Making Space: Why self-care isn’t a dirty word

Kendra: In the midst of all of this she had a conversation one day with her son’s mentor that brought her up short.

Lisdaly: And he asked me, he’s like, “what do you do for yourself?” And I literally looked at him and – nobody has ever asked me that. And I was like, “I don’t understand. And what do you mean?” And he’s like, “you know, anything, read a book, go get your nails done, take a walk.” And I”m like, “How?” First of all, I’m never alone. Like my babies were babies and I’m like, I, I never thought about it.

Like, I literally never thought about like doing anything for myself. It was just like, I swear I was just on survival mode. Just keep going, one day at a time. It was never about me. Um, but that conversation did open my eyes. Um, and I started like learning about self-care. And I’m still not that great at it, but it is, it, it is in my mind,

Kendra: This is A Little Easier. I’m Kendra Wilde. We’ve talked a lot about emotions so far in this podcast — giving ourselves permission to feel, finding out what happens when we try to suppress those difficult emotions, how emotions in a family are contagious. So we know that regulating our emotions in a healthy way is important. But how, how do you learn that, how to make the space for that? It’s time to talk about self-care.

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I think we grossly underestimate what I’m going to call managing our body’s budget.

Kendra: First of all, I want to try to encourage you or at least open your mind a little bit about a different way of thinking about self-care. Marc Brackett, our emotion scientist, says you have to recognize the link between the body and the brain.

Marc Brackett: We have a budget for regulation. And if you don’t get enough sleep and you don’t eat the right foods and you don’t get exercise or movement in your budget is going to be smaller. You do have to learn how to manage your physiology, because when you get triggered or activated, whether it can be excitement or fear or anger – it doesn’t matter what the emotion is – you go into a different way of processing information. Because when your sympathetic nervous system kicks in, because of that strong emotion, it really does interfere with your ability to process information. And so you’re not going to be able to be a good, compassionate, loving emotion scientist with your kid if you’re constantly activated. You’ve got to be able to deactivate.

Kendra: Marc’s reminding us of what we learned when we talked about how the nervous system works. So what does he recommend to be able to deactivate and make space to process information in a more regulated way?

Marc Brackett: So that might be engaging in some basic breathing exercises. It might be just taking a walk around the block. It might be having a cup of tea by yourself. It might be listening to a calming song. It might be doing a mindfulness exercise. So body budget, sleep, exercise, um, nutrition, all contribute to healthy regulation.

Kendra: I think sometimes parents feel like self-care is either too big or it’s something they can put off until later, or, you know, they just don’t need to do it right now…

Ann Douglas: Yeah. And I think sometimes it’s because I think our self care definition is so rigid. Like it’s like a woman on Instagram on top of a mountain doing yoga for an hour at dawn. And it doesn’t have to be that big.

Kendra: Here’s Ann Douglas, who just like Marc, reminds us that self-care can be small and practical.

Ann Douglas: I mean, and if you made a list of like 50 things that could be self-care: Self-care could be drinking a cup of tea by yourself. Self-care could be text messaging your best friend. Self-care could be going for a walk around the block. It doesn’t have to be running a marathon. It doesn’t have to be spending like $5,000 on a luxury vacation. I think if we make it more realistic, then it’s more doable for most people. And you could probably find a five minutes way to do self -care today, like five minutes.

Kendra: But even if it’s just five minutes, maybe you still feel bad, maybe you still feel guilty about taking time for yourself. Sarah  has a son with autism and she knows about that guilt.

Sarah: I think there’s a, there’s still a layer of guilt that goes along with it. I think, because you feel like well, I should be investigating or reading this article about autism, or I should be reading this book… when I really wanna be sitting on the couch with my glass of wine, watching TV or chatting with friends or, you know, whatever it happens to be.

Um, but it’s, it’s recognizing that you need that. And at the end, it’s going to make you a more relaxed and better parent.

Kendra: The other important piece of this is that self-care is personal.

Sarah: I think self-care has to be very individualized, because I think what works for one person isn’t going to work for another. I mean, I found yoga great for a while and I described it to a friend, another special needs friend, and she’s like, I would hate it. I couldn’t sit there. I couldn’t sit still. I couldn’t, you know, I’d just be waiting and waiting for it to be over. And I thought, that makes sense because we’re very, you know, we’re different people.

Kendra: Self-care is individual — that means you have to let go of other people’s expectations about how you’re going to spend your precious time.

Sarah: I’m going to realize that I’m not perfect. And if I really cared so much about a clean house, it would be clean. And if I really cared so much about, you know, certain things they would be done, because other things I do care about do get done.

Kendra: Sarah also brings us back to what we learned last time about emotional WiFi in families.

Sarah: It’s the recognition too, that you deserve it and that you need it. And that’s going to make you a better parent in the long run. Because the children, I mean, they, they know when I’m anxious, they know when I’m upset, whether I tell them or not. And so, for him to have had a bad day at school and come home and I’m anxious, it’s not going to make the situation any better. And so I think we’re also spending so much time teaching them how to regulate their emotions and do all of these things for themselves that we should be doing them for ourselves as well.

Kendra: As we’ve said, for many of us, self-care is going to involve just a small thing that makes us happy — a daily ritual. We’ve already begun this idea with our microaction moments at the end of each episode. But what will that look like for you? Last time I talked with my friend Deb Sweet, she gave me a great personal example.

Deb Sweet: I love iced tea with lemon, unsweetened, extra ice. It’s like my go-to ritual. And no joke, when I was in high school, I went trick-or-treating – way too old – with my girlfriends. I dressed up as a baby just so I could put iced tea in a baby bottle and suck on that while I was going, because I could care less about the candy. I love iced tea, I just love it. And I, something about that grounds me. And so I know people love their coffee and they love their, you know, I don’t know their podcast or their walk or whatever it is that grounds you as a person, find it and use it. I mean, Uh, like I, I love iced tea that I get at this little cafe down the street from here. And I probably shouldn’t spend money on getting that iced tea twice a day. But it’s the thing that makes me smile. That is predictable. That never lets me down. It’s such a silly thing, but it really does get me through a day.

Kendra: So for Deb and for Sarah, self-care means looking after yourself in these small ways, these mini restorative moments. But for some parents they have a hard time even imagining what looking after themselves could mean. They’ve put their kids’ needs ahead of their own for so long, they don’t even remember what matters to them. This is the problem occupational therapist Beth Larson works on.

Elizabeth Larson: We know that the way we measure wellbeing right now is kind of a lot of things that caregivers would not rate highly on. You know, how do you feel about your success in getting ahead? Well, if you had to give up your job, that’s not going to be rated highly. How do you feel about income? And if you’ve become a one-income family, that also can not be rated highly. Um, and so a lot of the materialism that is noted in some of the scales material success isn’t possible. So I wanted to know what wellbeing could look like then.

The question we asked was what would you like to do that would give you more joy, more balance in your life? What would make you feel more well? One of the interesting things we found out is they couldn’t actually come up with goals. They hadn’t considered their lives in so long that they actually had a real difficult time.

 Kendra: Beth developed a program called “Five Minutes for Myself.”

Elizabeth Larson: One of the things they told us is we’re tired. And we don’t have much energy. And so we were trying to make that the easiest possible. We used a, this card-sort that had all these different activities and we had them go through and pick five that were things they wanted to work on.

Kendra: But it’s one thing to pick goals — and something else to actually achieve them. How do you get there?

Elizabeth Larson: We want to give advice. You hear something, somebody wants to do something, you jump right in there with advice. And if somebody tells you what you should do, you often react by doing the opposite.

Kendra: And so she developed a technique called motivational interviewing, or “MI.”

Elizabeth Larson: So MI works to let people work through that themselves and author their own changes. Motivational interviewing is, uh, driven by the participant. It’s driven by the person. And you listen and kind of reflect back on what you hear them saying and keep having them work through what their thinking is. 

Kendra: And having people arrive at their own way of changing their lives helps it stick.

Elizabeth Larson: Sometimes the first time you understand what you’re really thinking is when you say it out loud. And that was striking, uh, in our final focus group, some of the mothers said, “I didn’t even know I was thinking that until I said it out loud. And just articulating it starts to bring commitment too. Starts to bring thinking like, oh, I could do that. 

Kendra: Beth remembers one particular mother who found a satisfying solution.

Elizabeth Larson: She felt responsible for everything and was unwilling to give up something and resented that her family didn’t support her. And so that led her to a goal where she realized that she needed to do something just for herself. And that was traveling and she did indeed decide to travel and went away from her family, which she hadn’t done in decades and went to visit a friend in another state.

Kendra: Beth is describing long-term goals that can give us space – of respite really – to do things we may have given up as we became parents. But what about the ability to create mental space just to get through the day?

Chris Willard: [TedX recording] And I also want to kind of give you some words to explain what mindfulness is. And to me, what I like to say is mindfulness is paying attention to the present moment with acceptance and non-judgment. And so who here’s ever been told to pay attention? Okay. And who here has ever been taught HOW to pay attention? Right. No hands in the room. And so mindfulness actually teaches us how to pay attention to our experience, which we know is going to serve us well in relationships and in school and on the job and all these other places in our lives. When we can learn how to put our attention where we want it to go.

Kendra: Dr. Christopher Willard talks about mindfulness all the time — this is him giving a TedX talk a few years ago to an audience of high school students.

Chris Willard: And so ultimately mindfulness invites us to attend, to show up, and even that other 20% is also to befriend our experience. Befriend whatever and whoever comes our way in this life, including maybe most of all befriending ourselves in this journey. Thank you.

Kendra: So let’s talk about mindfulness then. What is, what is mindfulness to you? How do you explain it?

Chris Willard: Oh my gosh. That is the big question. And, you know, I mean, there’s so many different ways to explain it and it’s so kind of ineffable at the same time. And I like to say it’s got these three parts: paying attention to the present moment or the here and now with acceptance and non-judgment.

And the reality is that doing any one of those things is very difficult. Doing all three is incredibly difficult. But we can, we can start to just work on these elements of right – How can we start to be aware, start to pay attention a little bit more to ourselves, to the world around us. Right? How can we start to be a bit more in the here and now, not racing off with, you know, like, Oh my gosh, you know, my kid, you know, who knows what, you know, “They told a lie and now they’re probably a sociopath and they’re going to be a serial killer…” and all, you know, like all that, you know, whatever. Right. We go down that pathway or you know, kind of keep harping on the past or something. Right. It’s like, you know, we’re worrying about that. Right. So when we come into the here and now we can let go of the stories or they become less real. It’s hard to, it’s easy to say let go of the story. Right. But, but we don’t have to believe them as much. It’s like “oh there’s this story about the future, maybe it’s true maybe it’s not. Here’s a story about the past. Does it have to impact us in this present moment right now? And then lastly, with, with acceptance and non-judgment right. It’s about accepting ourselves, accepting our kids, trying to not judge ourselves, not judge our kids quite so harshly, as well as our experience and all of that, of course, doing that perfectly is impossible, but just aiming a bit more for that and trying to not judge our experience quite so harshly,

Kendra: Yeah. I think that’s so true.

Caroline Welch: in interviewing over a hundred women for my book, one of my questions was, “Do you have a mindfulness practice? What is your relationship to mindfulness?” And often they’d say, oh, um, I am the least mindful person. Just put your computer away. There’ll be nothing here for you and your book,

Kendra: Caroline Welch is CEO and co-founder with Dr. Dan Siegel of The Mindsight Institute. She’s the author of The Gift of Presence, a Mindfulness Guide for Women.

Caroline Welch: But as we would get, uh, further into our conversation and they would describe to me, for example, a very busy day at work, returning home, the first thing, one woman in particular I’m thinking of, single mom, adolescent daughter.

And she would describe how, when she gets home, the first thing she does is she feels her hand on the door knob of her apartment. And takes three breaths. And being mindful, those three breaths, that transition, she says it makes all the difference in how she relates to her daughter for the rest of the evening.

Kendra: So Caroline’s point is — you might be practicing mindfulness already, without even realizing that’s what it is.

Caroline Welch: Mindfulness is very available to us, very accessible. And I think there is still a lot of, uh, intimidation and I can’t do that. I’m too busy to do that. I don’t know what it is. It doesn’t work for me… We can all capture these moments. And, uh, that’s really the key. I think we don’t want to fall into the trap of having yet another thing on our to-do list. So one thing that has been effective with my students is to introduce them to the concept of “stapling” what these moments will be to something they always do. One of my students actually has a, um, a pet lizard named Ruby and Ruby lives in a warm terrarium, but, uh, she has to turn the light on and off, day and night. And after a few minutes of thinking about how she could remember to take moments for herself, she “stapled” it to the light switch on and off twice a day. 

Kendra: I love that. And I love the word staple. That’s just so cool. Yeah. And everyone has this, this routine of like mundane tasks where you could just start to attach that little new habit that you want to try.

Caroline Welch: Exactly. And I would encourage, it’s an invitation really, that we make to ourselves, not an expectation.

Kendra: I was thinking about the little illustrations in your book, which by the way, I’m holding here, are so fun. Aand it’s so helpful. Maybe it’s because I’m so visual, but to see, you know, this person sitting in a room, but the thought in their mind, their mind is elsewhere. And so you, in many ways you almost could think of mindfulness as being, having your mind where your body is.

Caroline Welch: Yeah, exactly.

Kendra: And Caroline has a thing or two to say about those ideas that putting ourself first is a no-no.

Caroline Welch: As you might expect, many women believe self-care is selfish. So when I would ask about self care, I would hear things such as, oh, I’m not even on my own to-do list or I’m at the bottom of the list, or that’s not me. I’m not selfish. So we have a culture that has groomed us to be helpers and to say yes, and to be there for people. So when it comes to self-care, I think the first door to open is the one that says self-care is not selfish.

Kendra: What can mindfulness look like in practice if you’re in a really tough situation with your kids? I want to share with you the story of how mindfulness — and a meditation practice – helped one family who faced a severe mental health crisis.

Jill: I have a son, he was about 22. He was a junior in college and he was doing a research project for his senior thesis, which involved going to a yoga ashram and interviewing people for his project.

Kendra: Jill’s son was a high achiever. Valedictorian in high school, very smart, self motivated, and always demanding of himself. Someone she thought was already successfully launched. But his experiences during this senior thesis project changed everything. She says her son became physically depleted during some fieldwork – not sleeping, not eating enough. Then he lost the keys to the car he was driving. He pleaded for his parents to travel the four hours to get to the site to bring him a spare key.

Jill: I drove out there and he was, he was pretty crazy. He, and he hadn’t like, he hadn’t slept the night before. He had told me earlier that he was having trouble sleeping. But when I, when I went up there, he had actually had this, what he called “seeing God experience,” you know, he thought he had had some kind of connection that totally, you know, it, it frightened him. And it also, he also thought that it was like some kind of magical mystical thing. And so when I went to pick him up, he was, he was, “mom. I really want to share this with you, but I’m really afraid.”

Kendra: That episode turned out to be just the first in a series of escalating mental health crises for Jill’s son, who started to have difficulty coping on his own.

Jill: As the year went by, he started doing more and more strange things. He decided that he needed to simplify his life. And he got rid of all of his books. He got rid of all of his things. He deleted all of his work on his computer. He had to write this paper and this was his senior thesis. And he was in the middle of the night. He called me up at like five in the morning and said, I can’t do this. And I said, I said, well, why not? And he said, well, there’s no point. And I said, well, how far are along are you? And he said, well, I’m almost done. So I said, okay. I said, well, could you do it for us? And he’s like, okay. So he did. He finished the paper, he handed it in. He graduated from college, like three days later. We went out there to his graduation and we got him home. And then he totally flipped out and was like, he thought that somehow he had misused the power that was given to him. And so he needed to be punished and he was going to go to hell. That was his, that was his psychotic story.

Kendra: Jill wrestled with how to handle the crisis what would help her son — for a while he was involuntarily committed to a psychiatric facility. She had to fight to get him treatment with electro-convulsive therapy, which she says helped considerably. And then came a years-long journey to figure out which medications would help to control his psychotic symptoms.

Jill: We were really lucky to have a doctor who really knew his stuff. So, and, you know, he told us that, you know, his goal was to have him on as little medication as possible. So he wasn’t trying to just, you know, numb him and drug him. He was trying to figure out what was going to help his symptoms.

Kendra: Over this time she spent hours and hours just being with her son, reassuring him and trying to find ways to help him reorient his troubling thoughts – and at the same time keep herself from spinning out of control.

Jill: You know, these kids need, they need regular everyday support and reassurance. And you know, the more you can let them know that you’re there for them, even if you don’t know what to tell them, it makes a big difference. And you know, that was actually one of the biggest things that I learned was to not go to all the places my brain was taking me. And, you know, that’s exactly what they’re trying to learn as well, you know? With AA, I think the word is “one day at a time,” you know, that phrase? This experience taught me what that means. It’s like, you cannot go too far ahead of what you’re experiencing in the moment, because there’s nothing you can do about it. You’re probably going to be wrong and you know, you just have to live through it. 

Kendra: Yeah. And so how did you learn that? How did you learn to just stay in the moment and not let your mind spin into the future wondering what you’re going to do next? What else you need to learn? Whether he’ll function ever again…

Jill:  So how I learned that was, um, a friend of mine actually told me about this, um, psychologist, mindfulness teacher, Tara Brach, B R A C H. And, um, she has all of these guided meditations and talks and you know, any particular issue that you’re having a hard time with, there’s a talk for it and there’s a meditation for it.

Tara Brach: [Recorded meditation from Tara Brach] We practice. And when thinking is sticky, which it often is, you keep getting sucked back into the same narrative, your top 10 hits, you know how it goes. When it’s sticky, we can use the acronym RAIN to reestablish an embodied presence. And as a reminder, that means you just Recognize what’s going on. Okay. Worrying, worrying. Allow. Have space for the life that’s here. Just give space. Don’t judge yourself for thinking. Then Investigate. R-A-I investigate. Investigate in the body.

Jill: My son and I started listening to them and, you know, every one of those talks had some kind of thing that related to what he was going through and some way of learning, how to work through it and how to be with it.

Kendra: Even though her focus was her son and his wellness, Jill found that the tapes also spoke to her.

Jill: We listened to, um, those meditation tapes every day together for three years. And the mindfulness piece of it is teaching people that, you know, whatever you’re attached to is something that you can, you know, you can let go of at some point and look at it from another perspective and, you know, all of the scenarios that you’ve made up because you’re so worried as a parent, chances are, none of them are going to happen. And you know, why drive yourself crazy making all of this stuff up? And it’s very easy to say that and very hard to take that kind of advice. But over time, you know, if you meditate enough, like if, if you do, you know, 20 minutes a day for a couple months, your body gets trained into that relaxing place. So that, you know, when you’re getting worked up, the first thing you can do is start recognizing that you’re getting worked up. And then, you know, you can start your breathing and your body will take over and calm you down.

I don’t go so far as I used to in those, you know, emotional states, I get calmer. 

Kendra: That’s so great because I think that’s one of the biggest challenges for parents is just to, to learn, to kind of take a pause and not react right away, but just to kind of reflect on “What are my options here? And maybe I do nothing.” 

Jill: Right. But, you know, I think that parents, you know, parents think that everything is their fault. You know, if something isn’t working somehow, what did I do wrong as a parent to make this happen? And you know, it’s like, What parent knows what they’re doing when they have kids? I mean, I sure had no clue, you know, you figure it out. And, and you can’t, so you can’t judge yourself and say that you screwed up and that’s why your kid is like this. It’s just not, that’s just not right.

Kendra: Parents say the same thing that you’re saying, though, they feel some level of guilt or self reproach, or, you know, just keep looking back and ruminating over what they may have missed or what you did wrong. And you don’t, you just have to remind yourself in the moment you’re doing the best you can with what you know.

Jill: Right. And, you know, knowing the answer to a lot of these questions does not move you forward. When you’re in a situation like this, you cannot control any of it. And you don’t, it turns out you don’t need to, you know, and that’s something that I learned through all this mindfulness stuff.

Kendra: One final thought Jill shared with us from her mindfulness practice: Instead of fighting the things that scare you the most — try embracing them instead.

Jill: It’s like, okay, this is scary. There it is. It’s scary. And accepting it and that if you, you know, fear and you know, anxiety and bad stuff is a part of human, the human condition, as much as happiness and joy and love. And so if you look at that stuff as a part of what you’re supposed to be doing in life, you don’t have to push it away so much. You can just say, oh, there’s that, there’s that fear piece. There’s that? Oh yeah. Okay. Well, I guess that’s part of what I have to experience. And you know, like my son used to talk about with his thoughts, you know, the, the scary hell thoughts where like, I, you know, the more I try to push them the way, the more they come back. And, you know, once he finally was able to let them in, they didn’t have their power anymore.

MUSIC

Next time on A Little Easier we’ll move from mindfulness to another really important concept. The idea that the parent that we are is good enough. Self-acceptance, and self-compassion.

Susan Pollak: The easiest definition for self-compassion is treating yourself as you would a really good friend.

Kendra: But let’s not forget your microaction moment, this time from Caroline Welch.

Caroline: Welch: One day I took a post-it and I wrote on it: I am right where I should be. And I posted it on the wall of my office. And if I went to a writing retreat or something, I took it with me and posted it on that wall. The women whom I interviewed, I often heard their feeling, they just weren’t, they hadn’t done enough. They weren’t in the right spot. And I think the more we can give the message – whatever that most resonating message with you is – put it on a post-it and put it up and have a look at it. It’s so simple, but it really works. Just the simple I got this. Or you got this. However you speak to yourself. That can be very encouraging to have as a reminder for us.

I’m Kendra Wilde and this has been A Little Easier. The show that was created to help you find more joy and resilience when parenting is extra challenging. Thank you so much for being here. Make sure you’re subscribed to A Little Easier in your podcast app so you don’t miss an episode. And while you’re there, please take a moment to rate and review the podcast, share it with family and friends.

We’re an independent show focused on elevating parents because you’re the most important force behind your child’s wellbeing. Visit alittleeasier.org for show notes and discussion questions. Plus resources on parental burnout and resilience building. A Little Easier is written by Harriet Jones and co-produced by Harriet and Rae Kantrowitz, sound design and original music by Rae. This podcast is brought to you by Wild Peace for Parents and me, Kendra Wilde.