Salon post: April 13

[jenett]

Welcome to this week's salon post!

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Topic of the week
A conversation with the assistant here at work made me think self-care would be a great topic.

(I had allergy testing yesterday, and am going to be doing allergy shots, but I mentioned I was going to have another session in the float tank tomorrow, which is where this comes from. Which are two very different kinds of self care in some ways.)

What counts as self care for you? What makes it work well for you? What kinds of things do you do? How do you pick which one, when there are reasonable options?

What I've been up to:
Presenting at a conference! (More details in a locked post on my journal, I am amiable about adding people, but don't want to discuss the details in a public post since they're quickly identifying). Getting allergy testing! Doing a modicum of other household stuff, and more writing than I expected given the rest of this week.

I'm looking forward to a three day weekend. Massachusetts (and Maine, which used to be part of Massachusetts) have the third Monday in April as a holiday for Patriots Day, which is for the battles of Lexington and Concord at the start of the American Revolution, and in the Boston area, especially so because it's Marathon Day. I plan to go out and do things tomorrow.

It does also mean sometimes one goes to the grocery store and spots someone in re-enactment gear.


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Comments

[monksandbones]

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.

[theora]

Yes! This is me too. Getting stuff done makes me feel better, though at times it’s so so hard (especially when I need it the most). I find that productivity begets productivity, though I have to be careful not to let it snowball to the point that I get overwhelmed trying to do too much.

[jenett]

I am so good at active procrastination. Which as you say is sometimes really helpful. (I used to say my room was never so clean as when I had Greek homework.)

I am having a lot of luck with some kinds of measuring things (like writing X words a day - when job hunting, I've done the X apps a week or whatever thing, same concept.) But having something to get me started helps a lot.