I did a brief survey a while ago and I asked women to tell me their favorite forms of self-care.  The top 3 answers were (in no particular order):

• Massage
• Manicure/pedicure
• Exercise

It’s no wonder then that when I mention self-care to my clients, many of them think of these things and tell me they’d love to be able to take better care of themselves but they can’t afford to or don’t have time.   There is an assumption that self-care has to require time and money and that just isn’t so.

Self-care doesn’t have to be expensive and it doesn’t have to take a lot of time.  In fact, here are 2 great no cost/no time ways of taking care of yourself.  The first one is actually a time saver!

1.  Just say ‘no.’ When we say we don’t have time to take care of ourselves, what we are really saying is that we are saying ‘yes’ to everyone else and have allowed our boundaries to be invaded.   A huge, cost-free, time saving self-care strategy is to decline requests and offers. We need to learn not to say yes to every request for volunteer involvement, and not to accept every invitation and opportunity.

Step back and take stock of the things you really enjoy doing, the things you do that are fulfilling, energizing and that make a contribution.  Hang on to those.  Then take an inventory of the things that you are doing that are draining you, that you do out of habit or obligation.  Find ways to shed those things… resign from volunteer boards, find a replacement for yourself for things,  or at the very least, do things less often.

2. Speak gently to yourself. The second no cost/no time strategy focuses around self-talk, a frequent topic on this blog.
A great method of cost- free self-care is speaking kindly and gently to yourself.  We are often really tough on ourselves.   We send ourselves a lot of negative messages.  We tell ourselves that we are ‘bad’ if we don’t do this,  we feel guilty if we don’t do that, we worry that others will get angry if we don’t participate. We have all sorts of conversations going on in our heads about what we should and shouldn’t do, rules about what good husbands/wives, sisters/brothers, friends, daughters/sons do.  And, if we aren’t doing it… we’re BAD.  Who made up those rules?  Who says they are right?  And who will be doing it all when we collapse from exhaustion?

I have a client who is a wife and mother of 2 young children and daughter of parents who are well into their 80’s.  She’s active in her community doing various volunteer activities.  Whenever she doesn’t do all of the things she thinks she’s supposed to be doing, she beats herself up.  She thinks of herself as disorganized, a bad mother, a neglectful daughter.  She says things like “I should go to that meeting”  “I should be making a good dinner for my family.”  “A good mother, a good daughter, a good wife does X.”  She was so busy responding to everyone else’s needs and meeting everyone else’s expectations, that one day, she just collapsed and ended up in the hospital.  Diagnosis:  exhaustion and anemia.  She was so focused on everyone else, she didn’t notice what was going on with her own body.

The irony here, and the lesson to be learned from this is:  If you are so busy taking care of everyone else, you burn yourself out and then you are of no use to anyone.  So you create exactly what you are trying to avoid.

In the next few weeks, notice what you are doing that is draining you of energy, and find ways to gently back off from some of them.  Give it up all together, find a replacement for yourself, suggest meeting less often, find a different, more fulfilling way of doing things.  And do all of this without guilt and negative self-talk.  Remind yourself that your well-being is important.  Without your attention to it,  you can not be your best!