How To Completely Change Your Self-Care Mindset -

When you think of the word “self-care” what comes to mind? What images, sounds, ideas, or thoughts do you experience? In my professional practice as a therapist, I ask people this question a lot. And most people have very similar self-care mindsets. They often report thinking of self-care as being wildy indulgent, acts of luxury, or the pinacle of physical fitness. When I ask how they feel about self-care, people often describe feeling overwhelemed, inexperienced, disconnected, inadequate, like they’re missing out on something, or just plain lazy.

I find this interesting because it doesn’t quite add up. How can something so helpful and therapeutic be so torrentially difficult and painstakingly distraught? Sometimes I stop myself from even bringing up the word “self-care” to avoid having to unravel the waves of negative emotions that come with it. This is weird, y’all. Self-care shouldn’t be like this. Self-care shouldn’t feel like this. It’s time to completely change your mind about self-care.

Deconstructing Your Self-Care Mindset

If you can relate to any of this, it may be time to sit down and assess your self-care mindset. Is how you are thinking about self-care benefiting you? Is it helping you actually put in the work and energy towards your goals? If not, it might be worth taking a good look at how you can shift your self-care mindset in a more positive way. The first step in doing so is to start to recognize and be aware of all of the unhelpful thoughts you have about self-care. Whenever an unhelpful thought comes into your head, label it as no helpful. This can help you start to recognize that sometimes we need to clean up and reevaluate our thinking patterns.

Reconstructing Your Self-Care Mindset

After hashing out all of the unhelpful thoughts and feelings that you have towards self-care, you can then work to build up a new self-care mindset- a helpful self-care mindset. Take a moment and ask yourself, “what would help me take good care of myself right now?” Figuring out how you can work within yourself to motivate yourself in helpful ways will help self-care feel much less of a burden. We can eventually start to replace the unhelpful thoughts with helpful ones. What ways can you incorporate helpful thinking about self-care into your day?

Putting It All Together

The way we think about self-care has a direct impact on our ability to successfully and effienciently take good care of ourselves. It is important to take some time to listen to your thoughts about self-care and distinguish the helpful thoughts from the unhelpful. The more you work on this, the closer you can get to completely changing your minds about self-care.