How do you make time for self-care?
For decades I crammed the day, the week and the year with stuff. I thought that by scheduling activities — the gym, the theatre, dinner parties, holidays, even sleep — I was taking good care of myself. My diary was full of things I enjoyed, so surely that counted as self-care.
What I eventually realised was that I needed something quite different: time off the hamster wheel.
I needed time to pause, but more importantly I needed what I now think of as breathing space. Not another scheduled activity called relaxation, squeezed between two other commitments, but actual empty space in the diary.
There is something hugely comforting about knowing that you can slow down and take your time. That if something overruns, it doesn’t matter. That you don’t have to keep glancing at the clock because the next thing is already bearing down on you. There is ample space around what you are doing.
That has become my version of self-care: not necessarily doing something for myself, but allowing myself not to be doing something.
And it has had physical consequences too. My indigestion improved. My sleep improved. Perhaps, after decades of filling every available space, I finally discovered that looking after myself sometimes meant leaving some of it empty.
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