I don’t have time to (not) look after myself

Time. It’s a precious commodity. The one we often spend without really thinking about it, and then realise we didn’t actually do what we wanted to with it.

We spend our time at work, asleep, looking after other people (children/grandchildren/parents/others). We spend time on household chores, ‘life admin’. We crash out at the end of the day, watch tv/Netflix/Prime, scroll through our social media platform of choice. And then we get to bed feeling exhausted and like everyone else has a part of us but that there’s nothing left for ourselves. And then we might not sleep well, only to wake up and do it all again, just a little bit more tired than the day before.

We are socialised and conditioned, particularly those of us raised as female, to put other people before ourselves, that others’ needs are more important than our own. We leave our needs until the end of the day, only to discover we lack the time and/or energy to meet them. Or we feel guilty, selfish if we ‘indulge’ ourselves, like looking after ourselves requires some special justification. Like somehow we are less important than the other people in our lives.

But this thinking is somewhat back to front. There’s a reason we’re told to ‘put on your own oxygen mask before helping others with theirs’. This is because you can’t support other people if your own needs are not being met.

The whole point of looking after yourself (selfcare) is not to be selfish or self-centred, it’s to empower you to serve others in the best way possible. Once my needs are met I have greater capacity to support others.

So perhaps we need to rethink the way we live our lives. Given how full our lives and days are, we need as much inner strength and capacity as possible! Far from not having time to look after myself, I don’t have time not to look after myself. So I need to create time in my day to make sure my needs are met, so I can best support others, be that at home or at work.

So let’s let that idea sink in for a bit, and then we can think about how we can create that time and make some changes…