The need for self-care in your workscape

Care needs to begin with self – just like the putting on of a mask in an airplane. When flying we are reminded to attend to our own oxygen masks first – to take care of ourselves – before assisting with others. There’s a clear reason for this, we can only give appropriate care, if we receive it ourselves. It’s the same thinking we need to have in our workscapes.

As the Sovereign of Helen unLimited, I have declared that self-care is important for me in my workscape. I have utilised the responsibility of RULES to define what actions to take that align with the value of self-care for me and others.  I have utilised the responsibility of RENEWAL to ensure that those actions are part of my everyday practice in how I manage my energies and respond to challenging situations.

I also recognise that my wellbeing is connected to those who I live and work with. So in taking care of myself, I directly and indirectly affect others positively by my actions.

Self-care is giving the world the best of you, instead of what’s left of you.
~ Katie Reed

Symptoms of the lack of self-care

Are you experiencing well-being right now?

Consider what a lack of self-care in your own day-to-day life looks like for you. You’ll have personal symptoms that can differ from others. We are unique in our risks, triggers and experiences that influence the nature of our personal well-being.

Here’s some of symptoms I experience when my self-care activity is low:

• My negative emotions rise in intensity and duration and I can become contagious with those emotions spreading it to those around me.
• I feel violated with internal conflict between the critical values by which I choose to live my life, and the actions taken around me.
• My energy levels go down. Often it starts are low-grade damage, which can cumulate over time leading to burnout and fatigue.
• I become overwhelmed and my normal patterns of productive working fail me; I start to procrastinate and doubt my past decisions.
• My sleep patterns become disrupted and I dream more vivid unsettling dreams, which in turn disrupt my sleep patterns.

Actions that generate poor self-care

Are you contributing to poor self-care?

There’s a connection about our ability to deal with difficult situations, the way we care for ourselves and the way we care for others. I can be the cause of harm arising from poor self-care practices.

Here’s some ways I know my actions can cause harm to me and others:

• Not prioritising self and the care-of-self, over other activities that fill my week.
• Not setting and maintaining good personal boundaries in decisions in where and with whom I place my time, energy and attention.
• Not maintaining good emotional hygiene to protect myself from catching negative emotional contagion from others.
• Not quarantining myself when I’m highly contagious with negative emotion.
• Leaning too strongly on colleagues, friends or family members who are ill-prepared to provide support I need at the time I might need it. (Not having the right people identified and easy to access when needed.)
• Failing to recognise the signals when harm is slight but without corrective intervention will become more severe.
• Most basically, not attending to common triggers for the need for self-care: being hungry, angry, lonely or tired. (HALT – A useful acronym created by Judson Brewer, Yale.)

Practices that generate good well-being

What actions create good well-being for you now?

Here’s some ideas to shape (or reshape) your practices for generating personal well-being. These are things for general self-care that you do constantly, and not as a response to an emergency situation.

• Identify and build deep relationships with people who nurture you and uplift you. Hang with them as much as possible.
• Tell others about your commitment to self-care. This helps make the commitment stick, and you’ll likely find sympathetic colleagues and allies.
• Habit-unmaking – Be mindful about an activity that you typically do on autopilot, e.g. brushing your teeth, taking a shower, standing in a coffee line, waiting for a train – pay attention to what you are doing, and be ‘awake’ during the action. You may or may not change what you do, but the first part is to raising your awareness to what you are doing without your mind wandering to other things. Be present! (There are lots of online resources with suggestions for mindfulness behaviours. If you want a particularly deep experience in the month of May, consider Mindful in May where you can Pause for a Cause.)
• Find someone who wants and needs your talents who you can help out. Pay it forward for the assistance you’ve been given in the past. Sometimes having what you offer truly valued by someone else can be a real motivational boost.
• Turn a challenging situation into a learning moment. Find a purpose or hidden blessing. Warning – you have a choice about whether you want/need, or can handle the lesson now. It’s okay to simply be, and not strive to learn or change.
• Read the recommendations others have given you as life affirming input. It’s good to remember what positive impact we have in other’s lives.
• List things you are grateful for. Keep a gratitude journal. (Gratitude works its magic by serving as an antidote to negative emotions. ~ Arianna Huffington)
• Self-care aids can be directly helpful; or provide useful prompts/beacons to remind you of self-care attitude and actions.
  A design student in London, Rui Sun has come up with some creative ideas that might delight and inspire you. Called an ‘Emotional First Aid Kit’, it is a collection of products designed to relax and help one concentrate in particularly difficult or stressful situations.
• Check out bio-metric devices and apps available for your mobile devices. Ask your friends and colleagues if they have favourites to recommend to you. (I purposefully avoid aids that require me to have electronic devices constantly close to my person, so sorry I can’t recommend any to you.)
• Engage in physical activities that stimulate the senses and connect you to feeling alive.
• Write down the critical Values that you live by. Use these as anchor points for decisions about what situations you get into; to keep perspective about what really matters to you, and indicators of where you shouldn’t compromise. Sometimes self-care is making prudent decisions about when to commit and when to quit. The best self-care option might be to retreat, especially when things aren’t working out because they are not the best fit for you, or not a best fit for this point in time, or for the particular set of circumstances.

These are just a few. There are many books and resources published with valuable ideas. Why not start a conversation with people in your network to learn more?  You’ll want to be on the lookout for ones that are most relevant to you personally, and your self-care risks and triggers.

Make a start today. Attending to self-care is an ongoing activity; just like attending to your physical health. Even a small amount can make a useful difference. And be kind to yourself – even in your expectations about how much self-care activity you do, and the level of well-being you achieve.

I do not claim to have attained optimum emotional well-being. Actually, I think that may be a lifetime goal. For me it’s an ongoing process that requires awareness, knowledge, and practice. I do know what good emotional health feels like, and that motivates me to keep at the practice.
~ Andrew Weil

Author

Helen Palmer, Founder of Self unLimited, will get on a soapbox and preach to anyone who will listen about prioritising self-care at work. She’s experienced the negatives and the positives from her own behaviour, and not surprisingly, finds she does better work when she’s following positive self-care practices. In all her collaborative endeavours, she does her best to get everyone attending to their own and mutual well-being because it creates happier workplaces and more satisfying work experiences.

(Amended) Photo by Christin Hume on Unsplash