The other night, Gretchen Kubacky, PsyD shared in her webinar that managing a chronic illness such as PCOS requires an average of an hour and 40 minutes a day. She stated that this included exercise, taking medications, checking blood glucose, physician appointments, etc.
I don't have PCOS, and as she was listing the activities that fell into the self-care category, I realized that even so, I devote a fair amount of time in my day to self-care. I don't take meds and I don't monitor my biochemistry, but I do (1) make more food from scratch than the average person, (2) swim a mile 3 to 4 times a week, (3) walk instead of drive whenever I can, and (4) commit to a regular bedtime instead of staying up late.
Yesterday, for example, I had a presentation late in the day. So I scheduled my workout first thing in the morning, and did a little bit of work in the afternoon before leaving to speak. There was a free symphony concert I really wanted to attend, but I realized that if I went, I'd be home late and I had to get up early this morning to catch a plane. So as much as I wanted to do the fun thing and see some friends, I came home, packed, and relaxed, so I would be at my best today.
I don't think of those choices as sacrifice at all. They're part of my routine. It wasn't always that way.
Long ago, I lived in Palo Alto, a very population-dense community. My job was only two miles away, but I realized one day that it was taking me longer to drive around and find a parking place than it was to actually drive to work. I decided that walking/rollerblading to work could kill two birds with one stone: (1) I wouldn't waste the driving around to park time and (2) I could have my workout done by the time I got home.
Easy you say? Not really. Even though the benefits were clear in my head, I had a really hard time making the switch. I decided to try only doing the rollerblading commute one day a week at first. Then I added two, then three. It actually took about a year to get into the habit. Once it got into my system, I actually looked forward to it. Palo Alto is a beautiful community and I started to notice that in walking home and enjoying the gardens along the way, I was a lot less stressed.
It was giving up the old way of doing things that was hard. There was probably a little bit of grieving involved. Maybe changing some hardwiring in my brain. It was CHANGE. Any change takes effort, and adjustment.
I got to wondering if reframing that hour and a half as self-nurturing rather than self-care might help some of you. To realize that what you're being asked to do, at least partially, isn't something that you HAVE to do because you're weird or broken or have PCOS, but because it's because you're being asked to take better care of yourself, and because you DESERVE to make that kind of time for your self and your health.
These may not be as glamorous as the choices the food industry and the alcohol industry and the clothing industry might like you to define as self-care, but it does work. These days, and I'm being honest, I value having an hour in the pool far more than I do eating a brownie. It's my one hour where email, phone, Twitter, yadayadayada, is not a concept. I relish the feeling of silently gliding through the water and having my brain and my thoughts all to myself. I love that later on at night, I feel sleepy and actually sleep soundly. I've become selfish about that time and I schedule around it.
If you were to think of that one and a half hours as selfish time, may even a little bit of self-indulgent time, would you be more willing to do it? Instead of viewing it as an hour and a half of suffering, sacrifice, self-denial? It's all in how you market the concept to yourself.
So you have to give up a few tweets and status reports and You Tubes and Facebook friends to accommodate the glucose monitoring. You deserve to be self-indulgent.