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In an effort to balance out my rant about self-care tactics that don’t work for me, I thought I would share some that do. While I will be sharing specific things that I do, I don’t want to present this as a list of things that work for me and should also work for you. I intend to focus more on how I settled on these methods, how they have helped me, and how I handle my own expectations for them.

1) Meditation: I will admit, my journey with mindfulness meditation began through a workplace wellness program. At first, I saw it as a great way to take an extra little three-minute break during the day. That led to many more three minute breaks, and eventually to me downloading a mindfulness app, but not really establishing any sort of routine. I had difficulty making time to meditate on the weekends, mostly because I did not want to be alone with my thoughts. After a long break during the pandemic, I downloaded a different app and started my journey over again. Most days I meditated very much in earnest, although some days I just put the timer on while I brushed my teeth to keep my streak. Eventually I noticed that I felt better on days when I meditated, and every once in a while I noticed myself dismissing troublesome thoughts.

But the results were not immediate. I was 200 days into my second meditation journey before I was able to put my phone in the drawer at work for even one day, and it was another hundred days before I was able to do so with any sort of consistency. For me, meditation hit that sweet spot of short term and long term benefits. Every day, whether I felt It was having an effect on the rest of my life or not I got some peace a few moments of peace and quiet.

2) Exercise: I’m not here to proselytize the benefits of exercise, which may not be accessible to everyone, or extol the benefits of a specific exercise routine. Everyone’s body is unique and the right exercise for you is a personal matter, so I wont to get into specifics. I want to use exercise as an example of something that takes much more time out of the day, and something that I have had an on-again-off-again relationship with for pretty much my entire life. My early dabbling for the exercise were largely tied to my teenage body image issues. After college, armed with a more thorough knowledge of how bodies work and a different set of expectations, I began to exercise again. This time my motivation was much healthier. I knew the more I moved, the better I felt, especially in contrast to a highly sedentary job.

Over the past few years I have tried, for varying amounts of time: yoga videos, which were the quickest and easiest; swimming, which was the most time-consuming, but also when I can say I was physically at my strongest; cycling during the beginning of quarantine when I was furloughed and itching to get outside, and now I do low-impact aerobics routines, which are much easier on my joints, but at least get my heart rate up.

In between each of these, there were long periods where I got little or no exercise. Sometimes I was just too busy, and sometimes my previous form of exercise no longer fit with my schedule. Every time I found something new I would have to start again from the beginning. I still struggle with having to backtrack so that I don’t over exert myself after I take a week off for whatever reason. My current routine works for me now and that’s great but I’ve learned enough from the past not to be disappointed when it doesn’t work forever and I have to find something new.

3) Setting Boundaries: This may seem like a departure from the previous methods in that it is not visibly advertised. After all, it would be difficult to sell you a boundary-setting app and no workplace wants to be on the receiving end of such boundaries. Learning to set healthy boundaries took a lot of therapy, which I know not everyone has access to, and a lot of lived experience. One simple boundary I set was not going out on weeknights. I decided it was more important for me to get enough rest before work the next day. None of my friendships have suffered. There are other, more personal boundaries that have been more difficult to set and I won’t get into details here. I had to go through the difficult task of parsing out what was reasonable to protect myself and what would put an undue burden on someone else. At the root of it all, though, I had to come to the realization that I was worthy of respect. And that is a conclusion I hope everyone is able to come to on their self-care journey.

 4) Journaling: My other on-again-off-again relationship. If you were to flip through the journals I have accumulated throughout my life, which I hope only Carolyn ever has or will, you would probably be very concerned for me. I tend to journal when I need it most, often in a time of crisis. I’ve tried at various times to create an “every single day” journaling habit to no avail. Journaling is where I exercise my self-imposed principle that nothing is self-care if it really stresses me out more than it helps. And often if I set a standard of journaling every single day, finding time to journal is more stressful than the stress it relieves. But I know that if I ever need to process something out on paper, the blank page is there for me.

5) Scheduling Me Time: I don’t do this terribly often, maybe once every couple of months or so, but sometimes if my calendar is looking either to empty or too full, I like to schedule out a little time for myself. Whether it’s taking a bath, watching a movie, or sometimes even something I just never do like cleaning my baseboards, it feels good to officially allow myself the time.

-Erica

July is a free review month! This post would normally be for Patreon subscribers, but is being reposted for free. If you’re not a Patreon subscriber, this is what the Patreon posts are like. If you are a Patreon subscriber and have been wanting to share this post, now you can! (please do).

Self-care and self-improvement have always been tricky topics for me. As someone who has struggled with both anxiety and depression since childhood, I feel like I could always be taking better care of myself. And as a member of that special cohort of high-achieving children who become average to less-than-average achieving adults, I feel like I could always just be doing better. This toxic combination of nature and nurture let me to spend much of my early 20s searching in vain for a way to live my life that would make me both happy and productive.

Suffice it to say, many of these strategies and methods simply did not work for me. And every time I tried implementing one of these methods and failed, I felt the doom and gloom set in. It took me too long to learn that not everything is for everybody, and just because something worked for someone else does not mean that it would work for me.

It can be really hard to read about how a certain organizational method or habit-forming strategy worked out wonderfully for someone else while it is simultaneously failing you. It’s also difficult when the methods described require amounts of time or other resources you just don’t have. And yet another layer of pressure is added when you’re not just reading about self-improvement from a book you can stop reading at any time, but you have unsolicited advice coming from everyone in your life. I want to detail some of the self-help and self-improvement strategies that did not work for me, so that if anyone else out there find some selves in a similar situation they know they are not alone.

“Just do” or “Just don’t do” [Insert Good or Bad Thing Here]: My contention with pronouncements like these goes all the way back to when people, including my parents, would tell me as a depressed 10-year-old to “just be happy.” Now, as an adult who does not easily establish or keep routines, I simply ignore any piece of advice that begins with those words. The key to happiness may very well be exercising every single day without fail or never looking at my phone at work again. But I know that I can’t “just do” anything. I need instruction on how to start a routine and, when I inevitably break it, how to restart a routine without shaming myself out of trying all together. Included in this category are things like “just let it go,” “just don’t take it personally,” “just stop looking at distracting websites,” etc.

Many Workplace Self-Care Initiatives I want to be clear, I’m not talking about EAPs here. Those can be a great resource. I’m talking about the “do this three minute desk yoga video and don’t say we don’t look out for you!” kind of thing. Taking care of yourself should not come with any outside expectations. You are the most qualified to evaluate your own needs and establish your own goals for yourself, whether your goal is to be more active, better rested, something else. This is not to say you cannot take advantage of an employer sponsored program if it aligns with your personal goals, just throw out any messaging about how it will help your productivity. Remember you are doing this for you, not them. Don’t do anything that would put more of a burden on you than your employer already has.

Self-Help Books I tried reading books like Gretchen Rubin’s Better than Before, which breaks people down into four basic personality types and provides tips and tricks for each of these for forming healthy habits. She begins the book with the caveat that those suffering from a variety of mental illnesses or mental health issues would likely not be able to follow her strategies. I soldiered on anyway, and found that she had the least amount of helpful advice for my personality type, often following her advice for the other three types by saying “well this probably won’t work for you.” If things change to later in the book I don’t know I stopped reading.

Cal Newport’s Deep Work is another book I gave up on about halfway through. I started it hoping that it would help me focus at work, but the his advice does not work for someone who’s job is almost entirely distractions.

I think it’s great that these people have figured out what works for them. And I’m not writing off the above books. They might work for you, they just didn’t work for me. So, if you’re also in some kind of slump, whether it’s depression, a dead-end job, or anything else, take care of yourself. Don’t expect one meditation or one candle-lit bath to solve everything. And don’t give into the sunk cost fallacy. If you’re trying something that’s supposed to make you feel better, and it’s just making you miserable, stop. Try something else. There are so many ways to get the same result, and you need to find the one that works for you. Don’t waste valuable time on the ones that don’t.

-Erica