Wellbeing: The Power of Self-Care and Reflection

Keeping a regular bullet journal for the last four or five years means I have been learning to reflect on my life much more deeply than ever before. Each week, month and year the bullet journal method encourages you to look back on what worked and what needs tweaking. Rather than just endless lists, they become a record of your life. A pattern begins to emerge as tasks or events either get marked as complete, moved forward or cancelled. What matters begins to emerge and what isn’t working becomes blatantly obvious.

Two of the recurring themes I saw in the pages, in between the lines if you will, was very little writing and an abundance of broken sleep. There’s a connection between how tired I am and how creative I feel.

The last time I slept well I think I was fifteen. From then on late nights, parties, finding my bed in the wee hours and questionable nutrition were the enemy of my circadian rhythm.

Cue the ‘having children’ years and I waved goodbye to any semblance of regular sleep since. Not surprisingly I often leant on caffeine to keep me moving forward. One or two cups of really good coffee a day was enough to keep me going.

I accepted lack of sleep as a way of life.

Self care is new for me. I’ve been trying to get the hang of it. It goes against everything I was brainwashed taught as a child. I grew up (in the sixties/seventies)when self care was labelled: ‘navel gazing.’ Self-centred, narcissistic and selfish at best. Add to that many years of church indoctrination teaching where I was taught to put everyone else first, and any thought of self care was at the bottom of a very long list of needs, not to mention the patriarchal society.

Seeing lack of sleep in the pages of my bullet journal, again and again, I knew it was time to give myself permission to take care of myself.

I started using magnesium spray, eating healthier foods, less snack foods and using a good moisturiser instead of soap. (shocking I know) These are a few things I have introduced to my self care routine. It’s early days but I am already getting better sleep, which then gives me more brain space for writing. Win win.

I quit caffeine this year and started drinking sparkling water with crushed ice and a splash of lime. Apart from an initial headache for a couple of days, I feel a lot better. Placebo effect I hear you say? Maybe.

Did you know that NASA studied spiders? Me neither. Apparently they gave them a dose of a variety of substances to see how it would affect their web-building ability. NASA were surprised to find that caffeine had the most significant impact on the spiders’ web-building.

Now I know I’m not a spider but seeing this gave me incentive to continue to stay away from caffeine for the time being. The erratic web looks like how the inside of my brain felt. Exhausted and stimulated.

Another important part of self care, which I think is often overlooked, is the way we talk to ourselves. The inner chatter that sometimes spills over into our speech. The way we beat ourselves up verbally when something doesn’t work out.

We were at the Veterinarians the other day and the Vet nurse made a mistake. She mis-labelled the medicine with double the dosage. Thankfully the Vet picked it up. The nurse said ‘I’m an idiot!’

I immediately said, ‘No you’re not!’

She fixed the mistake and ignored my comment, they all did. I let it go rather than launch into a speech about the damage negative talk has on our inner world — (ask my kids)

This may sound like a small thing and yet, our subconscious mind is listening all the time. It pays attention to the way we speak to ourselves. Each time we beat ourselves up it files it away to use later. Negatives stick to our brain like velcro. We barely hear ourselves saying these derogatory things to ourselves most of the time. Unless there is a pedant (like me) in your life who will pick you up on it, you may never notice it. And that’s just the bit that spills over into speech. Learning to hear self talk is vital because then we are able to reverse engineer it.

Setting ourselves up with positive affirmations will have an impact on our inner world. I would often catch our children saying, ‘I can’t do it,’ and I would stop them and say, ‘Yet’ and make them say it out loud. ‘I can’t do it, yet.’ I still say it to my grandchildren. A beginner’s mind that acknowledges we are all learning.

We ought to speak to ourselves as we would to someone we love. I think that is radical self care.

Next time you catch yourself calling yourself names when something doesn’t go the way it should, remember who you are, beloved, and speak kindly to yourself.