Even superheroes need rest (or why self care matters)

Our modern superhero approach to life and work has been missing the mark.

What it's given us: Stress and burnout. Hustle culture. Expectations that we can and should be juggling all the things, and doing it perfectly. Working more, doing more, overcommitting, packing calendars, digital overload, endless video meetings…

This isn't new. I first wrote about this back in 2012 (!). But it certainly has not been helped by a pandemic, accelerated change and a world that feels seemingly and literally on fire.

Most of us know this intellectually. And too often, though, we continue to uphold the drama. We're buying in without asking a lot of questions. Sustainable success, greater impact, happier and more fulfilling days are waiting on the other side of those questions.

We all need rest and it’s not optional.

Without a strong foundation of rest and nourishment, it’s hard to find the calm, the clarity or the creativity to pursue what we most want or have the impact that we want to have.

What happens instead looks like this: We ignore what we know. Our bodies begin to rebel. Our minds get overwhelmed. We struggle more and accomplish less. We yearn for change, but have no real idea what it is we're reinventing or more importantly, why. We start running from instead of moving towards.

Saying you're “so busy” as a routine answer to how are you doing, downing coffee after coffee, putting yourself on the back burner or staying up late and missing out on sleep just to get a moment’s peace is not thriving. It's a warning sign.

The less self care we practice, the more we need.

What I often see is this: the less we give to ourselves, the less we’re open to receive from the people and the world around us. This is how we end up feeling stressed and depleted— because we’re running ourselves ragged trying to get from "out there" what we really can only ever give to ourselves.

As one of my brilliant clients put it: when a person is running on adrenaline and building an identity around putting everything ahead of herself, at some point she has to ask, "Why? What’s really happening here? What fuels her when she is standing still? Why is she never standing still?"

My client didn’t have the answers to these questions right away, but she is asking them. And she's rewriting her rules in a way that will ultimately benefit everyone-- herself, her employer, her kids, her partner, her community.

If it's been possible to function until now, imagine what she's capable of when she's rested and nourished on a deep level. What about you?

What fuels you? Where do you need more of that?

This is a serious question — and it’s one that can be challenging to answer while multitasking and racing against the clock. You need to take the time to figure it out. Time just for you.

We’re all given 24 hours every single day, 7 days a week. How we fill that time and the choices that we make in response to the environments that we’re in — that’s ultimately up to us. It’s a wonderful responsibility to have. If we’re choosing, then we get to experiment with different choices and different responses until we find the ones that do fuel and nourish us.

Finding time for meaningful rest and self care is exactly how you take on your full schedule and commitments consciously. What do you really want and need to be doing and not doing? Where does "treating myself very well" fall on your priority list? What might need to be renegotiated to adjust those priorities?

Rewrite your rules today.

The thing is, when you don’t actively prioritize your own rest, nourishment and development, it's rare that someone else will do that for you. So let's get started. All you need to begin is 10 minutes a day. Identify a couple of small tweaks to make and take 10 minutes today to make one of them.

Think: minimum viable dose. Microsteps. Build your foundation.

What are you doing right now to create the foundational level of self care that will allow you to serve more, be more, feel more, do more without all the struggle?

What else could you be doing (or doing less of)?

What do you need to manage mentally, emotionally, physically, spiritually or environmentally to be at your best?

If you need help creating a plan to integrate some serious self care into your busy life, check out Nourish, the book I wrote to help you do just that.

Or schedule a consult. We can definitely move you from stressed out to building the foundation that you need to create — and enjoy— the life that you want to live.