How to Overcome the Obstacles to Self-Care

Before self-care can become a consistent replenishing of your health and energy, you have to decide what works as self-care and then do it. It is not easy, but we make it harder when we make the obstacles bigger and more difficult in our minds. How can you make it easier? Reduce the perceived cost and effort, and increase the priority.

Reducing the Cost

What do you see as the cost of doing the thing you most need for your self- care? Sometimes it is money, but cost also includes the resources of time, energy and stamina as well. It could include the cost of whatever you replace with a self-care activity.

Maybe you need to improve your physical health, but you think that working out an hour a day, six days a week, seems impossible, especially since it has been six months since you last exercised. You are probably right. Perhaps you could take a 10-minute daily walk instead. That would have added up to about 28 hours of exercise over that last six months, and most of us can find 10 minutes. Reduce the cost of time to something that is easy. Usually, 15 minutes or less is much less formidable when starting is difficult. Some is better than none. It is easier to add a little more time once you start, but the goal is not a buff body with new gym friends. The self-care goal is to feel nourished and rejuvenated in the present and/or the future.

Reducing the Effort

Capitalize on times when your energy is higher. What you do first thing in the morning always gets done, whether it is scrolling through your social media feed or meditating. That is helpful to know when building self-care habits. However, physical, mental and social energy wax and wane throughout the day, but in predictable patterns. Maybe you wake up slowly with your lowest physical energy of the day, but your mental energy is high when you are freshly awake. If you find journaling nourishing, do that first thing, but save physical exercise for later in the day. If, instead, your brain is tired after work or class, but your physical body is buzzing, plan movement when it will be most nourishing and rejuvenating, and do not expect that you will be willing to work on homework or case notes then. It costs less energy to do mental activities when your mental energy is high, physical activities when physical energy is high, and social activities when social energy is high.

Increasing the Priority

Why do you want to care for yourself? Which of your reasons motivates you? Perhaps knowing that self-care is something you need to do to feel better leaves you self-reprimanded, but not motivated to change. Many of us in this profession equate self-care with selfishness, and if candles and bubbles baths were just for you, well, it might be. However, our ability to care for ourselves directly impacts our clients, intimate partners, families and friends. You are the most important helping tool you have, and self-care is how you repair and sharpen that tool. When you do not, you become dull and broken from the work. Then, your work is less effective and your personal life suffers.

If you use Creative Play Therapy, you must build self-care into every week because this work is quick and intense. It brings out deep and painful wounds. When we contain and collect client pain, it is like holding a trash can out for them to dump their wounded stories. We provide the container for clients to express and eventually leave their hurt. Our job is to provide the safe space to contain their pain. However, as we hold that container, we will inevitably get splattered with some of the seeping wounds and feel the burden when it overflows. We see and hear the worst kinds of stories from our clients, and it inevitably impacts us, too. To extend the metaphor, we need to have consistent things in place to take out the trash. We need continual self-care.

We encourage you to build wellness into your schedule, just as you schedule time to complete case notes and block out client sessions. It is essential for career longevity, job enjoyment, client care and work/life satisfaction. You need self- care when you feel the urge to check out for a few hours, but by then you are already depleted. Instead, make deposits nearly every day to keep from running on empty, deposits that nourish and replenish. If you want to be a great helper, facilitate changed lives, and be an example of the healthy life you want for your clients, then wellness is not optional. Without it, you will limit yourself.

When addressing what later became the American Counseling Association, Carl Rogers (Rogers, 1980) concluded his speech with these words:

.. .The optimal helping relationship is the kind of relationship created by a person who is psychologically mature. Or to put it in another way, the degree to which I can create relationships which facilitate the growth of others as separate persons is a measure of the growth I have achieved in myself. In some respects this is a disturbing thought, but it is also a promising or challenging one. It would indicate that if I am interested in creating helping relationships I have a fascinating lifetime job ahead of me, stretching and developing my potentialities in the direction of growth.

(p. 56)

By creating your own wellness plan (making it as flexible as needed), and consistently doing the things that increase your energy, nourish you inside and out, and relieve stress, you improve your growth potential. That makes you a better helper. Regardless of how depleted you are today, by consistently adding small deposits to your wellness bank, you will improve and develop reserves when you need them.