Be Kind To Yourself
I’ve been feeling like a broken record lately, over on YouTube and on my Instagram feed. I keep talking about feeling exhausted, spread too thin and how I need to simplify my life a bit.
I’ve had this idea for a blog post about treating yourself with kindness and talking to yourself as if you were a friend, it’s been sat as a title only in my drafts for a few weeks. And then I entered yet another moment of high stress and suddenly this post and the self-reflection behind it has become even more poignant.
This summer I’ve been making progress with removing excess stress from my life in the form of simplifying. I am removing myself from certain projects and commitments that I just cannot continue to commit to and I’m setting myself fewer goals with my art, YouTube and other creative output. The idea behind all this was to give myself more time over the summer to spend with my family and also to allow me to start up a creative project out of genuine inspiration and creative feeling than for simply continuing to have an output.
In the last couple of weeks one of my commitments/roles has faced an unexpected hurdle. Something that has required pretty much all of my attention and time. Luckily I had a couple of blog posts in draft which I’ve now published but in general all of my writing, both creative and self-reflective (journalling and blogging), had come to a stand-still.
Now that I have a moment to sit down and process what has happened, there are some very interesting themes that I’d like to talk about which are so relevant to the idea of being kind to yourself.
By the end of the first week of the current situation I could feel the familiar symptoms of my personal depression setting in. In a conversation with a friend she described it as being like muscle memory and that is exactly what it is like. As soon as my mind goes into stress mode, it starts to bring up those old feelings straight away. At least now I can recognise it for what it is, and that perspective makes it a little bit easier to combat and work on.
One of the feelings that starts to arise, for me, are spirals of self-loathing. It can be related to the stressful thing itself such as feeling like I have personally let people down or that I am no good at my job. But it also spreads out into other areas of my life - I question my parenting abilities, I start hating my body, I question what my husband sees in me or believe that I am a terrible friend, I start wondering whether I’ve made a mistake leaving my corporate job and that I should have just stuck it out for the salary. I genuinely start to question everything.
So how am I being kind to myself? What is it that I’m doing?
I hope you can understand that in order to maintain confidentiality I am going to be incredibly vague about the situation itself.
Some of the work is already done. I’ve extended myself kindness by removing many of my commitments and deadlines which has meant that suddenly having to commit this amount of time has been easier to accommodate than it could have been. I am incredibly grateful to myself for having done this.
Listen to the positive feedback. Whether it’s because I’m British or any other factor, I find it very difficult to accept compliments, positive feedback, or thanks. I am prone to focusing on the negative and allowing the positive comments to pass me by. I am trying to make myself more aware when someone says something positive. Almost like a type of meditation, a grounding in the moment and genuinely listening, instead of instantly moving on to the next metaphorical fire that needs to be fought.
Using the techniques and methods I’ve been taught through previous therapy, books and courses to help get through the inevitable insomnia and anxiety attacks that arises when I’m stressed. This means purposefully switching off from any work involved in the situation before bed and reading something completely unrelated. I also, at the worst of these times, allow myself to fall asleep to an audio book. Having earphones in is not ideal, but a good soothing audiobook with a soothing narrator focuses my senses so my mind stops racing. I personally like The Midnight Library by Matt Haig, narrated by Carey Mulligan and also Wolf Brother by Michele Paver, narrated by Sir Ian McKellen. I’m not focused on staying awake to hear the story because I’ve read them before but the narration is the perfect blend of engaging and soothing to stop my mind wandering.
I want to go a little deeper on point 2 because this is really where self-kindness comes out.
An interesting point of reflection for me is that I forget that where we each have our strengths and weaknesses, something which I find simple, others will find difficult to grasp. In the situation I/we find my/ourself in, my mind wanted to blame me and that therefore I am not the right person for the job. Trying to listen to the others I began to realise that where I found our action plan going forwards relatively simple to pull into focus (albeit a lot), others felt that they wouldn’t know where to begin with it. They are grateful that I’ve been able to so quickly take on board all the information that is being thrown at us and create our action plan.
A second compliment I received related to my writing. I had to write what felt like an entire essay into an email as we sought advice on our situation. A co-worker in this expressed to another co-worker “boy can she write!” I initially shrugged my shoulders, ready to brush it off. But no, I’ve decided to actively take that on board and feel good about it. In the midst of all this chaos, I am a good writer. I want to keep practising and working on it, but actually the written word is somewhere I feel comfortable and I’m pretty good at it.
I won’t continue because other examples start to go deeper into the situation than I’m comfortable sharing and I’m already struggling with the idea of posting this in case it comes across as self-centred. I think it’s important to post though, in case someone else reads this who could do with extending kindness to themselves. It’s something that not many of us do but something we should. It’s also a skill that we need to practice, something we need to actively remind ourselves to do.
I really think that this is helping me to plough on with the mountain of work that faces me. I just hope this helps others.
Thank you for reading.
*The books mentioned in this post contain affiliate links with Bookshop.org. Bookshop.org is an alternative affiliate program to Amazon which awards a small commission to both the creator (me) and to independent bookshops. If you decide to buy any of the books mentioned in this post, please consider purchasing them through the links as it helps me and keeps money away from Amazon.