The term “self-care” gets thrown around a lot, especially via social media. It’s a legitimate concept, but the popular idea seems to be that self-care equates to taking time away from the daily grind to pamper oneself, and that isn’t the only part of self-care.
Self-care is also the everyday things: the little bits of maintenance that keep us from breaking down. Going outside and getting some fresh air. Taking some time to doodle. Putting away the smartphone. Drinking a glass of water. Sitting with your thoughts. Writing them in a journal or a blog.
A few months into our… relationship? …my therapist gave me a printout of a short essay by author Brianna Wiest, entitled, “This Is What Self-Care Really Means, Because It’s Not All Salt Baths And Chocolate Cake.” (Make sure your ad-blocker is turned on if you choose to read the entire essay.)
Self-care should not be something we resort to because we are so absolutely exhausted that we need some reprieve from our own relentless internal pressure.
True self-care is not salt baths and chocolate cake, it is making the choice to build a life you don’t need to regularly escape from.
And that often takes doing the thing you least want to do.
—Brianna Wiest
Years ago, I had the idea to personify the structures of the brain, so I could visualize them interacting with each other and with the construct that is my self — I guess that would be the ego? I imagined the dorsal striatum, which recognizes and repeats patterns, as a dolphin that performs the same trick every time it gets a certain cue. The nucleus accumbens, which serves up options that have previously resulted in the most pleasure, I personified as Benedict Cumberbatch handing me whatever will make me happy in the moment: a bowl of pasta, or my iPhone.
I forget how I chose to visualize the prefrontal cortex, which should theoretically be in charge and directing conscious decisions — maybe because I felt like it wasn’t, in fact, taking charge. That’s the thing with ADHD: things that produce the reward sensation in typical brains don’t have the same impact, and the memory of what impact they do have is not easily recalled.
For example, I feel pretty awesome after I go to Krav Maga, generally speaking. I get the endorphin rush from the physical activity, I get the social interaction with my partners and classmates, I get the satisfaction of having honed my skills and helped others do the same, and I get an amazing night’s sleep (if I stick to the proper bedtime routine).
But.
Say the end of my work day rolls around, and it’s been a doozie. I’m mentally and physically fatigued. I don’t have the oomph to make a proper dinner, much less gather up myself and my gear and my 11-year-old son and drive out to the dojo. If I skip class, I’m likely to stay up late watching YouTube on the smart TV and feel even worse the next day. If I make myself go, though, I’ll be so glad I did.
One would think this decision is a no-brainer (so to speak), but it’s not. If I allow this to be a conscious decision, I’ll order takeout and skip class and find a justification somewhere. (“I’m so tired, I’m sure I would have injured myself if I’d gone to class.”)
The solution for me is to make self-care a routine, a ritual, not a choice. It’s like this with so many things in my life: I need to make the decision in advance, when I’m in the right headspace, so that when the time comes that I need to do the inconvenient thing that will benefit me in the long run, it just happens. There is no decision to be made. There is no choice. This is just what happens. I use my tendency toward all-or-nothing thinking to my advantage.
I turn 47 next month; you’d think I’d have myself figured out by now.
Side note: The pedantic grammarian in me has a consistently hard time accepting the fact that correct grammar is a thing that can change over time, despite what the linguists say. I learned about run-on sentences in school, and I learned the technical name “comma splice” in my Freshman year of college. I see them everywhere, and the fact that a published author uses what I would consider incorrect punctuation just makes my skin crawl.