Why we’ve GOT to re-define the term “self-care”

For 15 days, we’re exploring the topic of making our health and well-being a priority as part of the 15 Days to a Healthier You series. You can read Day 1 here.

Before we go any further in this series, I think it’s important that we define self-care. It’s a term that gets bandied around a lot and I think it is often misused and abused.

The reality is this: I don’t want to just survive life. Thus, I’m not looking for survival tactics.

I want to thrive. I want to live life as my best, boldest, and bravest self. I want to live up to my fullest potential.

Yesterday I talked about the importance of making our health and well-being a priority, but I want to be clear: I’m not making self-care a priority so I can cope with life. I don’t want to limp along through life just trying to make it.

I want to prioritize self-care so I can succeed in life. So I can grow stronger, embrace life more fully, love more enthusiastically, live more generously, and serve others more wholeheartedly.

The Difference Between Self-Care & Self-Comfort

I heard Megan and Kelly on the Sorta Awesome show recently discussing the differences between self-care and self-comfort and I thought it was really profound. I think it’s important that we define what this looks like in our own life. It can be easy to confuse the two.

What Self-Care Is: Making our health and well-being a priority. Listening to and attending to what our body and soul needs so that we are able to live our lives with energy and purpose.

What Self-Care Isn’t: Numbing ourselves from reality, using coping mechanisms, or turning to addictive behavior to try to survive life.

To help you understand where I’m coming from with this, let me give you a really practical example. Let’s say your child fell down and skinned their knee and it was bleeding pretty seriously. Yes, you should comfort your child, but you also need to care for your child by getting the bleeding to stop, getting medical attention (if necessary), and bandaging up the wound.

Comfort can be very important, but it’s not enough if our souls are bleeding. We can’t just slap a warm hug or chocolate ice cream and a chick flick on as a bandage labeled “self-care” and think that all will be well.

No, we need to stop the bleeding. And often, that means we first need to determine where the bleeding is actually coming from in the first place.

To me, this is what self-care is. It’s not a temporary fix that might make you feel better in the moment but does nothing for you long-term. Self-care is dealing with root causes, healing from deep wounds, and working on permanent solutions to struggles.

Pay Attention to the Pain; Listen to Your Tears

Until you are willing to admit there is pain, you can’t figure out where it’s coming from or how to fix it. So today, I want you to get really honest with yourself and ask: What’s bleeding? Where does it hurt? Am I trying to cope with life because I’d rather avoid a painful situation? Am I self-medicating in some way in order to mask what I’m really feeling deep down?

That’s how you get to the heart of what’s hurting and discover where the pain points are. These answers might not be obvious at first. They might require some intense soul-searching. They might dredge up things you’d rather stuff down and pretend don’t exist. They might invoke tears or a knot at the pit of your stomach.

Pay attention to the tears. Pay attention to the anxiety rising inside of you. Don’t dismiss it. Don’t run from it.

Instead, when you feel the tears or the anxiety, stop and let yourself stay in it. Ask yourself, “Where is this coming from? What triggered this? Why am I feeling this?”

What Does Your Soul Need?

Remember how yesterday we talked about how taking care of ourselves will look different for different people and I encouraged you to make a list of what energizes you? Today, I want to drill down further and I want you to really ask yourself, “What does my soul need?”

This is a question I’ve really been asking myself the past 6 months as part of my Year of Rest.

I’ve talked about the Year of Rest multiple times on the blog and on social media. So many people have commented with things like, “I’m sure that’s been amazing!” Or, “Are you feeling all rested and refreshed?” Or, “It must be so incredible.”

The truth is: It has been wonderful — but not at all in the way I was expecting. I was expecting a year of rest to be filled with more sleep, more time with my family, more fun, more reading, more time for things I love. And it has been that… and that’s been wonderful.

But what has completely caught me off guard is that it’s also been a year of ugly crying. I’m not a crier, usually. I can be the only one in a group to experience something deeply touching without ever shedding a tear. I’m known to be stoic and non-emotional.

That’s all changed this year, however. I’ve probably cried more tears than I have in all the past 20 years put together.

As I’ve been weaning myself off my addiction to “hustle” and intentionally sought quietness and stillness in my life, I’ve struggled to figure out who I am without all of the noise, the accolades, and the accomplishing.

I’ve realized that the busyness was a bandage I tried to slap on. Instead of addressing deep wounds and aches and longings in my soul; I tried to medicate with productivity.

It felt good in the moment. It numbed the pain. It filled the empty spaces. And as long as I kept up the out-of-breath living, I didn’t have to confront the reality or deal with the broken parts of me I’d rather hide.

I realized that instead of dealing with the pain and hurt and hard situations of life over the past number of years, I’d stuffed them down deep, pretended they didn’t exist, and heaped on more busyness to distract myself.

What Self-Care Looks Like in This Season for Me

As I’ve asked myself, “What does my soul need?” I’ve realized that self-care in this season has been me allowing myself to cry. Allowing myself space to really feel. To acknowledge the pain. To open up with safe friends in safe spaces about how much my heart feels broken by situations in my past.

Self-care has meant letting other people see the under-belly of who I really am. It’s meant welcoming people into the authentic messiness and rawness and not apologizing.

It’s been ugly and real… and oh so healing for me! Allowing myself the space and permission to feel, the permission to acknowledge the pain, and welcoming people in to see that I’m a broken, hot mess some days, has made me so much stronger, happier, and healthier than I’ve been in, well, probably ever.

Self-care has also looked like making weight-lifting a priority, giving myself permission to gain a little weight, becoming more spontaneous, working a whole lot less, experimenting with new things, saying “yes” to what once would have seemed way too crazy for me, sleeping more, and making space for a whole lot more fun in my life. {Read more about all of this here.}