Architecture 101: Making Self-Care Strategic

Join trauma therapist Lindsay Faas to learn foundational concepts that are key to developing a useful, meaningful and sustainable self-care plan. This episode will give you the blueprint to build a plan that can stand the test of front line stress.

Show Notes

Show Notes:

In this episode we are talking about the strategy involved in creating a useful, meaningful and sustainable self-care plan. For plans to be useful they have to actually be grounded in reality and practicality – without that they’ll just sit on the backburner, never being implemented. Our goal is to understand the ways to diversify our self-care plan to ensure we have a plan for every circumstance. During this episode we talk about 4 key areas to keep in mind as you consider crafting a self-care plan:

1.      Keep time in mind: self-care actions need to be diverse in terms of the time they take. Some need to fit into 5 minutes or less, others within 30 minutes, and others may be longer. Accessibility is key to making self-care consistent and useful, and you should have more things that take less time included in your plan, as time is often hard to come by.

2.      Keep expense in mind: just like self-care needs to be diverse based on time, it also needs to be diverse based on expense. You cannot go for a 2 hour massage everyday…well, maybe some people can but most of us can’t. So plan actions that cost nothing, are cheap and then range from there. Again, there should be far more activities on the free or cheap end of the spectrum than the expensive end.

3.      Keep energy in mind: diversify your activity planning based on the energy it takes. You may have days where you are up for a hike, and others where brushing your teeth feels like Everest. Ensure you have a range of ideas that you can use when you are low energy or sick, as well as when you are moderate and higher energy.

4.      Keep context in mind: consider activities you can do wherever you are and whoever you’re with. While it might be ideal to engage in self-care when you have a night to yourself at home, this will not always be an option. Come up with creative ideas for showing a heart of care whether you’re at home or getting groceries; whether you are on your own or with one or more people. 

We also cover some reminders:

·        Self-care won’t always feel good. Self-care includes nice things that feel good, but it also includes regularly scheduling dentist visits and caring for your basic wellness.

·        Self-care involves setting boundaries and saying “no” sometimes – with ourselves and with others.

·        Self-care involves experimentation and self-reflection to notice what you like, what you don’t and how to continually adapt as your preferences and needs evolve.

Episode Challenge:

To begin, start by meeting basic needs – hydrate, eat nutritious foods, engage in hygiene activities, prioritize sleep habits, limit substances, limit screens, prioritize base health needs including doctor/dentist appointments. If you are already doing all of these things – bravo! I would encourage you to reflect a bit on whether you are doing them with a heart of care for you or out of a place of routine or obligation and consider if there are ways to could shift your mindset about them a bit to lean heavier into the caring for self heart.

And, register for the 5 day challenge here!

Additional Resources:

The Self-Care Dare 5 Day Challenge for First Responders & Front Line Workers

https://theblissfulmind.com/self-care-strategies/

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What is Behind The Line?

Created for First Responders and Front Line Workers to tackle the challenges of working on the front lines. Dig into topics on burnout, workplace dynamics, managing mental health, balancing family life...and so much more. Created and hosted by Lindsay Faas, clinical counsellor and trauma therapist. View the show notes, and access bonus resources at https://my.thrive-life.ca/behind-the-line.

Hey there and welcome back to Behind the Line.
For those of you new to the show, I’m your host, Lindsay Faas. I am a clinical counsellor specializing in trauma therapy, and as a result of my exposure to supporting those on the front lines, I have become a passionate wellness advocate and educator for First Responders and Front Line Workers. Behind the Line is a place for us to talk about the real life behind the scenes challenges facing you on the front lines. The work you do is incredibly hard and shines a light on the darkest aspects of humanity and suffering – there are no easy answers for how to cope with what you face, but I created this podcast with the hope of bringing easy access to skills for wellness – allowing you to find greater sustainability, both on the job and off.
Now, if you haven’t already shared this podcast with your community of co-workers, this is the time to do it, because we are launching into a 5 week series starting today that is going to cover a topic that has become trendy to talk about but tends to hit some degree of resistance with those on the front lines. We are talking about self-care. The reason I say you should share this with your circle, is because we are going to tackle this topic from every angle, and you are not going to want to miss it. So, find me on social media @lindsayafaas and share our posts with your colleagues or on your professional forum group pages, send the info to your union or workplace to include in their email newsletters, shout it from the rooftops, send carrier pigeons…I don’t care how you do it but get the word out because self-care has become a bit of a hot button topic and we’re going to clarify exactly what self-care is all about, why we have resistance to it, how to overcome barriers to it and how to make it a meaningful, personal, and practical tool in our strategic wellness action plan. Every. Single. First Responder and Front Line Worker needs this series, so show love to one another by offering this resource to those you care about on the job.
As I said a minute ago, Self-Care has become this trendy topic, talked about often. But it has also become a bit of a hot button topic for those on the front lines, and I think this is for a few reasons. First, as with other topics we’ve covered on this show, I think many perceive self-care as fluffy or, to use a word I don’t love, girly – like taking a bubble bath while diffusing essential oils with candles lit around the room. Second, I think it’s brought up as an answer to all things, it become a bit of a platitude that you can “just” do some self-care and it will all be better…but when you’ve witnessed the worst of humanity, a bubble bath just isn’t going to do the trick. Third, I think that we complicate it. When I talk with people about self-care and what they think it is and means, I hear about hour long baths, going for a massage, going on vacation…these things are all great things, and they certainly can be self-caring, but they are not even remotely the whole shebang. When we complicate it we make it one more thing I have to do, have to fit in, and then it almost negates whatever benefit I might gain from doing it and it makes it less likely I’ll ever make it happen at all as it’s too hard to fit in. Maybe there are more reasons that we roll our eyes and discount the idea of self-care when it’s suggested to us – if you have others I would love to hear them so I can add them to my list of things to dispel, pop over to my facebook or Instagram and leave me a comment with your thoughts!
As we start this series on self-care, I want to focus today on dispelling some of the myths about self-care and breaking down some of the barriers that I hear often in my office. By the end of this episode, I want you to have a strong sense of why self-care is for everyone, but even more so, why it is a non-negotiable absolute must have NEED for those on the front lines. And at the end of the episode, I am also going to tell you about something exciting I have coming up that will help you dive deeper into this non-negotiable must-have, so I hope you’ll hang around to hear more about that.
Ok, let’s start off with the most obvious myth about self-care: Self-care is selfish. I have heard this one for forever and I hate that it’s still a belief floating around out there. Western culture as well as other cultures have strong messaging about humility, self-sacrifice, self-deprecation and servitude as highly valued personal characteristics, particularly of women. So when we talk about the idea of engaging in actions that focus on self, perhaps even dare to prioritize self, all the fears of being a bad person, or being perceived as a bad person by others creep in. But part of the problem here is we misunderstand both what self-care is, as well as what selfishness is. So, to help me debunk this one I have gone to my trusty dictionary – thank you merriam-webster! – and here is the definition for selfish: concerned excessively or exclusively with oneself; seeking or concentrating on one’s own advantage, pleasure, or well-being without regard for others; arising from concern with one’s own welfare or advantage in disregard of others. To summarize, behaving selfishly means to be excessively or exclusively concerned with self without regard for others. Do you hear how extreme that is – how far you would have to go in order to actually meet the criteria for this definition? Engaging in self-caring actions, ie, ensuring our base wellness and sanity, can hardly be considered excessive or exclusive fixation with self, and I don’t think anyone in a helping profession could ever be construed as doing much of anything with complete disregard for others. When we fully understand what selfishness means, I think we can quickly see that it would be difficult to self-care ourselves into qualifying for this kind of extreme self-preoccupation. I also said a minute ago that part of the problem here is misunderstanding not just what selfishness is, but also what self-care is. At the heart of it, self-care is not just care for yourself – it is care for others. Think of it like a bank account. In order to give generously from your bank account, you also have to have something coming in…or you will very quickly be running into the red and big problems happen there. In order to care well for others, we have to have a supply to offer from, and in order to maintain our supply of energy and care, we have to refill and replenish our stores on a semi-regular basis. When you engage in self-care you actually grow your capacity to care for others, and to care more effectively for them – because you’re not offering care while running on fumes and offering them the scraps of yourself that are left after all of the other demands have been met – you are offering care from your own well self, which is a higher quality you. Some of you may have heard the airplane metaphor for self-care – it goes like this: when you are on a plane, they tell you that in the case of an emergency air masks will drop down from the overhead compartment and they instruct that you are to put on your own mask before helping others. Why? Because you are not useful if unconscious or dead – you become a liability yourself, even in the effort to come to the aid of others. We have to ensure our own wellness, because it allows us to help others. When we understand this, suddenly the idea that self-care is selfish becomes ridiculous – because not only is it not selfish, it is actually to the significant benefit of others. It is a gift we give ourselves, our loved ones, our communities and the whole wide world.
Myth number 2: Self-care is a fluffy, girly, dumb waste of time and doesn’t fix anything. Alright, this one might be a few myths mixed together. A lot of people report believing that self-care is feminine – that it is the long baths, smelly candles and trips to the spa. That is a bunch of hooey. Self-care has as many different faces as the people who employ it as a tool. It is personal to the user and can be so many things. We are going to tackle this more in coming episodes in terms of what self-care can actually look like, so come back for the coming episodes in this series, but I promise you that there is nothing specifically fluffy or girly about self care. Functionally, self-care has a very specific intention – to act as a consistent reminder to your brain and body about your worth, value and safety. In many ways, this is connected to the last several episodes where we discussed mindfulness and the ways we engage our brain to target train the structures of our brain that help to counterbalance stress. Self-caring actions and an integrated mentality of self-care as a fundamental aspect of our base operating system are significant contributors to building up the part of our brain that regulates stress. Many people talk about self-care being nice in the moment they are doing the action, but not keeping it up as a routine out of a belief that the effects are temporary and don’t actually “fix” anything. The challenge is that self-care is not a magic wand – it doesn’t instantly ease all of the problems in the world. Self-care is also not able to undo the fact that life is really hard sometimes, particularly when what you are exposed to in front line work is so far above and beyond what a “bad day” is intended to look like for most people. However, regular and consistent intentional actions of self-care create a cumulative effect and research has confirmed this – when we operate in our everyday lives looking for big and small ways to care for ourselves and replenish our stores, the accumulated effect actually changes how your brain looks and functions when stressed and when calm. Research has also shown that self-care improves measures of health and wellness including lower morbidity, mortality and subsequent healthcare costs. It’s a bit like starting a weight loss program or something else to that effect – we put in work on the front end and tend to get tempted to cave when we don’t see immediate results, but it’s the consistent effort over time that leads to the outcomes, we just have to hang in, and when we do the benefits are more than just our jean size. Engaging in self-care may not be a magic cure-all pill, but nothing in life is; it is however a really effective way of investing in your wellness long-term for your benefit and for those who care about you.
Myth number 3: Self-care is just a bunch of random activities that make you feel good. To this one I say, well…kinda. Yes, self-care is a bunch of actions, big and small, and as I mentioned before we will be talking about the specific ways we can do self-care in coming episodes, and I promise we will be giving you handouts with as many ideas as possible to help you brainstorm and find what works for you. But self-care isn’t really about the actions – it’s about the heart behind them. Let me give you an example – I’m a shower person. I have an absolute hatred for baths and cannot handle the idea of sitting in my own filth with water that is progressively getting colder with nothing to do but attempt to read a book without getting it wet. There are two versions of showers in my life, and they would look identical to an observer…which would be weird and creepy that this were observed, but nonetheless…One version is functional: shampoo hair, wash face, wash body, conditioner, rinse, done. The other looks the same, but the intention involved is different: shampoo hair and notice the smell of coconut, do the hair massage thing my hair dresser does when she shampoos before a hair cut, notice the warmth of the water, breathe in the steamy lavender scented air while I soap, stretch my neck a bit while rinsing conditioner…on the outside the actual steps would look almost the same, but in one version I’m just trying to get through the task I have to do before moving on to the next part of my day; in the other version I am allowing myself to use this functional time as a way to take time for myself, prioritize things I like and connect with them – like the coconut smell of my shampoo which I deliberately choose because it makes me think of pina coladas in a hammock on a beach somewhere warm. Think of self-care less like random actions that “feel good” and more like an exercise in intention. The best thing I can compare it to is parenting. When you parent from an intentional place, you work at being thoughtful about ways to show intentional care to and for your child. My kids love to ask me for foot massages, or one more chapter of a book, or cuddles on the couch – and those are all ways I show care to them. They also need me to book doctors appointments, dentist visits, and make them healthful meals because these are parts of how they stay well and no one else is going to do them on their behalf. When we are doing self-care we are offering a similar type of care for ourselves as good parents offer their children – we are being thoughtful of ourselves, mindful of our needs, attentive to our wishes, and willing to engage with these things knowing that it doesn’t make us spoiled and selfish, it makes us strong and capable to extend ourselves out to others.
Last but not least, myth number 4: Self-Care is Complicated/Time Consuming/Financially Demanding/Can Only be done alone… Ok, again this might be a few myths rolled into one, but I would classify these as the practical arguments against self-care. When we start talking over the next few weeks about the various types of self-care and we brainstorm what this can look like, I can guarantee you will quickly see that these arguments fall apart. In the meantime, consider my shower example. Everyday tasks can be considered self-care when we engage them from a heart of caring for and valuing ourselves – which means that things you do all the time can be converted into your self-care regime. While some self-care actions can be more complicated, time consuming, expensive, etc – this is not a requirement. Over the coming weeks we are going to talk about building a comprehensive self-care plan – and in it’s most ideal form, it would include actions that are diverse. Some that can be done if I have tons of energy, and others that can be options if I have very little energy; some that can be done over the course of hours or a weekend, others that fit in 5 minutes or less; some that cost more and some that cost less or nothing; some that are best done alone, others that can include my family or friends… Don’t let the practical concerns get in the way of trying to incorporate self-care into your daily life – I promise it gives more than it takes, and if you get a bit creative and scrappy you can find a bit of self-care almost anywhere.
As I said near the start, there may be more myths that I’ve missed – if you come up with some let me know so I can tackle them another time, but I hope that this has covered the heavy hitters. I’m curious if any of these hit home for you – and if so, I hope you mull what you’ve heard today and maybe challenge some of those preconceived notions about self-care that have perhaps limited you from really glomming on to the idea that this could be helpful. There has yet to be any research I’m aware of that suggests negative impacts of self-care – so at the end of the day it can really only stand to benefit you and those in your life, and there isn’t really a down side. Now, the next challenge is what do you do to do self-care?? Well, join me next week and we will start to tackle that question – because at the end of this series I want you to have a ton of ideas to work with that range in time, energy commitment, expense, and so on so there are no excuses.
Before we wrap up for today, I want to lay out a bit of a road map for where we’re going from here in this series on self-care, as well as share an announcement about something I’ve come up with for those keen to really work at implementing self-care strategies in a meaningful way. Let’s start with the podcast series roadmap. Today’s episode has been all about debunking the myths about self-care and making a case for why we should care about self-care. Next week’s episode, episode 11, we will be talking about making self-care strategic where we will break down ways to implement self-care in the most meaningful ways possible. The week following, episode 12, we will cover making self-care personal where we will talk about the ways self-care varies from person to person and how to get your inner-scientist to help you out in an experimentation process to figure out what self-care looks like for you. After that, episode 13 we will tackle making self-care practical – because all the learning about self-care in the world won’t amount to a hill of beans if you can’t actually put it into action and keep it up consistently day to day. And last but not least, Episode 14 is all about doing the shit and making it happen where we will wade through barriers that can get in the way, developing habits that stick and reaping the benefits of all your hard work.
Now, on top of this podcast series, and in an effort to make sure that you walk away from this with every chance at success in creating a killer self-care component of your strategic action plan for wellness – I am also going to be launching a 5 day challenge at the beginning of March called “The Self-Care Dare 5 Day Challenge for First Responders & Front Line Workers” and I hope you’ll consider joining. It is $5 to enroll for the challenge, where you’ll get access to daily videos from me focused on developing and honing your self-care skills in 5 key domains. You will also have access to a private facebook group to connect with one another and with me to help navigate stumbling blocks and celebrate successes. There will be bonus resources and some prizes to help motivate you toward your goal, and I can hardly wait! If you would like to join the challenge, you can register anytime before March 2nd when the challenge will kick off. You can find where to register in the show notes.
As I mentioned at the start of this episode, I hope you will share this with those you care about who are on the front lines alongside you. I have this dream of a culture shift for front line workers where we collectively value wellness and support one another’s wellness, rather than fearing stigma and perceptions…I may not live to see it, but it starts with things like this – sharing tools that help to build us up, that give us common language and skills, and that encourage us to not just bide time and survive in the job but to find tools to help us thrive. I want that for you and for your peers, and I hope you will help me get the message out.
As always, I would love to hear from you and always enjoy receiving thoughts, stories, reflections and feedback from episodes. My contact details are always in the show notes. Until next time, stay safe.