Is Self-Care Stressing You Out? How to stop "self-care anxiety"​

Last night, my filling came out while flossing. Seriously. Flossing. Isn’t flossing supposed to help your teeth?! I was finally in a groove with that daily flossing habit and bam. Sidelined.

You may have experienced this. You start working out and then pull a muscle on day 2. Or you start eating more veggies, and get gassy. You start taking a protein powder and feel bloated. You're "finally" going to start getting 8 hours of sleep only to toss and turn beating yourself up for not falling asleep on time. Even our quest to find purpose in life can cause Purpose Anxiety.

Maybe, you tried to do all the things, at once, and suddenly this self-care thing starts to make you feel like you're actually falling apart. It's unstainable. And so you stop. And beat yourself up for stopping.

Or maybe you never really start because the very thought of knowing where to start or how to start is so overwhelming it stresses you out. And yet still, you beat yourself up for not starting.

Why it’s happening

If your attempts to practice self-care are only adding more stress to your life, you aren’t alone. Just knowing that can be helpful, right?

In my experience working with clients, a few common causes for, shall we say “Self-Care Anxiety” are:

1) Shoulding on yourself: You are trying to practice self-care in ways that you think you should, but aren't ways aligned with who you are and what you want.

2) Perfectionism: You are trying to tackle too many self-care-related goals at once, perfectly, instead of picking one or two and giving yourself permission to fail your way forward.

3) Jumping in too hard, too fast: You are trying to recreate the workouts you did in college, 30 years ago, for example.

What to do

1) To stop shoulding on yourself, you need to know who you are, what you enjoy and what you want. For example, if you hate running, instead of saying: “I should work out and I should run,” don’t run. Find some other way to work out.

You might sign up for a bunch for free trial classes at different gyms and fitness studios in your neighborhood. You might discover you like Pilates more than Yoga, or like kickboxing and weightlifting but not cycling. You might discover you love it all but don’t want to get bored, so you buy Class Pass to help you keep it varied.

With nutrition, you might discover you hate steamed broccoli but love it roasted.

With sleep, after experimenting you might find that brain dumping before doesn’t work for you, even though so many people recommend it. But doing a guided breathing practice does.

Give yourself permission to discover who you are and what you like. Take other people’s recommendations as just that, a recommendation not an absolute. Even mine.

2) To stop falling into the perfectionism trap, pick one goal to start with, one new self-care practice, and give yourself permission to trip up. You learned to walk by falling over and getting back up, often. If you know how to ride a bike, you learned the same way, falling and getting back up. You learned your job by messing up, getting feedback, and making corrections.

The same is true for discovering how to take care of yourself and mastering that self-care. And, by the way, because life is constantly changing, you will always be mastering self-care. Embracing that you are a life-long journey to self-discovery and self-care is one more way you can break up with perfectionism.

3) To stop going too hard, too fast, recognize that who you are now, is not who you used to be. You are not the 18-year-old you. What that version of you needed, wanted, and was capable of is likely not what you need, want, or can do today. At least not right away. Instead of trying to make a comeback, think of giving yourself a clean slate. This ties into the self-discovery journey mentioned above.

How long will it take

Practicing each of these will help keep self-care routines supportive rather than a source of stress. Doing this work alone could take time. That’s OK. The sooner you start, the sooner you will start seeing results. If you want to go further, faster, schedule a complimentary chat. Helping people save time, effort, and stress around self-care is what I do.