From Coping to Thriving: How to Turn Self-care Into a Way of Life

Introduction

Welcome to From Coping to Thriving. Thank you for purchasing this book, and congratulations on investing in your relationship with yourself. My intention is that this book will provide you with a comprehensive introduction to self-care. In the following pages, you’ll find plenty of tips and suggestions that you can use to integrate self-care into your life in a way that best meets your needs.

This is a how-to book, and at the same time, it’s much more than that. You’ll find a variety of self-care practices you can put to use, as well as the key ingredients that will help you make self-care into a way of life, rather than just a routine.

Self-care is crucial to our experience of our day-to-day lives and to other people’s experiences of us. In the first part of this book, we’ll explore why self-care is so important, examine the difference between long-term and short-term self-care, and discover different methods with which you can experiment for creating sustainable habits. We’ll also discuss how to deal with the dreaded resistance (which, by the way, is very common; most of us deal with this on a daily basis).

We’ll cover these foundations first, because this book is about the whole self-care package.

When I began consciously addressing my own self-care, I launched straight into scheming and whipped up a detailed and intensive self-care routine without having a clear understanding of why it was so important (except that many people in the personal development world say it’s a good idea). I quickly discovered that it’s hard to figure out what works best for us without knowing why we’re engaging in self-care in the first place and what needs we want to address.

If we don’t know what we need from our self-care, we cannot meet those needs. Instead, we end up fumbling around, engaging in various activities that might feel very pleasant, but don’t quite hit the spot. Alternatively, we start engaging in activities that meet some of our needs but sacrifice others. We might also confuse self-care with pampering, end up feeling unfulfilled, and decide that this whole self-care malarkey is a load of woo-woo nonsense anyway.

As well as knowing the why behind our self-care and how we can best meet our needs, we need to get to know ourselves in order to make self-care a way of life. We need to be conscious of what’s going to get in our way, times when we will most need self-care, which activities fill us to the brim, and which activities are more draining than nurturing. We need to know what our resistance tells us, and how to work with ourselves to build a sustainable self-care practice.

This book will address all the above and more.

You might be approaching this book from one of the following perspectives: Perhaps you already have a self-care routine but want to delve deeper and find out how to make your self-care even more satisfying, meaningful, and life affirming than it already is. Perhaps you’re slightly wary of the whole idea of self-care (I know I certainly was), but you also have a sense that something needs to give. You’re tired of feeling stressed, stretched, foggy, and disconnected. Or maybe you like the sound of self-care, but don’t know where to start; you can’t afford to splash a ton of cash on spa days, and you don’t have much time to spend on yourself.

Wherever you’re coming from, this book will act as a guide, supporting you in creating the self-care practice that is right for you. Over the following pages, we’ll talk about how you can build a toolkit of nourishing self-care activities that will support you, encourage you, and provide you with a solid internal foundation so you can meet the world as the best version of yourself.

Let’s get to it.

P.S. Would you like a free video class on self-kindness to kickstart your journey? Simply go to http://selfkindness.becomingwhoyouare.net and enter your email to access to the class. When you register, you’ll also get more free workbooks, video classes and more tools for cultivating courage, compassion, and creativity in the Becoming Who You Are Library (I will never, ever share your email and you are free to unsubscribe at any time).

Part One

Laying the Foundations

One

Don’t Just Survive, Live

To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.

—Ralph Waldo Emerson

"How can I:

• Stop watching so much TV?

• Cut down my drinking?

• Stop spending so much money?

• Stop smoking?

• Get fitter?

• Eat more healthily?

• Experience a richer social life?

• Get enough sleep?

• Reduce my busyness?

• Improve my relationships?"

This book will answer all of those questions, and more. By the time you finish reading, you’ll have the ideas and resources you need to switch the coping strategies above for behaviors that will help you thrive.

Before we begin, however, let’s start with another question:

What does self-care mean to you?

It’s a question I have struggled with for many years, only recently realizing that the answer is hard to define in strong, tangible terms. The goalposts move according to how I’m feeling, what’s happening in my life, and what needs I want to meet at the time.

My favorite definition of self-care comes from Pauline Salvucci, author of Self-Care Now! (Salvucci, 2001.) She defines self-care as: "the right and responsibility to take care of your physical, emotional, and spiritual well-being."

I selected this definition because it includes several key facts about self-care:

• Self-care involves our physical, emotional, and spiritual needs. As I mentioned briefly in the introduction, self-care is less about going out and doing things that fall under the category of pampering, and more about consciously taking steps to meet our needs in these three areas.

• Self-care is our right. Another way of phrasing this is: we all deserve self-care—even if it doesn’t feel that way sometimes. If you experience internal debate around whether or not you deserve self-care, I’ll talk more about this in a later chapter, Resistance.

• Self-care is our responsibility. Yes, that means that no one is going to take care of us—it’s down to us and us alone. Although it’s not always conscious, many of us yearn for someone to come along and take care of us, to assume a nurturing parent role, and to meet our unmet needs. While we’re waiting for that unspecified (and nonexistent) person to come along, we’re neglecting our needs. Taking responsibility for our own self-care allows us to enter into mutually beneficial relationships to meet our needs, rather than being dependent on someone else. Like the question around deserving self-care, I’ll talk more about the white knight fallacy in Resistance too.

The secret ingredient to real, genuine self-care is very simple, yet many people miss its power.

At its essence, its very core, self-care is about identifying and meeting your needs.

Self-care is integral to our relationship with ourselves and our relationship with the outside world. It provides us with a chance to rest, replenish, and re-nourish physically, mentally, and emotionally.

As children, we rely on our parents and caregivers to meet our needs and take care of ourselves. As adults, we are the only people who can meet our own needs, and that’s what self-care is all about. When we engage in self-care, we send ourselves the message: You are worth taking care of.

What are our needs, and why do they matter?

We all have a variety of human needs that range from basics—like food, shelter, safety, and sleep—to existential needs, like self-expression, acceptance, stability, empathy, and to know and to be known. These needs are the driving force behind our decisions and actions, even if we’re not conscious of them at the time. These needs have a deep influence on our internal worlds and our external behavior. Therefore, we need to meet these needs if we’re going to have the best possible experience of our lives.

Even if we’re not consciously aware of our needs (or we are, but we reject them), parts of us will still be working away under the surface, trying to meet them. This is a recipe for disaster. It leads to us doing things, saying things, and feeling things that we just don’t understand. It leads to depression, procrastination, and a whole host of other undesirable phenomena. It keeps us stuck in the same patterns over and over again, and it curbs our ability to live to our full potential.

The parts of us that are left trying to meet these unmet needs are entering a tennis game blindfolded. We hear the thwack of the ball from our partner and swing wildly, running all over the court in an attempt to guess where that ball has gone. Soon, we’re drained, frustrated, and feeling rather helpless; meeting our needs takes energy—even more so when we’re trying to do it unconsciously.

To create a meaningful and fulfilling self-care practice, we need to develop our awareness of our unmet needs. When we’re unconsciously working to meet one or more needs, either because part of us has rejected them, or because we’re disconnected from them altogether, we aren’t going to be able to engage in activities that will truly meet those needs.

When we are conscious of our needs, when we accept them, and when we work out what we need to do to meet them directly, we free up that emotional and physical energy. We’re back in the tennis game, blindfold off and ready. We’re able to hone our skills, play our best game, feel good about our performance and provide a satisfying experience for our game partner, too.

When we’re aware of our needs, we free up a huge amount of headspace. We can live our lives without feeling distracted and weighed down by malaise, emptiness, and that something’s missing feeling. In a nutshell, we are freer to live the life we want to lead as the best version of ourselves.

This is a vital process, so we’re going to get right into it. The next few chapters start by focusing on the key obstacles to self-care and your most important unmet needs.

Two

Obstacles to Self-Care

There is no need to go to India or anywhere else to find peace. You will find that deep place of silence right in your room, your garden or even your bathtub.

—Elisabeth Kubler-Ross

Many people have a common misconception that self-care is something you do when you have a certain lifestyle, with a certain amount of income, and a certain amount of time to spare. The fact is; that’s just not true.

Self-care is healthcare. 

Just as we might go see doctors and dentists, we need to take care of our existential needs too. We are in the best position to be the best version of ourselves, fulfill our dreams, live our potential, have our best relationships, do our best work, and most importantly, enjoy life when we have taken care of our needs.

In fact, we are only able to be the best version of ourselves, fulfill our dreams, live our potential, have our best relationships, and do our best work when we have taken care of our needs.

This reality runs counter to the popular view that it’s selfish to put ourselves first. Many of us struggle with feeling like we haven’t yet achieved enough, been enough, earned enough, or sacrificed enough to be worthy of self-care. This was the place I started from when I began taking my self-care seriously. It took me a long time to understand that this was a chicken-egg situation: I was reluctant to engage in self-care and take time to focus on meeting my needs in a healthy and sustainable way until I felt I was worthy of doing so, but I didn’t necessarily feel like I was worthy of doing so until I started engaging in self-care and meeting my needs in a healthy and sustainable way.

This Catch-22 situation is partly due to our cultural fanaticism about altruism, putting others first, and the virtue of hard work. Many of us are raised to believe that we only deserve a day off if we’ve been working ourselves to the bone. Once this belief becomes embedded in our self-concept, it’s hard to shift. I used to view one day off in four months as an achievement, not as a sign that something was severely wrong with the fun quotient in my life. I rarely stopped working when I got sick, and I took pride in pushing myself as far as I could go. I felt effective, efficient, and terribly unhappy. I’ve found that I need to be constantly vigilant of how I approach the balance between work and leisure activities in my life; otherwise this balance will inevitably tip in favor of the work side.

With the gift of hindsight, I can look back and see that my desire to be constantly working and constantly busy came from a need to feel worthy. In addition, I had a sense that if I just lived my life as myself, not Hannah, who does all of these things and does them well, then I wouldn’t be enough.

We all have many needs that fit under the overarching category of worthiness. The constant struggle to meet these needs is one I’ve seen many times over in people who aren’t happy with the way their life is playing out, yet aren’t aware that it is internal shifts, not external changes, that will lead to the change they are seeking. As I’ll talk about in the next chapter, being busy is a great coping strategy and one of the biggest emotional barriers to self-care. For now, I want to move the focus to two of the biggest practical (and, secondarily, emotional) barriers to self-care: money and time.

Money

Most of us have a complicated relationship with money.

Money has come to represent so much in our culture that many of us equate our financial worth with our personal worth. When this happens, we feel worth more as a person when we have, or are earning, more money; and worth less as a person when we have, or are earning, less money. These feelings of having more or less value greatly impact our behavior and our feelings around whether we are worthy of self-care. When we equate our financial worth with our self-worth, we might give ourselves permission to engage in self-care only when things are going well financially. Equally, financial challenges can leave us feeling stressed, isolated, and lacking in some way.

Of course, there are many reasons why we might struggle to accept our current