An easy way to care for yourself

May 16, 2024 ~ The Healing Modalities ~ Leave a comment

Even more.

One of the ways I started taking better care of myself was through thinking about my Future Self and what she would appreciate.

It’s easy to do or not do something in the moment for reasons of instant gratification. But would your Future Self appreciate that action?

Here are some examples:

When faced with washing the dishes in my kitchen sink, would my Future Self appreciate the instant gratification of my Current Self leaving dishes in the sink for her to wash the next day? (Sometimes I DO choose to leave the dishes for the next day – on days when I know I don’t have to rush out of the house first thing in the morning. Then I DO have time to do them in the morning. But if I leave them there the night before a long day, I know I won’t be able to wash them until I get home later the next evening. And by that time, I might be too tired and there goes another day with dishes in the sink. In that case, my Future Self would appreciate me washing the dishes sooner rather than later.)

Would my Future Self appreciate me spending an hour scrolling on social media at night when I could be sleeping earlier or reading instead? I think my Future Self would appreciate some extra sleep or making progress in the book I’m reading.

Would my Future Self appreciate me skipping my morning workout routine today? What would be the consequences of that? If I’m sick or in pain, that’s a different story. My Current Self would appreciate it greatly if I skipped my morning workout routine today. My Future Self might also appreciate it, if it means that I rest and recover more quickly instead of pushing myself and prolonging the pain or sickness.

Would my Future Self appreciate me giving in to the urge to text someone who is better for me NOT to text in the moment? Probably not, because she would have to deal with the consequences of feeling anxious, waiting to hear back, receiving a message that she doesn’t want to hear, or engaging in ways that are unhealthy for her.

Would my Future Self appreciate me eating another helping of food when I want to lose weight? No, because she’s the one who will be frustrated that her body weight isn’t changing and “nothing” is working. Even though it might meet my Current Self’s need for instant gratification, it will delay my Future Self’s desire for a more healthy weight and well-being.

In thinking about our Future Self, what we’re doing TODAY contributes to what and who our Future Self will be, do, and have.

Today, if we don’t overeat, we are taking care of our tomorrow Future Self who won’t feel lethargic and guilty for overeating.

Today, if we spend an hour working on the report, we are taking care of our next-week Future Self who won’t need to scramble at the last minute to finish the report.

Today, if we decide to finally leave the toxic relationship we’re in, we are taking care of our 6-month later Future Self who is in a healthier relationship with themself (or even someone else).

Today, if we create a monthly payment plan to pay off our debt and choose on each of the following months to stick with the plan, we are taking care of our one-year later Future Self who no longer has debt.

We get to decide today with our actions how we are taking care of our Future Self.

Your turn: What will you decide to do today to take care of your Future Self tomorrow? What about your Future Self in a week? In a month? In a year?

Subscribe if you want to receive this content directly in your inbox.

Work with me: Want to see how self-care is transformative and can help you create the results you want in your life? I can show you how. I offer first-time seekers a complimentary 60-minute exploratory session. Sign up here.

What’s on your mind? It can be powerful to learn from each other and our common struggles when it comes to our practice of self-care–or just being a human being. If you have something you’re struggling with and would like some perspective, share it here. Your issue may be chosen and addressed in the next post–it’ll be totally anonymous.

When you try to escape from yourself

May 9, 2024 ~ The Healing Modalities ~ Leave a comment

Do you know what it means to escape yourself? We may avoid ourselves or escape from ourselves for different reasons, which I’ll talk about in a minute.

Forms of escape or avoidance that might be familiar to you are overeating, overdrinking, overspending, over-Instagraming, over-Netflixing, overworking, over-cleaning, over-exercising, or eating edibles.

It could be ANYTHING, if we’re using that thing/action to prevent ourselves from being present to feeling an emotion.

I call this type of escape “buffering.” What is buffering?

We buffer to avoid feeling emotional pain or uncomfortable emotions. When we buffer, we use external things to change how we feel internally. This means engaging in an action to put a buffer between us and a feeling we don’t want to feel.

We might feel like we’re taking care of ourselves by engaging in some of these actions. Sometimes we are. And sometimes, these things become false pleasures that have a net-negative outcome: when we overeat, we gain weight. When we overdrink, we end up with hangovers and half of the next day is ruined. When we overspend, we go into debt or don’t meet our savings goals. When we eat edibles, we are less present for our lives and those around us.

If buffering is what we do to avoid pain/discomfort, it makes sense that when we stop buffering, we’ll feel pain/discomfort. But most of us don’t understand this, which makes it almost impossible to stop buffering or escaping ourselves.

We have to be willing to feel uncomfortable in order to move past our buffers.

An analogy for this is like stepping into a house and turning on the lights and the house is a mess. The obvious and easiest answer is to turn the lights back off (to buffer) so the mess will “go away.” But the mess doesn’t go away – you just can’t see it now because the lights are off.

It’s similar with emotions. Avoiding an emotion doesn’t make the emotion go away – it just helps us not to see or feel it. We pretend it isn’t there, but it IS there, and it’s there for a reason.

And this is part of the reason WHY we buffer sometimes – to NOT find out what that reason is.

Buffering is a way to tolerate our lives when we know there’s some misalignment occurring.

We may be unhappy at our job, but we need to keep the job in order to support our family. So we buffer by overdrinking wine every night or impulse buying on Amazon or eating edibles.

Or we might be in a relationship that’s not working for us, but instead of having an uncomfortable conversation or making a scary, difficult decision, we stay in the relationship and buffer instead.

Or we don’t like the overall trajectory of our lives but don’t know what to do, so we buffer – which is easy – instead of doing the harder work of looking within, seeking professional help, or making tough decisions to help change our lives.

When we stop buffering, we’ll likely experience temporary pain. And the pain isn’t caused by the lack of buffering. What we need to do is stop buffering ourselves long enough to find the real cause of the pain.

It might mean taking a closer look at ourselves and our lives, our decisions and choices up to this point, and asking ourselves what we really need and how we truly want to take care of ourselves and our lives.

Your turn: What feelings have you been avoiding? What are the false pleasures you’ve been engaging in? In what way would your life be different if you didn’t have these false pleasures? Are you ready to stop buffering and willing to feel some discomfort instead, in order to move towards true knowing and well-being for yourself?

Subscribe if you want to receive this content directly in your inbox.

Is it selfish?

May 2, 2024 ~ The Healing Modalities ~ Leave a comment

You get to decide.

Over the weekend, I attended the Kidpower International 35 year anniversary conference in Healdsburg, California. I’ve been part of Kidpower since 2002 and for this conference, people in the Kidpower community gathered from many places around the world, including Argentina, Ecuador, Guatemala, Mexico, New Zealand, Nepal, Vietnam, Pakistan, Montreal, Germany, Sweden, Russia, and Iran, and from various places within the U.S. We gathered together to learn, connect, and celebrate. I felt a strong sense of community and shared values.

At the conference, I made a presentation about Transformative Self-Care and received a question that I want to write about today: “What is the difference between self-care and being selfish?”

This is an important question – and it might also contribute to being an obstacle for some of us to engage in our own self-care practice. If we see self-care as selfish and we don’t want to view ourselves as “selfish,” then the cognitive dissonance will get in the way.

One conference participant shared a new concept: self-fullness vs. selfishness. I appreciated that idea! It’s like being mindful about ourselves by being self-full of what we need to for ourselves.

A question came to me that felt very powerful as well:

Is it selfish to take care of ourselves if doing so helps us continue contributing to and taking care of others?

When put that way, I don’t see the selfishness. I see someone who is prioritizing themselves so that they can continue to actively contribute to others and to the world.

When we are depleted and worn down, contributing to others can feel like a burden. But when we are taken care of and filled up by our own efforts to care for ourselves, contributing to others can feel more joyful and desirable.

Your turn: You get to decide – is it selfish to take care of yourself so that you can continue taking care of others and contributing in ways that feel good to you?

Subscribe if you want to receive this content directly in your inbox.

Equal air time

April 25, 2024 ~ The Healing Modalities ~ Leave a comment

For the best-case.

Have you noticed that you think about worst-case scenarios more than you think about best-case scenarios?

This is partly due to our brains being wired to think this way, in order to survive. We want to be prepared for the worst. But why don’t we ever want to be prepared for the best?

Again, this is partly due to how our brains work – sometimes, we don’t want to be disappointed, so we avoid thinking about the best-case scenario to “protect” ourselves in case it doesn’t happen. OR, we think we’ll know how to handle the best-case scenario with ease, so we don’t worry about it much.

But we DON’T think we’ll be able to handle the worst-case scenario, so we dwell on it, worry about it, ruminate about it – to no end sometimes. Worrying pretends to be necessary. We think that if we worry enough, we’ll be prepared enough.

I want to offer that with any-case scenarios, we won’t know what will happen or how we’ll feel and act until we’re there.

What we CAN spend more time doing is giving the best-case scenario EQUAL AIR TIME.

Equal air time just means that if we’re going to think about what’s wrong, what’s bad, what’s lacking, what’s missing, what could go wrong, etc. then we choose on purpose to also think about what’s right, what’s good, what’s enough, what’s here right now, and what’s going right.

It may not be the best-case scenario, but it’s a better-case scenario when we can see what’s right about something instead of what’s wrong about something – especially when thinking about what’s wrong about something isn’t serving us. We can help ourselves experience more appreciation and gratitude in that space of thinking about what’s right about something.

And there’s less room for the story about “what’s wrong” to take up space when we’re focused on the story about “what’s right.” There’s always a 50/50 component to life – positive/negative. What we choose to focus on intentionally is up to us.

Your turn: If you find yourself thinking about “what’s wrong” often, are you willing to give equal air time to “what’s right”? What would be different for you if you started giving equal air time to “what could go right” versus “what could go wrong”?

I’d love to hear any insights you want to share!

Subscribe if you want to receive this content directly in your inbox.

I didn’t want to write this post

April 18, 2024 ~ The Healing Modalities ~ Leave a comment

😑

Sometimes, I just don’t feel like it. I don’t feel like doing “the thing,” whatever it happens to be.

For example, I didn’t feel like writing this post this week. I kept thinking, “What do I have to say? I’ve said everything that I want to say. I don’t have any new ideas.”

I felt unmotivated to come up with something new. But because I’m committed to myself and my business, I decided to tell the truth and have that be a topic I’m writing to you about this week.

We all struggle with those times when we say to ourselves, “I just don’t feel like it!” And then we don’t do whatever it is that we told ourselves we’d do.

And sometimes, that’s OK. When we check-in with ourselves and find that we really don’t have the energy or capacity to do something, we can choose not to do it.

We just want to make sure that it’s intentional, on purpose, and not just an automatic response, a way for us to push the “easy” button on something that might be really important to us in the long run.

What I mean is, are we getting in our own way and self-sabotaging in that moment OR are we choosing to take care of ourselves in that moment?

Because sometimes doing something to take care of ourselves might be hard – not easy. And doing something self-sabotaging is usually easy. Like eating that fourth cookie, or having that third drink, or blowing off the gym, our walk, our yoga class, our meditation practice – or not writing a weekly blog post.

So we really want to check-in with ourselves and ask, “Do I really not have the energy or capacity for this? Or do I just want to do the easy thing? What might be the long-term benefit of doing / not doing this thing?”

Sometimes we will choose to do the easy thing. If we do, we choose that on purpose and then we don’t need to beat ourselves up for it. Because choosing the easy thing and beating ourselves up for it doesn’t help anyone. In fact, it probably defeats the purpose of choosing the easy thing if we’re just going to beat ourselves up for it. Might as well choose the hard thing, then!

So I could’ve chosen the easy thing and not written a post this week. Would anyone have noticed? Maybe. Maybe not. But I chose to write this post and tell the truth about not wanting to write this post as an example of what’s possible.

(And honestly, when I finally sat down to write this, it wasn’t that hard!)

We can be intentional about our decisions as acts of care for ourselves, instead of automatically pushing the “easy” button. And we get to know the difference between self-sabotaging actions and self-care actions. We can always choose differently next time.

Your turn: Are you clear about which of your choices are self-sabotaging or self-caring? If not, you can get clearer for yourself. Each time you have the thought, “I don’t feel like it,” get curious with yourself. Why don’t you feel like it? Is it about caring for yourself or is it about pushing the “easy” button for yourself (aka, possibly a self-sabotaging action)?

Ultimately, you get to decide which one it is for you. Asking the last question, “What might be the long-term benefit of doing / not doing this thing?” could also help you find more clarity.

Subscribe if you want to receive this content directly in your inbox.

Episode 2 of my show “Get Out of Your Own Way” is on today at 3:30pm Pacific time! And you can find it wherever you listen to podcasts, by searching my name, April Yee. Listen to it on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio, Amazon Music, Podcast Addict, and more!

You’re in charge

April 11, 2024 ~ The Healing Modalities ~ Leave a comment

Of your thoughts and feelings.

It’s easy to think that external circumstances, like other people, things, outcomes, and events, cause us to feel a certain way.

The traffic

The weather.

What someone said to us.

The number on the scale.

The number in our bank account.

These are all facts, things that are circumstances. And they’re NEUTRAL, until we apply a thought to them.

So what really causes us to feel a certain way is how we think about those external circumstances. And this is how we can get in our own way, or get out of our own way.

Do you know why circumstances don’t cause our feelings? Because two different people could experience the exact same circumstance, but depending on how each of them thinks about the circumstance, their thoughts will create their feelings. So it’s not the circumstance. It’s our thoughts.

For example, one person gets cut off while driving. She could immediately get angry and vengeful and try to cut that other person off because she’s thinking, “This person is a jerk! How dare he do that to me. I’ll show him!” And sometimes this anger can start a spiral of negative thoughts and emotions for the rest of the day. She got in her own way and ruined her day.

Another person who gets cut off while driving could feel some annoyance but then get over it easily because he’s thinking, “Yikes! I know how it feels to be in a rush like that. I’ve done that type of thing before without meaning to.” Some initial annoyance, but pretty quickly letting it go and not letting it ruin his day.

Same circumstance, but different thoughts, which create different feelings – and ultimately, different results.

When we let other people have so much control over our feelings, we’re giving our power away to them. We’re saying, “How you’re behaving/what you’re saying/what’s happening ‘out there’ is determining how I feel, so I have no control over my feelings.”

But we DO have control. That control is in our thoughts. Our thoughts are where our power lies.

Most of the time, we make other people’s words and actions mean something about us and we think we have to protect ourselves from something, protect our egos.

For example, when a colleague offers another way of doing something than what we suggested, we might get defensive because we might think, “She doesn’t respect my opinion.” Then we may feel angry and defensive because we made it mean something about ourselves – usually something related to “I’m not good enough.” Then we proceed to act in a certain way that deteriorates our relationship with that colleague. We got in our own way and affected our relationship with our colleague.

What if instead we thought, “She could be offering a more efficient way to do it. Let’s see if it can work”? That thought will create a totally different feeling. We didn’t make our colleague’s words/actions mean anything about ourselves. We didn’t take it personally or need to defend ourselves. This other thought might create the feeling of “curiosity” or “openness,” which leads us to collaborate with that colleague in a cooperative way.

Two different outcomes because of two different thoughts – but the circumstance was the same.

When we take responsibility for our feelings, we stop giving our power away to other people and situations. We stop getting in our own way. We are in charge of how we think and feel.

Your turn: What are you making someone’s words or actions mean about yourself? What if their words or actions don’t have to mean anything about you? Are you open to becoming more aware of the thoughts you’re thinking and how they’re creating your feelings? What are the three most frequent emotions you feel during a typical day? What are the thoughts creating those emotions?

Subscribe if you want to receive this content directly in your inbox.

Get out of your own way

April 4, 2024 ~ The Healing Modalities ~ Leave a comment

How?

Are you getting in your own way? If so, what does that look like for you?

It might look like feeling stuck in a life that you know could be better or different. It could be staying at a “safe” job because you feel too scared to pursue something you could really love. It might be not losing 20 pounds because “dieting has never worked for you.” It could be staying in a “situation-ship” because you don’t believe you’ll find someone better. It could be that you’re burning yourself out at work because you’re not setting boundaries.

For me, I got in my own way by:

– Letting other people define my value and worth
– Hustling for worthiness (trying to DO all the things to prove my worthiness)
– Wanting someone to “save” me from my “mediocre” life
– Not setting boundaries
– Ignoring my body
– Flaking on myself
– Lying to myself and others, aka people-pleasing
– Thinking I wasn’t good enough
– Not asking for help
– Thinking I needed to have it all figured out

I used to seek approval from external sources. This is a losing game because we can never get enough approval if we only seek it from outside ourselves. Other people and things can be unreliable in providing us with approval. The way to fulfill this need for approval is to give it to ourselves.

Recognizing that, these are some ways I practice getting out of my own way:

– Asking myself, “What brings me joy?”
– Taking responsibility for my life and emotions
– Setting boundaries in multiple areas of my life
– Connecting with my body, listening to it, honoring it
– Being kinder to myself
– Keeping commitments to myself
– Paying attention to my thoughts
– Allowing all the feelings – be willing to feel any feeling
– Telling the truth to myself, then to others
– Having my own back
– Loving myself no matter what
– Practice, practice, practice

Some of these things might sound familiar because they are things I’ve talked about and shared with you in the past through these weekly posts. 🙂

AND, I’m excited to announce: to dive deeper and learn more about getting out of your own way, you can tune in to my new show, “Get Out of Your Own Way” on Transformation Talk Radio!

My show premieres today, April 4th, at 3:30pm Pacific time! You can catch it by going here.

My show will also be available as a podcast on all the platforms where you listen to podcasts. Stay tuned!

Subscribe if you want to receive this content directly in your inbox.

All-or-nothing thinking

March 28, 2024 ~ The Healing Modalities ~ Leave a comment

Drop it.

One of the things that can get in the way of our self-care practices is all-or-nothing thinking.

All-or-nothing thinking is an unhelpful thinking pattern that we may be engaging in. We can recognize when we’re doing this when we’re thinking in extremes: we’re either a success or a failure. Our performance was perfect or terrible. If we’re not one hundred percent, then we’re a zero. If we can’t exercise for an hour, then we won’t do it at all.

That last example creates a majority of the reasons why most people don’t engage in self-care practices. Some people might have an unrealistic idea – an ideal – of what self-care looks like for them.

And when they can’t meet that ideal, they don’t do ANYTHING.

For example, because Sara thinks she has to exercise for an hour 4 times a week, when she has to stay 20 minutes later at work than expected one afternoon, she decides that she can’t exercise for a full hour before going home to make dinner, so she doesn’t go to the gym at all that day. And because she didn’t go to the gym that day, her gym momentum takes a hit and she doesn’t go again for a week and a half.

If Sara dropped her all-or-nothing thinking, she could’ve gone to the gym and exercised for 30 minutes – even 20 minutes would have been beneficial.

Or because Kevin thinks he has to meditate for 30 minutes every time he sits down to practice, when he finds himself with only 10 minutes one day, he skips his practice entirely. And his meditation practice momentum takes a hit and he finds himself skipping practice for several days because he “doesn’t have time.”

If Kevin dropped his all-or-nothing thinking, he’d recognize that meditating for 10 minutes can still be beneficial.

Or because Charlie thinks she has to stick to her diet 100% or it won’t work, when she finds herself eating two more cookies than she planned on Tuesday, she quits her whole diet for the next two weeks. Quitting won’t get us to our goal faster.

If Charlie dropped her all-or-nothing thinking, she could instead think, “OK, I ate two extra cookies today, but I can still stick with my plan for dinner. And tomorrow, I can stick with my meal plan too. I don’t have to give up just because I went off part of my plan today.”

It’s great to set ambitious goals for ourselves. But not at the expense of us meeting those goals. It’s about having realistic plans for the time we DO have, with the decisions we CAN make, and with the CAPACITY we have.

With any practice, consistency and commitment are important. Showing up is key. Even for 5 minutes.

So when we want to have a movement goal of exercising every day and we only have 5 minutes in the morning and 5 minutes in the evening to do something, we DO something during those 5 minutes.

It could be 10 pushups and 10 squats, twice a day.

It could be a 5 minute walk twice a day.

It could be 5 minutes on a bike/treadmill in the morning and 5 minutes stretching at night.

But we DO it when the time comes. We show up for ourselves when the time comes.

Showing up for ourselves consistently builds trust in ourselves to do what we say we’ll do. Even if it’s only for 5 minutes at a time.

And what we may find is that those 5 minutes build strength, energy, and motivation to extend our movement time. We might find ourselves wanting to make more time to build on what we started and do 10 minutes at a time. Or find a 30-minute time chunk each day. We won’t know what’s possible for us until we try.

And still, maybe it happens that one day, we don’t even have 5 minutes and we only have 2 minutes. We can still do SOMEthing during those 2 minutes to move our body around intentionally.

So we can drop the all-or-nothing thinking. We can start having more realistic ideas of what our self-care plan looks like. And then we show up for those plans. We show up for ourselves.

Your turn: Where in your life might you be engaging in all-or-nothing thinking? Do you find yourself wondering why you’re not engaging in the self-care practices you KNOW you can do? Are your self-care plans realistic or unrealistic to fit into your life right now? How can you create self-care practices that FIT into your life exactly the way it is right now?

Dig Deeper: In what ways might you need to make changes in your life to help support your self-care practices? (Hint: making those changes IS part of self-care.)

Subscribe if you want to receive this content directly in your inbox.

Joy vs. Buffering

March 21, 2024 ~ The Healing Modalities ~ Leave a comment

What’s the difference?

Last week we talked about doing things that bring us more joy. And I mentioned that this week we’ll look at the difference between doing things that bring us joy and engaging in behaviors that have a net negative consequence or that are self-sabotaging.

So, what is buffering? Buffering means engaging in an action to put a buffer between us and a feeling we don’t want to feel.

We buffer to avoid feeling emotional pain or uncomfortable emotions. When we buffer, we use external things to change how we feel internally.

The actions might look like we are doing things that bring us joy, like getting a sweet treat, having a nice glass of wine, or purchasing a small gift for ourselves. When we are experiencing joy, there’s a peaceful, easy, celebratory feel to it.

The difference with buffering is that we are likely OVER-doing something and feel out of control with it, like overeating, overdrinking, overspending, over-Instagraming, over-Netflixing, overworking, over-cleaning, or over-exercising. It could be anything, if we’re using that thing/action to prevent ourselves from feeling an emotion.

These things become false pleasures that have a net-negative outcome: When we overeat, we gain weight. When we overdrink, we end up with hangovers and half of the next day is ruined. When we overspend, we go into debt or don’t meet our savings goals. When we over-Instagram, we lose time that could be used in more valuable ways.

We have to be willing to feel uncomfortable in order to move past our buffers.

An analogy for this is like stepping into a house and turning on the lights and the house is a mess. The obvious and easiest answer is to turn the lights back off (to buffer) so the mess will “go away.” But the mess doesn’t go away–you just can’t see it now because the lights are off.

It’s similar with emotions. Avoiding an emotion doesn’t make the emotion go away—it just helps us not to see or feel it. We pretend it isn’t there, but it is there, and it’s there for a reason.

When we give up our buffers, we’ll still get upset, but we’ll deal with it differently. We won’t head for the ice cream, which will just make us feel sick or regretful. We’ll deal with it by becoming aware and examining why we’re upset. Soon, we won’t even want ice cream or chips because the (false) pleasure we get from food—or whatever buffering actions we’re doing—actually diminishes, and the pleasure we get from taking care of ourselves and fueling ourselves increases.

Instead of using external things to change how we feel, we can use our minds to change how we feel. Or we can keep the emotion and choose to feel and process it in the moment.

Your turn: What feelings have you been avoiding? What are the false pleasures you’ve been engaging in? In what way would your life be better if you didn’t have these false pleasures? Are you ready to stop buffering and willing to feel some discomfort instead, to move towards real well-being?

Subscribe if you want to receive this content directly in your inbox.

What about joy?

March 14, 2024 ~ The Healing Modalities ~ Leave a comment

Know it for YOU.

One of the first ways I started to learn how to take better care of myself was through asking the question, “What brings me joy?”

I learned this question in my Holistic Life Coach certification program. And that was the first time anyone had suggested to me that this was a good question to ask myself. And to know how to answer it. In multiple ways.

In working with my clients, it’s not a surprise that some of them have no idea how to answer the questions, “What do you want?” or “What brings you joy?”

This is because they’ve been too busy letting other people have what they want, or helping others get what they want, or thinking about what others might want.

This looks like saying:

“Oh, I’ll be fine with whatever you choose.”
“I know you like pizza, so let’s get that.”
“You have great taste, so I’ll let you choose.”
“OK kids, we’ll watch the movie you want.”
“OK honey, we’ll go where you want to go.”

This is not to say that we stop being considerate or thoughtful of what others want or stop going with the flow sometimes, but rather, we can start thinking about what WE truly want, like, and enjoy. Just so we know that for ourselves.

We can still take part in and enjoy what others like AND we can learn to advocate for ourselves so others participate in what we like sometimes too. We don’t need to force them to do it and we don’t need to force ourselves to do it, if we don’t want to. And sometimes we might choose to do something that ISN’T our preference because it’s easier to do it than not to do it – it saves an argument or conflict from happening. That’s an intentional choice we make sometimes. And that’s OK, as long as it doesn’t become the default and create resentment.

When we can start knowing for ourselves what brings us joy and allow ourselves to partake in these things, we start to listen to and honor ourselves more deeply.

This is part of caring for ourselves, to let ourselves experience joy, comfort, and pleasure. Even if they are small things to start, like staying in pajamas all day, baking something, knitting/crocheting, sitting in silence in the car, watching an episode (or three) of reality TV, buying hot apple cider at the farmers market, or intentionally noticing the flowers on a walk.

Next week we’ll look at the difference between doing things that bring us joy and engaging in behaviors that have a net negative consequence or that are self-sabotaging. (Think: getting an ice cream cone because it brings you joy when you are actively working on reducing your sugar intake to lose weight. Which is why it’s great to have multiple ways to experience joy.)

Your turn: What kind of flowers do you like? What fabrics feel good on your skin? What colors do you enjoy wearing? What scents do you love? What soothes you? What have you been wanting to do / experience / eat / have but haven’t made the time for yourself to do / experience / eat / have that? When is the next time you can make time to do / experience / eat / have that? Make a plan to make it happen for you. When you do it, remember to thank yourself for making it happen.

Subscribe if you want to receive this content directly in your inbox.