The Importance of Self Care
Last month, on World Mental Health Day, I shared this post on Instagram.
I found the response quite overwhelming, to be honest, and I want to thank everyone who took the time to offer words of support. But there’s only so much you can say in a short Instagram post, and I wanted to expand a little on one of the things I mentioned - the importance of taking care of our mental health.
Something I didn’t understand until it was too late was that you don’t need to have a mental illness to need to look after your mental health. That’s like saying you don’t need to look after your heart unless you’ve got heart disease. And learning to view my mind as I would any other part of my body was one of the first big steps I ever took to helping myself.
Like many athletes, I came to understand the importance of rest to my progression. Recovery time is important, even in a sport like mine, and more physically dynamic understand this better than anyone. The body needs time to replenish what has been lost and repair damage caused by exercise. Without that rest period, the body will just continue to break down under the physical stress. My body needed a break from the ridiculous positions I competed in. It needed rest after travelling, to adapt to time zone change and overcome travel fatigue. And that fatigue builds up over time, so the recovery time has to be proportional. Short breaks of a few minutes during training sessions. Medium breaks of a few days between competitions. Long breaks of a few months at the end of four-year cycles.
There’s also well-documented psychological aspects to rest. Firstly, sport is tiring and your brain needs time to replenish and repair the same as any other organ in your body. It also needs time to process and absorb what’s been learned - consciously or subconsciously - during either training or competition. But, most importantly, competition (and sometimes even training) can be a stressful environment and a brain needs a break from that in the same way a body needs a rest from lifting weights or running marathons.
That last bit was a light-bulb moment for me. Because your brain is an organ, just like your heart and your lungs. But drastically more complex. The thing is that prolonged exposure to stress - or more specifically the hormones it prompts your body to produce - actually damages areas of the brain over time, affecting memory and impairing learning. Starting to understand how my brain worked on a physical level helped me make sense of what I felt on an emotional level.
It also made me realise the importance of treating my mind, my brain, with a bit more respect. If I hurt my back, I would see the physio. If I had an ear infection, I would see the doctor. If I couldn’t sleep because my mind was such a tangle of emotions… well, maybe I should see someone for that too. And in the same way I try to eat well and stay active to keep my body healthy, I also try to make time to do things to care for my mind. Which is how I discovered self-care.
Now, speaking as a woman in particular, that term has become a little warped in recent years. Search the #selfcaresunday tag on Instagram and you’ll find plenty of pictures of glamorous influencers touting luxury products and fuelling feelings of inadequacy in impressionable young women across the world. I read somewhere that millennials spend twice as much on self-care than their parents’ generation, and that the self-care industry was worth something in excess of $10 billion… which is just insane. So, to be clear, I’m talking about self-care the act, not the industry - which as far as I can tell is just another marketing schtick to beat women with and looks suspiciously like the evil love-child of the cosmetics and diet industries.
Self care means exactly that - taking care of oneself. How you do that is entirely up to you. In my experience, what you do is actually almost irrelevant - it’s just making the conscious choice to put your own needs first. And don’t get me wrong, I like a long soak in the bath with a glass of wine as much as the next girl. But on days when I’m really low, self care just means collapsing on the sofa and binging on reruns of my favourite TV shows. Old episodes of Doctor Who and Stargate are my go-to, but things like Buffy and Charmed work just as well too. They were shows I watched as a teenager, and I find the nostalgia factor comforting. Reading serves a similar purpose, and both let me escape whatever is causing me stress. By losing myself in another world, I’m able to give myself space from my emotions while they sort themselves out.
When I’ve got more energy, getting outside - weather permitting, and often even when it’s not - can make a tremendous difference. The dog needs out for a run every day and while walks with a mental spaniel are not always relaxing, since I’m always on high alert for things he might try to chase, the time spent outdoors and connecting with nature always leaves me feeling refreshed. I’ve also taken up gardening (now that I have a garden) and have found the act of caring and nurturing plants to be very beneficial for my mood. There’s the added benefit that the outcome is neither immediate nor finite, so I’m not constantly criticising myself that it’s not good enough - which is what happened when I started painting again…
The point is that whatever I do, I do with full understanding that it is me making time for myself. I am a people pleaser at heart - though it might surprise some to hear that - and I’m very guilty of putting everyone else’s needs before my own. And, as I alluded to in my post on World Mental Health Day, I’ve struggled with low self-esteem for a very long time. Making time for myself, whatever that looks like, reinforces to that critical voice inside that I am valuable and that I deserve to be happy.
Self care is just rest for the mind. It’s listening to your body and giving it what it needs, and you don’t need to have anxiety or depression or any other mental illness to benefit from it. So look after your mental health the same way you’d look after your physical health. It’s a more complex beast, right enough, but it’s just as important.
Do you practice self-care? What are some of your favourite self-care activities? Let me know in the comments below!