What gets in the way of YOUR self-care?

Last night I gave a presentation to a NAMI (National Alliance on Mental Illness) support group.

The audience all have a family member with severe mental illness.

For those who don’t know, this means they have a life full of crises and untenable fear, along with profound grief from a cascade of broken dreams gobbled up by the diagnosis.

• My goal was to give them a framework to help them suffer less and start to thrive, in spite of their circumstances.

I shared basics from my book — Masters of Change — about being in a forced identity transition after the rug’s pulled out from under you.

And I connected the dots around how it applies to them.

Because of new roles they’re taking on to support their loved ones, they’re no longer Doing and Being like before.

That’s the core criteria for being in either a chosen or forced identity transition.

Then I cherry-picked the most important concepts and principles to help with their specific journey — dealing with a catastrophic medical diagnosis.

• One of the toughest things for people dealing with this kind of situation is putting your own self-care on the list of things to do.

And … IF they do that … they’ll ALSO give better care to their loved one AND others in their family.

This “Put your own oxygen mask on first” isn’t just for airplanes and people dealing with catastrophic medical diagnoses. It’s important for everyday life.

• Even just in regular life, a lot of us put our “obligations” ahead of basic self-care needs.

Like getting enough sleep.

Like eating a whole lot healthier.

I know about being busy. I was a single mom working two jobs.

• And regardless of circumstances, if we INSIST on self-advocacy as strongly as we support others, we CAN create ways to consistently fit in self-care for ourselves.

But it takes a mindset shift.

We have to make different decisions.

Different choices.

It takes breaking away from entrenched beliefs and habits.

• What’s a habit that’s holding YOU back from putting adequate self-care higher up on the totem pole?

I developed an unhelpful habit in middle school.

I didn’t allow myself to read any books for pleasure until I finished my schoolwork.

Unfortunately, starting in middle school, my concentration fell apart and reading became very difficult.

So I never did get my reading done for school… until my concentration changed in the last semester of graduate school!

In retrospect, that was a bad habit…

I regret not having made time for more pleasure and am still working on fitting in pleasurable downtime.

—Julie Browne, Speaker, Author  

MASTERS of CHANGE

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