My least-healthy habits all revolve around procrastination and avoidance and chickening out of doing things, so a lot of the pampering-type things that spring to mind at the phrase "self-care" (even though I know those represent something of a flattening of the concept) can quite easily become their own forms of procrastination. I also don't respond well to rewards, because generally no reward is as rewarding as procrastination/avoiding doing the thing.
All that is to say that for me, self-care generally takes the form of doing the thing/things. I've been having some recent, very minor success at doing small amounts of work on, say, job applications, well in advance. Not that the small amounts generally add up to much less work when it comes to finally doing the thing, but they do at least cut down on some of the guilt about procrastinating when I'm doing the thing at the last minute, so at least I can focus on getting it done without feeling bad that I've put it off on top of the misery of making myself do it.
That said, selectively declaring official time off (for instance, when I go to bed and read at night, that is official time off, neither a fun time I am stealing from something else I should be doing nor a reward for productivity) can also be helpful, because I spend a lot of time wasting time and feeling guilty about it, and declaring not-work time is at least a break from the guilt. Sometimes forms of "active procrastination," when I use procrastinating on one thing to motivate me to do something else, also work, because at least I'm getting something done, and can sometimes fuel doing things up to maybe 60% as daunting as the thing I'm avoiding by doing that.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2018-04-13 04:16 pm (UTC)All that is to say that for me, self-care generally takes the form of doing the thing/things. I've been having some recent, very minor success at doing small amounts of work on, say, job applications, well in advance. Not that the small amounts generally add up to much less work when it comes to finally doing the thing, but they do at least cut down on some of the guilt about procrastinating when I'm doing the thing at the last minute, so at least I can focus on getting it done without feeling bad that I've put it off on top of the misery of making myself do it.
That said, selectively declaring official time off (for instance, when I go to bed and read at night, that is official time off, neither a fun time I am stealing from something else I should be doing nor a reward for productivity) can also be helpful, because I spend a lot of time wasting time and feeling guilty about it, and declaring not-work time is at least a break from the guilt. Sometimes forms of "active procrastination," when I use procrastinating on one thing to motivate me to do something else, also work, because at least I'm getting something done, and can sometimes fuel doing things up to maybe 60% as daunting as the thing I'm avoiding by doing that.