Self Care Guilt — How to STOP Feeling Guilty About Self-Care

Hi, I’m Paul Krismer, I’m your happiness expert and this week we’re going to talk all about the guilt that so many of us feel when we take care of ourselves, when we do basic things to make us healthy and well. I’ve got a personal example that I’m almost a little ashamed to share with you, but it’s just really true in my life. Since I moved to Las Vegas, I’ve gotten into playing hockey, and I love it. It is fantastic fitness, and it’s my kind of fun too. So, it’s just, it’s really working for me and I want to get three skates in per week because, from a fitness perspective, that seems like the right kind of vigorous cardiovascular that I want to have on a regular basis. I’m finding Friday evenings and Sunday early mornings and Sunday afternoons, I’m getting skates in on a regular basis, but I want one midweek skate too. The way that the schedule seems to work is that it’s always on a Wednesday morning, and I’m wracked with guilt when I go and play this hockey on a Wednesday morning as though somehow it makes me a bad person to not be sitting here in front of my desk, working away and furthering my business interests.

I’ll bet many of you can relate to that, that when you’ve taken and made time in your busy schedules for things that are for your own benefit, for your mental, emotional, and physical well-being, you’re feeling guilty. So much so that probably many of you really aren’t taking very good care of yourselves at all. So, this video is all about not just how to get over the guilt, but how to find some actual practices that will ensure you actually do the things that you need and want to do for your own self-care. So, stay tuned.

As a coach, public speaker, and best-selling author, I teach topics just like this one all around the world. So, stay tuned, and I’ll give you practical tools that you can use to make both yourself and those around you both happier and more successful. Yeah, so a lot of us can relate to this idea that we feel guilty when we just simply are taking care of ourselves, that there’s so many other things to do in our lives that we’re somehow not entitled to make ourselves feel good, to take care of ourselves. That the idea of feeling good in itself must be unworthy, that the things that we should be doing, should be doing, are the things that are strenuous, demanding, and dedicated to the well-being of others.

That’s a little bit of the adult conditioning that we all of us get, is that our priorities are our workplace, our families, taking care of the chores that we need to do, and particularly if you’ve got kids, you just get a ton more of have to do’s in your list. That conditioning makes us basically feel like we’re self-serving and selfish if we’re taking care of ourselves, which of course is absurd. The whole basic idea behind self-care is a little bit like Stephen Covey’s seventh habit in his Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. The seventh habit is what he calls “sharpening the saw.” He gives this a metaphor of somebody being out in the woods trying to cut down a tree and back and forth, back and forth, trying to cut down the tree and it’s so much effort. If someone comes along and says, “Well, this looks like it’s really hard work. Have you sharpened your saw?” He says, “No, no, I don’t have any time to sharpen my so, I’ve got to cut down this tree.” Of course, the effort to cut down the tree is hugely magnified, increased by the fact that the saw itself is dull.

That’s a little bit analogous to our own well-being. If we’re not taking care of ourselves, we can only necessarily be less for others, for our employers, for our families, for our children, for our communities. Self-care is really basic, it’s about emotional regulation, getting calm, getting grounded again, physical wellness, so getting some exercise, eating good nutrition, and then even yet from a kind of spiritual point of view, we need time to be with ourselves, to feel that we’re valuable, to be heliotropic. Remember, I’ve talked about that topic before, where by nature we tend towards that which is positive and that which makes us grow. And when we’re denying that heliotropic tendency in all biological beings, we’re denying our very essence as a living organism on Earth. So, it’s really critical that we do that “sharpening the saw” piece.

I guess I can also relate it to one of my most fundamental teachings, is that the science is very, very clear, that when people have abundant positive emotions, they get more success in their lives. Success in a whole number of categories: relationships, careers, health. They’re even more intelligent, they’re more energetic. So, happiness needs to be first in order for us to be able to make a bigger contribution. The science is super, super solid on this point. In order to get that happiness, that positive sense of well-being, to have abundant positive emotions, we have to invest in the path that gets us there.

So, whatever your self-care needs are, and we all have them, and especially those ones that aren’t being met, you need to be able to kind of have some strategies that will effectively give you what you need and want. And the first one, maybe, is a bit odd but you have to kind of defend yourself. It’s probably an illusory, pretend boogie man that’s saying that you can’t take care of yourself. You imagine your spouse saying to you, “I don’t want you going out to the gym because I need blah, blah, blah, blah”, or your kids complaining that, “Mom, you don’t have time to hang out in the tub because I have a million needs,” and those probably are less real than you might perceive them to be. Although, on occasion, they might come up but that’s a function of setting some healthy boundaries.

You know, if a spouse were to come and say to you, “I haven’t got time for you to be going to the gym because I have all these needs I want you to meet for me,” you need to people say, “Whoa, dude or do that, I have my own needs and as long as I’m being reasonable and not breaking the bank or going away for days on end then we need to be able to simply say, ‘Whoa, I need this for myself.’ It’s a priority for me. I’ve carved out this time. It’s in my schedule. This is what I’m going to do. It’s a valuable investment in myself.” And you need to then be able to hold firm on those boundaries. This is beyond this video’s scope to say how that might actually play out in one’s own personal life.

And then, secondly, once you’ve defended your need for self-care and create healthy boundaries, you simply need to prioritize it. It should be the number one thing in your life. And that may sound very difficult for some of you to hear but the truth is if it’s not number one, it’ll fall off to be number 12 or 14 or 15 or 16. And so, one of the easiest ways to make some self-care, and when I say “some self-care”, whatever the right proportion of it is, to make some self-care the priority in your life, you need to be able to do it first. Get up first thing in the morning and that’s the first half hour, 45 minutes, maybe a full hour, an hour and a half, whatever you can do to say, “This is when I take care of myself. I meditate, I pray, I journal, I exercise,” whatever it is that you see is your important, critical things for self-care, the best time to do it is to carve that out for yourself first thing in the day.

And then it’s done. If that’s not realistic for you, if you’re not a morning person, you have other things that are competing with it, you need to actually schedule it into your calendar so that there are pieces of time that are dedicated to your self-care. And unless it’s prioritized in some fashion that way, where you know there’s a portion of your day in your week when you’re going to give to self-care, and it’s always been left to the thing “I’ll get to”, well, we won’t get to it. And we all know what that’s like, it just won’t happen.

And then, I guess, I would finally suggest that we need to team up with people. So many times, if I have an accountability with somebody else who’s also going to the gym or who also wants to take a time out during the work day and spend 10 minutes in meditation, that additional person, because you’re accountable to them, will make you join them and engage in the activity that you genuinely want to do for your own self. And even if you don’t do the activity with them, you can sometimes simply have an accountability partner, a friend, a colleague that you say, “Hey, you know, I really want you to hold me accountable to get to the gym. Will you ask me tomorrow about it?” And every week, and you can do the same for them, so that you’re just checking in with each other that you’re doing what you want to do for yourself. Because you deserve it, you need it, and we all do. It’s the basic underlying foundation for our strengths and contribution we can make elsewhere in the world to take care of ourselves.

So, I encourage you to do that. And I hope that you liked the video. If you do like it, click the like button, share it with your friends and family, and I will see you again next week. Thanks so much for watching. Bye for now.