Life laughs at our super detailed self-care checklists
You make a plan to make it to your yoga class, meditate more often, take more mindfulness breaks during the day, and do some deep breathing exercises because mindfulness pays off, right?! You take it a step further: you want to make sure you’re well hydrated and stick to your bedtime routine to help yourself get better sleep. You come up with a holistic self-care plan. Maybe you even downloaded one of those printable workbooks that help you organize your self-care, track everything you do, and set up a schedule.
You break your goals down into incremental, measurable chunks, and then you get to work. The first week, you make it through your list of self-care things and feel great! Fairly quickly, your adherence to your holistic plan begins to dwindle. You feel like crap because you feel like you prepared everything to be successful, but somehow it still feels difficult to take care of yourself. Does this story sound familiar?
As a therapist, I’ve witnessed this countless times. I’ve done it myself too! This is so common; you are not alone. We all experience the irony of self-care plans.
i·ro·ny. /ˈīrənē/. noun. a state of affairs or an event that seems deliberately contrary to what one expects and is often amusing as a result.
Making a super-detailed self-care plan is ironic. I want to emphasize the “super detailed” part of this statement because that is where the irony lies. We apply work- and outcome-focused strategies (like making lists, checking things off, setting measurable goals, etc.) to activities that actually require us to go with the flow, tap into our intuition, be present, and be soft.
This tension between prioritizing our wellness and plans that feel like a “to-do list” is in part because hustle culture has infiltrated our self-care in major ways. Don’t get me wrong! We need structure in place to rest and let go, but I think many self-care plans overdo the structure at the expense of learning another way to be. In the ideal state of self-care, we learn how to create enough structure to have time, space, and energy to care for ourselves while also leaning into going with the flow and letting go. We can achieve balance when the structure we create for ourselves doesn’t feel demanding and harsh but instead is a supportive state of holding space for our care, softness, and nurturing.
The other irony is that I am going to link to a self-care plan that you can download from Etsy at the bottom of this article. I created this because I have not encountered any templates that didn’t feel overwhelming to me or that I felt were a good fit for a burned-out, overwhelmed client. When you need rest, reading a list of pages and pages of things you can track and do to take care of yourself feels like it’s too much. For some, it leads to feeling inadequate and incompetent because the question arises, “Is this how other people manage to take care of themselves?” or “Am I really supposed to be doing all of this?”
The solution I have found as the best place to start combating excessive self-care plans is to go back to the basics. Dial down the plan to bare bones and try to do those things more slowly, leaving more space in your schedule before and after an activity of self-care. Less is more. This is how we overcome the irony of self-care plans.
Download the Simple Weekend Self-Care Planner here.
You break your goals down into incremental, measurable chunks, and then you get to work. The first week, you make it through your list of self-care things and feel great! Family quickly, your adherence to your holitic plan begins to dwindle. You feel like crap because you feel like you prepared everything to be successful, but somehow it still feels difficult to take care of yourself. Does this story sound familiar?
As a therapist, I’ve witnessed this countless times. I’ve done it myself too! This is so common; you are not alone. We all experience the irony of self-care plans.