I am not sure if it’s our culture or the way that I was raised, but self-care wasn’t in-style when I was growing up. The most self-care I saw my mother do was a bubble bath and even that was often invaded by my younger sisters. I can still see her stretching her well-muscled leg up in the air shaving with her gold metal razor back when plastic ones weren’t mainstream. Occasionally, she would swipe red lipstick across her lips, but never did I see her use moisturizer or special hair products, and the idea of a massage or a manicure was as foreign as rain in California. Her mission was managing the life she built, with animals that could fill a small zoo, three children and mostly, on her own. Somehow she managed, until she didn’t. As if on cue, when her three children left home and life wasn’t filled with duty, she became overcome with crippling anxiety and few practices to help her.
I’ve noticed that it can go like this. We have skills to manage while we have to, like while the storm is whirling around us, but not yet living in us. We know how to take care of others, and fulfill our obligations amidst the chaos, but when the wind dies down and the dust settles, we begin to feel the effects. The whirling storm seeped into our cells when we weren’t paying attention. Fortunately, we are designed to “weather the storm”. Our autonomic nervous system can kick into a higher gear, called our sympathetic nervous system (think “fight or flight”) which provides us the resources needed in stressful situations. However, if we stay in this gear for too long, it can negatively affect our overall health. This is when self-care comes into play.
Two weeks ago, when we were evacuated from our home because of a nearby fire, this entire scenario played-out. I was relatively okay during the week, but when the evacuation was lifted and normal life resumed, my body started showing signs of stress. I wasn’t rebounding from my normal exercise and activity, my body ached, my sleep suffered, I had headaches, and I just didn’t mentally feel “myself”. Recognizing it for what it was, I employed self-care that I’ve learned to trust: yoga. meditation, good food, rest, massage, water, more rest, and being honest about how I felt... crappy. It’s okay to feel crappy! You just need to eventually do something about it.
If we can see self-care as a tool to re-regulate ourselves, then we can handle the stresses in our lives and ease back into daily life with minimal damage done. It’s repetitive, unacknowledged stress that unravels the system for longer periods of time and inhibits the quality of our lives.