Why Self Care Ins't Optional

No matter what’s going on in our lives, we have a tendency to get busy. When we get busy, we focus on whatever things are filling our time. I mean, if we have kids and work and a relationship, it’s easy to understand how our time gets filled focusing on these things. That’s how self-care can be neglected or forgotten. When we have so much going we don’t even think about it.  

But one very important thing to remember is that if we don’t take care of ourselves, we won’t have the ability to do the things that we want to do. If we don’t take care of ourselves, we aren’t able to do as well as we’d like at work or be the kind of partner or parent that we’d like to be.

It’s a hard thing to realize. Because if we take care of ourselves, it can feel like we’re taking time away from other things in our lives. That mindset can be a big reason why sometimes we may not be the best at self-care.  

But let’s think of ourselves like batteries. Throughout the day, there are going to be things that drain energy from us. These drains are anything that takes some kind of an emotional toll on us, or something that we don’t want to deal with but have to. Some things act like big, sudden drains, like when we play games on our phone. Some things are slow drains that happen over time, like those apps that don’t close quite right and slowly take energy from our battery when we don’t even know it’s happening.

A big drain could take the form of a fight with our significant other.

Slower drains look like having to deal with traffic and that annoying coworker.

But the thing with these things that drain us is that if we don’t find a way to recharge ourselves, we start the next day without being fully charged. Then the next day we start with even less of a charge. The lower our charge, the less tolerance we’re going to have for all of these drains, because we just don’t have the energy to drain from.

So the lower our battery, the more likely we are to snap at that annoying coworker. Or our kids.  

Self-care feels like it takes away from other things in our life, but really what it does is give us the ability to be the best versions of ourselves that we can be. It makes it so that we can tolerate a lot more that we wouldn’t otherwise be able to tolerate.  

Self-care keeps us happier and the people around us happier too.