Too often, we therapists neglect our personal relationships. Our work becomes our life. At the end of our workday, having given so much of ourselves, we feel drained of the desire for more relationship. ID Yalom, 2002 (The Gift of Therapy).
Do you ever feel like you have given so much of yourself to your work – to building relationships with patients and clients; to going the extra mile to provide care and compassion; to doing so again and again, throughout your working day – that you have nothing left when you get home? And then you feel guilty that your children aren’t getting the best of you.
Or do you feel so protective of precious family time, making extra effort to be present and engaged at home, that work just feels like you have to be on autopilot, going through the motions, protecting yourself from being too emotionally engaged, because of what it might cost you in emotional resources?
Compassion and caring aren’t finite resources, but we do need fuel in our emotional tanks to be able to maintain our compassion over time, in the face of challenges, and to avoiding burning out. This is true of both being a parent, and being in a healthcare or helping role, and doubly so when you are both.
We are all doing the best we can with the resources we have available to us. When we are burning out, reaching our limits, not being our best parenting self, or our most compassionate professional self, it isn’t a problem of knowledge, skill or understanding, but one of capacity. Self care is key to topping up our emotional fuel tanks and to creating capacity to continue to care for others.
What is self care?
Self care encompasses many things. From meeting your basic needs such as eating and drinking, to meeting other needs like the need for connection, autonomy and recognition. I use it to describe any of the practices that nurture yourself and add fuel to your emotional tank.
Self care can include long baths with candles and going to get a massage, but in this blog I’m going to focus on three types of self care that in many ways could not be further removed from this: I’m going to talk about “micro self care”, caring for yourself when you are not by yourself, and self care as an attitude.
The limits of self care
But before we get to looking more at this, an important caveat. Firstly, self care is not really self care if it is yet another thing on your TO DO list, one more thing for you beat yourself up over, or for anyone else in your life to beat you round the head with either. Too often, for both parents and for healthcare workers, it can be used in this way.
It’s too common to be made to feel that if we are stressed it is our own fault for not practicing “good enough” self care. Self care is not about managing intolerable levels of stress indefinitely. So self care isn’t a cure-all for toxic working cultures or a challenging home life. But here’s how it can help.
Micro self care
We all operate at our best when we are inside our “window of tolerance”. The idea is that when we are feeling calm and connected, we can draw on skills like empathy, problem-solving and emotional regulation. When stress builds and we move outside our window of tolerance we are in our fight/flight or freeze state. We are less likely to be able to draw on our rational thinking skills because the emotional centre of our brain has taken over to try to protect us from the perceived threat.
I know that shouting at my toddler doesn’t help either of us, but when I do so, it’s because I’ve been skirting too close to the edge of my window of tolerance for too long, and I simply don’t have the resources in that moment to respond helpfully.
It isn’t always one massive thing that sends us into our threat response. Sometimes it is the accumulation of lots of smaller things, manageable on their own: trigger stacks on trigger, straw upon straw, until the camel’s back is broken. But, just as an accumulation of small things can push us out of our window of tolerance, so too can small things brings us back, by removing one straw at a time.
So self-care doesn’t have to be all or nothing. You don’t have to wait until you have time for a massage or a holiday to do things that help your stress levels. By peppering self care throughout your day, you can prevent stress from building up.
For example, in “Simple Self Care for Therapists” Ashley Davis Bush lists hundreds of small acts of “micro” self care, things that fit into the time between appointments, that can be done in different places, to ground us, energise us or relax us.
You could try a grounding practice while the kettle boils, drink your cup of tea mindfully, or do a three minute breathing space exercise at your desk.
There are self care practices you can do if you have one minute (feel your feet on the floor, notice 5 things around you that are coloured green), five minutes (get a drink, do a three minute breathing space), or a bigger chunk of time like 20 minutes (a power nap, watch something funny, do a guided mindfulness meditation).
Try to make self care a habit by linking it to the patterns and activities of your day.
Caring for yourself when you are not by yourself
The Australian Clinical Psychologist Amanda Donnet (Spilt Milk Psychology) describes parenting as like “learning to breathe underwater”. Becoming a parent can feel like inhabiting a new underwater world, where things look and feel different. Many parents feel like they need to make a break for the surface, to be their old selves again, in order to take deep lungfuls of air and reset themselves.
But if our only coping strategy is going back to not being a parent for a while, then it makes going back under the water feel difficult. Instead, Donnet argues, we need to learn how to breathe and be comfortable under the water and to do this we can ask ourselves, “how can I do things for myself when I’m not by myself?”
Lots of the micro self care practices discussed above work here. Even better if what you do benefits or entertains your child too. That might be directly involving them in the self care – for example doing yoga or mindfulness together. Or it might be about picking activities where both your needs get met.
Lucy Aitken Read talks about Sites of Mutual Fulfilment, which are places “where both the child’s and the parent’s urges and needs are met. They are places where all parties leave with a full cup. They are the vital mental health break in a day for mum or dad.”
Try to find the places both you and your child find restorative. It might be that you love a particular park because you feel connected to nature, and your child likes the open space to have more freedom to run around while still being safely seen. Play games with your children that allow you to be still and sitting (if that’s what you need in the moment) while they run around and burn off energy – for example, time them on an obstacle course round the lounge, or send them off on a scavenger hunt round the garden or house.
Self care as an attitude
Self care isn’t always about things we do, it can also be about how we speak to ourselves, how we notice our own needs, have compassion for our own suffering and engage with ourselves with kindness rather than criticism. As a parent, and as a healthcare professional, we become adept at noticing others’ cues and responding to them, soothing them when they are upset, seeing the best in them, having compassion and empathy for their feelings and challenges. Imagine if we could cultivate the love we have for our children, and the kindness we have for our patients, for ourselves?
Try as an experiment talking kindly to yourself, in the way you would (in your calmest moments) talk to your child. What would you say to them if they were feeling this way? You might even let them hear you say it to yourself: “You are so tired, you’re trying your very best all the time, it is exhausting, no wonder you sometimes need help.” Children learn their own self talk from how we talk to ourselves, as well as from how we talk to them.
Having an attitude of self care could be about checking in more regularly with what you need, and setting appropriate boundaries that help you to meet those needs. It could be about asking for and accepting help (and being able to delegate the whole of the task, including the preparation and the mental load).
Sometimes it might be about lowering the bar and allowing yourself to be imperfect. And on tough days, really lower the bar. No harm will come to your children from eating ready meals and extra screen time on the days where that is all your resources will allow.
With these three tips it’s my hope that we can all find regular, nurturing, effective self care. Self care doesn’t have to take a lot of uninterrupted time. Why not experiment, and see what works for you? By using the small moments in our day, adjusting unreasonable expectations of ourselves, treating ourselves with kindness, and learning how to balance our needs with those of our children, self care can be within our reach after all.
Dr Hannah Guzinska is a Clinical Psychologist with a special interest in babies and very young children and their parents. She offers consultations around parenting young children and CalmFamily (Baby and ToddlerCalm) Workshops and classes, and works with organisations which support families in the early years. She has made a video on self care for new parents which was runner up in the IJBPE First 1000 Days competition: and has a blog and mailing list.
