleep. She can’t sleep because she’s stressed and has too many thoughts going through her head at night. There’s this thing at work that needs to be done first thing in the morning. Her kid is taking too long to fill out their college application and is about to miss the deadline. And on top of that, her neck and shoulders are so tight.

Kathy knows she needs to practice self care, but is in the thick of it and doesn’t know where to start.

Around your responsibilities

Kathy has a kiddo at home that’s applying for college. She wants to be supportive of her kid while letting them make their own decisions. She’s also working a full time job, Monday through Friday.

Around your capacity

Kathy feels wiped at the end of the day. It takes a lot to make sure there’s food for dinner, especially after the recent death of her dog. She’s part of a hiking group that hikes 3-8 miles on the weekends. That helps her keep going through the week.

Identify the Problem(s) You Want to Solve.

This sounds simple, but, as humans, we don’t usually have just 1 problem to solve. We have many, and they’re usually interconnected with something else. It’s both a blessing and a curse. On the one hand, which problem do you focus on? On the other hand, relieving one problem could ease the others as well.

In Kathy’s case, her problems are

• Lack of concentration during the day

• Lack of sleep

• Hard time going to sleep

• Tight neck and shoulders

• Grief (while not specifically mentioned as a problem, she’s probably affected by grief from the loss of her dog)

• Stress from compounding life events

Choose 1 Practice and How to Implement

That was a long list of problems. How do we know which one to attend to first?

In general, I suggest starting with the thing that’s creating the most pain, whether that’s physical, mental, emotional, energetic, or spiritual. However, sometimes you get lucky and 1 practice could address multiple problems.

Since all of Kathy’s problems are so interconnected, we could actually create the most influence by implementing an effective sleep routine that focuses on relaxing her body and calming her mind. And since it’s a sleep routine, it would make the most sense to do it in the evening, before bed.

If the practice wasn’t in the evening, looking at responsibilities or capacity could affect where to add this new practice into the day.

Identify what to remove in order to make room for change

We’re taught that more is better. More time, more flexibility, more money. In reality, more is more.

Imagine a water balloon. As you fill it with water, you’re taking up part of its capacity to hold water. You notice the water balloon begin to stretch as you continue filling it, before it eventually bursts.

Your capacity is similar, where you can feel the demands of life taking their toll on you. When that happens, you can choose do 1 of 3 things:

• Stop and stay where you are. You try and hold everything together and hope nothing else gets added to your plate.

• Continue taking on more. You eventually burn out so much that you might need to take medical leave.

• Remove some of the load. You let go of responsibilities, get help, or both.

In Kathy’s case, since we’re trying to implement the sleep routine, is there something in the evening where she could remove or source help?

• Is she spending time in the evening doom scrolling?

• Is her current evening routine drinking a glass of wine and watching TV in order to unwind?

• Can she get help with dinner from a partner, a meal service, or a meal train?

Remember, capacity is more than physical time on your calendar. It includes your energy. 

Physical changes, like the ones mentioned above, can affect energetic capacity. Making room energetically for this change could also mean Kathy finds a way to experience her grief and allow it to move: i.e. therapy, talking with a friend, having a ceremony for her dog. Alternatively, creating energetic capacity could be letting go of control of what she wants to have happen: whether it’s around her kid getting into college or how people react at work.

Identify what would make implementing easier

Implementing your self care plan doesn’t happen in a vacuum. You are allowed and encouraged to get help.

Identify Your Support System and Add accountability

What support do you already have and what support do you need to help you implement your practice?

Help can come in the form of a person or community. It can be in the form of leaning into habits and routines you’ve already created.

Some other ways Kathy (or you) could get help with implementing a self care plan could:

• Having a friend check in with to say, “yes, I did my self care practice”

• Being part of a community that practices self care and encourages each other to keep going

• Working one-on-one with someone who helps people manage and decrease their stress

  
  

Make it simple

Kathy could have a whole plan that takes 90 minutes to implement. It could involve tea, movement, aroma therapy, and sound machines. OR she could do 1 yoga pose with deep breathing for 1-5 minutes.

Both are self care practices. Both are impactful. But adding a short practice is much easier to implement than adding something that takes over an hour. If Kathy was getting help from me, I’d offer the short, simple practice. If she already had an established practice, we could adjust it to focus on reducing the stress she’s experiencing.

Small change creates big impact.

The goal is to make your practice simple enough for you to repeat it over and over and over again. Studies have shown that small, simple, consistent effort is more effective at creating change than large, intense, inconsistent practices.

Act and Iterate

Now that you’ve gone through all the steps, it’s time to implement. See what happens when you actually try to do the thing. I’ve tried to remove as many roadblocks as possible, but there’s always something that comes up. This doesn’t mean that there’s anything wrong with you. It doesn’t mean that you’re not good enough at making a self care practice and you’re destined to be stressed and sore forever. It could mean that something has changed or there was something you didn’t take account of.

In yoga, we have a practice of abhyasa vairagya: consistent effort with detachment from the outcome and how things are “supposed to” happen. You can always adjust the process and what you do, but you cannot control what happens because of your effort.

Imagine you’re navigating from one end of a glass maze to another. You can see where you want to go. You might even see some of the glass walls because of the angle the light is hitting it, but you can’t get to your destination in a straight line. You get there by setting a path and changing it as you discover where the walls are, but you’re still focused on getting to the other end. 

And if for some reason you want to make your way to a different location (have a different goal or solve a different problem) because of what you learned along the way, you can do that. And you’ll have the added benefit of remembering parts of the maze that you already went through.

Your effort is not wasted.

If all this feels like an overwhelming amount of steps, you’re not alone. I work with a bunch of people who want to improve their self care and lower their stress, but they don’t have the bandwidth to go through all the things on their own. There are even people who know what to do, but work with me because they don’t do it on their own. If you’d like help creating a practice or having accountability, let’s chat. I'd love to guide you through your self care journey.