What does self care look like?

[00:00:00] Well, hello! This is The Daily Five with Aurooba, that's me, where we reflect on creating our best lives a little bit every day. Here we go!

[00:00:15] When I was recording yesterday's episode, I said that resetting can be a form of self care. And in that same episode, I said that I reset by resetting my environment. But it got me thinking, what does self care look like and how does it fit into creating our best lives? How does it fit into improving, trying to meet our goals and remembering that the journey is, in fact, more important than the destination?

[00:00:47] Self care is not doing nothing. It's not lazing about eating junk food. It's not shirking off your responsibilities. It can be in moderation, perhaps, but a lot of the time that's not really self care. Maybe it's self indulgence, or better yet, it might be self sabotage. I remember reading a blog post from Sarah Von Bargen many, many years ago that really drove this point home for me.

[00:01:15] In that blog post, she argued that the term self care is often used as a cop out term to let us engage in our least healthy tendencies. We think binging three shows in three days while eating only mac and cheese and Doritos curled up in our pyjamas without a shower in bed is gonna make us feel better.

[00:01:34] I promise you, it totally, totally won't. It will feel great for maybe the first couple hours, but after those three days are over, you're gonna feel numb and crappy. Good self care can actually be a way of completing the stress response cycle, something we covered in episode 1 and episode 9 of season 2, which is already You know, an excellent way that self care connects to creating our best lives and achieving our goals.

[00:02:07] However, self care is also a practice in rewarding yourself. For whatever reason, a lot of us have rewards the wrong way in our heads, or Maybe, I don't know what it is exactly. For example, I ate healthy for five days and maybe I'll go and reward myself with some ice cream. Or, I did an amazing workout and I walked past a chocolate aisle in the grocery store and I'm gonna reward myself with a KitKat.

[00:02:37] I did 10, 000 steps yesterday, so today I'm gonna vetch out on the couch. How many times have we done something like that? Why is a reward for good habits things we've forbidden ourselves when we're being good? I mean, one. You can have a Kit Kat or ice cream whenever you want, and you can veg out on the couch whenever you want.

[00:03:04] When we associate these things in our head with the idea of a reward for a job well done, we're almost shooting ourselves in the feet again. And, you know, curtailing the good habit that we were trying to build in the first place. The reward for eating healthy for five days is probably already self evident in different ways.

[00:03:27] Having ice cream is not actually unhealthy. So, trying to stop yourself from eating it is not really great either. Now, if you had a whole tub of it in a single sitting, that is unhealthy. Why, it's, it's so weird, but why is being good to yourself being treated like a, a, um, what's a good comparison here?

[00:03:54] Like a brittle serving of oat bran that you forced down your throat without milk. Being good to yourself feels good a lot of the times, and if it doesn't, that's a problem and we should fix it. You're not going to stick with the things you don't like. Yes, not everything you want to do in life is always something you love doing, but when it comes to habits and new systems, you need to find a way to make it something you like, at least a little bit.

[00:04:25] Because if you don't, you're not going to stick with it. And if you are, good for you, but you're not going to get any points from me or from the world for doing things and making your life a misery. Because who wants to live a miserable life, right? So, self care. It can be good for you. And it should be good as well.

[00:04:54] Thanks for listening. Same time tomorrow?