Article
Self-Care: The Ultimate Relationship Balancing Act
Author | Christel Gudberg | Thursday 3rd September 2020
As a society, self-care has been in our “collective awareness” a lot recently. Whether this is driven by the necessity to buckle down and spend more alone-time in the recent global pandemic. Or whether we are collectively becoming more aware of the importance of self-care in our everyday lives – not just on special occasions when we might frequent a spa retreat, or go on the occasional weekend break.
Self-care has become more ingrained somehow. In our awareness at least.
It wasn’t too long ago that I contemplated the meaning behind self-care. As in, what do we actually mean here?
If we break it down – it literally means to take care of ourselves, of course. That sounds pretty simple, right?
And haven’t we been doing that for most of our adult lives? And before that, someone else took care of us. Our moms, our dads, our grannies.
But I realised – perhaps – we haven’t been taking GOOD care of ourselves.
Let me ask you: how often did you skip a meal, or forego a screen break, while you were caught up in the ambition of getting some work done?
“I’ll just finish this ONE thing”, sound familiar?
For me, that used to be – all – the time. I would routinely skip meals if they coincided with some important work that needed to get done. And if it was between dealing with my rumbling stomach or “getting it done”, my work ethic, as I thought, would usually win out.
Over time, I realised this was about more than just work ethic.
These moments seemed to be a sort of categorical inattention to the signals my body was communicating to me. Usually because it was “inconvenient”. I would even feel slight annoyance that I’d JUST gotten into the zone, and now my body required my attention, again.
I wanted my body to work FOR me, not the other way around.
On the other hand, when we embrace self-care, we have to embrace the reality that we are in charge of a system.
We are quite literally responsible for a biological system, with needs and requirements.
And our brains are just ONE part of that system. Therefore, what ‘brain’ wants may not be what ‘body’ wants, and vice versa.
The hardest, but most important, thing to realise is that it is a deeply symbiotic and mutual relationship: in order for either to function optimally, they BOTH need to be ‘happy’.
It is the ultimate relationship-balancing act.
If your body is not happy – how long can you realistically continue to push it to keep going? I can tell you – it isn’t forever. And you might end up with some unwanted side effects. Chronic conditions, fatigue, chronic low energy, and so on.
What about if your brain isn’t happy?
It would be great if our bodies would just sort of take over and say ‘hey, you rest, brain, I’ll take it from here’.
That usually doesn’t happen. What does tend to happen is this gets reflected in the body, in your energy – you get sluggish, tired quickly – all of these physiological embodiments of this mental energy or suffering.
So our responsibility as the custodians of this rather complex symbiotic system, is to make sure we maintain the careful balance of both brain AND body.
If this sounds hard, don’t worry.
The hard part is creating the initial state of balance. After that it’s actually remarkably simple. You just have to MAINTAIN it. But note that I wrote – that it is simple, not easy. It’s impressive how fast we can lose that balance again.
That’s where self-care comes in.
Self-care is almost like a magical conductor of your mind-body relationship.
It is the space in which both sides are heard and listened to. It is the safe space and balance between extremes.
It is the time we take to honour our whole selves.
Now, that’s GOOD self-care.
