Ep 167: Why Self-Care Is Not an Indulgence

Dr. Deb Butler: Welcome to Thinner Peace in Menopause and Beyond. This is Dr. Deb Butler, master life and weight coach, and as always your coach. Today’s episode number 167. I want to talk seriously to you. No, I really do. I want to talk to you about what you think self-care is and what I think self-care is. Stay tuned.

Hi, everybody, how are you today? It’s a beautiful day and the beginning of summer and I don’t know about you, but we’ve had a lot of rain. You might have heard about all the rain in the Midwest. And I’ll tell you what, the thing for me about all this rain is I know that it’s a problem. But it’s also a personal problem for me and I’m going to tell you why. All my hiking trails are flooded. I love to walk. I even love to walk in the rain, but I don’t like to walk in floods, and they are flooded. They’re closed. Lots of these hiking trails are closed so that does not make me happy. And knowing that the rain is probably a bigger problem than any of us want to talk about. I’m not going to get into that right now, because that’s not what this podcast is about.

But it is about self-care. That’s what I want to talk to you about today, which is why I was talking to my walking trails because one of the things that I like to do most days is to make sure that I get a beautiful walk in the woods and nature, kind of have, like, a bath forest, like a forest bath. I think I’ve heard that said before. It’s like almost taking a bath in the woods. And that’s how it feels to me when I’m walking. It’s like I can relax. I can relax my mind. I can think. I can be creative. And I think it’s so important for all of us. And for me, this is part of probably one of the most important self-care acts that I do for myself. But here’s what I want to talk to you about today.

What do you think self-care even is? One of my really beloved clients has been with me for a long time. Jeanette recently sent me an article from Forbes.com by a woman named Tami Forman and she wrote the most beautiful article. I loved it so much and it’s pretty short that I want to read it to you and then I want to discuss with you because I think she really hits the nail on the head about what you think self-care is and what self-care really is. So I’m going to read it to you a little bit and then I want to discuss it with you a little bit. And more than anything, I want you to think about it for yourself because I have a feeling most of you who are listening are thinking about self-care more as an indulgence and not as much as a self-discipline and what I want to help you with today is to realize that self-care is something that you have to be disciplined about doing. You have to decide that it’s such a high priority for you that you’re going to do it no matter what and then you have to decide what are those disciplines? So let me read this article to you. And then I’m going to come back and just discuss it a little bit, because I think it’s going to give you some great tidbits to think about this week, as you learn how to take care of yourself.

So here’s the article and it’s called “Self-Care is Not an Indulgence. It’s a Discipline.” and it’s by Tami Forman. Thank you, Tami. And she starts out by saying the way self-care is portrayed today is completely and utterly backwards. First, self-care as a concept is almost exclusively aimed at women, generally wealthy white women who can afford the goods and services that get marked to them as self-care. The not-so-subtle suggestion is that women need to be reminded to care for themselves because after all, they’re so busy taking care of everyone else. And the even less subtle suggestion is that while we should be taking care of ourselves, that doesn’t absolve us from taking care of everyone else which brings me to the second way that the current portrayal of self-care is backwards.

It’s characterized as an indulgence. This means both that the practice of self-care is something we are occasionally allowed to indulge in and that self-care should feel like an indulgence. Think expensive bath products, luxurious chocolates, spa appointments. When we spend more time talking about the self-care power of high thread count sheets than we do about getting enough sleep, we’ve wandered pretty far from anything that can be remotely considered healthy for either mind or body.

Self-care is not an indulgence. Self-care is a discipline. It requires tough mindedness, a deep and personal understanding of your priorities, and the respect for both yourself and the people you choose to spend your life with. For example, self-care is turning off the TV instead of watching another episode of The Crown because the alarm is going off at 5am so you can get to the gym, or declining the second drink at the office holiday party. It might even be declining the first drink, or saying no to the thing you don’t want to do even if someone is going to be angry at you, maintaining financial independence, and doing work that matters, and letting other people take care of themselves. And I’m just interjecting here because I love her examples of what she’s calling self-care and of course, what I would be adding to self-care is to be able to feed yourself beautiful, nutritious food, to be able to eat when you’re hungry and stop when you’re full, to be able to plan your meals ahead of time because it’s a priority. I just want to add that in there because she didn’t and I just, there’s, of course, millions of other things you could put in there. But I wanted to add that.

But then she goes on to say, if we are being honest, self-care is actually kind of boring. I really love this, which is why self-care is a discipline. It takes discipline to do the things that are good for us instead of what feels good in the moment. It takes even more discipline to refuse to take responsibility for other people’s emotional well-being. And it takes discipline to take full and complete responsibility for our own well-being.

Self-care is also a discipline because it’s not something you do once in a while when the world gets crazy. It’s what you do every day, every week, month in and month out. It’s taking care of yourself in a way that doesn’t require you to indulge in order to restore balance. It’s making the commitment to stay healthy and balanced as a regular practice.

I want you guys to really think about that, how important what she’s saying, because I think so many of my clients and so many of the people I talked to will say to me, “Well, you know, I get pedicures or I get massages,” and those are lovely too but it is more of an indulgence in terms of that it costs money. And it’s not that I don’t think it’s a lovely thing to do but what’s probably more important are the things that don’t cost anything. It just costs the time of your brain to think about what you really need.

And I think what she’s saying is, it is kind of boring because who wants to think about having to get up earlier so that they can either go for a walk? If it were me, out in the woods. Or go to the gym if you like to work out or go to a yoga class, to make sure that you get taken care of when at the moment maybe staying up late seems more fun.

Right, the idea of instant gratification. What you think might feel good in the moment may not feel good later on. You know, when we talk about urges, that’s indulging. That’s, “Ooh, this would feel good right now. Let me tell you what. A piece of chocolate, a cupcake right in this moment. Yeah, that could be really nice. That sounds lovely. Oh, that could take care of whatever is going on.” But it’s an instant gratification as opposed to really taking care of your well-being. And well-being, like I’ve talked about many times before, is something that you have to be disciplined about.

And it’s so interesting when I talk to my clients, about how they took care of their children, or how they take care of people that they love. It really is a discipline that you do the things that you do for these people. It’s something that you make yourself do because you think it’s important for them and the discipline of taking care of yourself is even more important. And I think about this: I’ve had a few clients who’ve been sick lately. And it’s taken them a little bit of time to recover. And they’re getting mad at their bodies because their bodies aren’t doing what they want them to do.

Now, indulgence might be even in a case like this. Indulgence might be indulging in doing the things that you really want to do even though your body really doesn’t want you to, like working longer or even going to work out when your body says “No, it can’t.” The discipline of taking care of a body that needs to recover, from either being sick, from surgery, from whatever. It needs recovery period, and it tells you when it’s ready. And do you have the discipline inside of yourself to do what your body really needs as opposed to what looks good in the moment? This is all the things that she’s talking about.

And these are the things that I really want you to think about in this week is that are you indulging or are you disciplined? Are you getting the sleep that you really need? Are you balancing your life so that you’re working as much as you’re playing? Are you able to say no to people when you know that what you need is more important than saying yes to them but saying no feel so uncomfortable that it’s almost an indulgence to do it?

Yes, that’s what I’m talking about. Discipline. Self-discipline is the way that you do self-care and you do it mindfully, and you do it not from the perspective of instant gratification. What do you feel like in the moment may not be what you need in the moment. Think of little kids, what they feel like in the moment. They see something, they want it, whatever it is. And as a parent, we discipline that by saying “No, sweetheart, that’s not good for you right now.” That’s the discipline that you require from you.

I want you to listen to this podcast over and over again, the letter that I read, and I’ll actually put it in my show notes if you want to read it because I think it’s that important. And I’m so happy that my client sent it to me because she’s one of those people that needs, also like the rest of us, how to discipline ourselves because it’s really interesting with her. And I have a lot of clients like this too, who love their schedules, who love all the things that they do on their schedules. But even when you love everything that you’re doing, even if you think everything that you’re doing is fun, you still have to pay attention to when your body says stop. You can only fit so much in, no matter what it is. And your body is the first person that will tell you, “You can’t do anymore.”

Do you have the discipline to stop? Do you have the discipline to not put one more thing in your calendar, no matter how fun it looks because you know it’s too much. That’s what I’m challenging you to do this week: to not only really undertake self-care, but to realize that you must discipline yourself. And discipline is a practice.

Discipline is a practice just like if you decide to plan what you’re going to be eating. I have a lot of clients who think that it’s so hard to plan what they’re going to eat. They think that it’s so much easier to just do something in the moment. But guess what? What they want in the moment: nothing that’s going to fill them. And guess what else they want in the moment? They want something that’s easy. And easy isn’t an apple, for some reason. And easy is a cupcake. It’s the way our little heads work, our little minds work. That’s not discipline. That’s indulging.

You can indulge in cupcakes. You can indulge in a busy calendar. You can indulge in too many massages. But the self-discipline of taking excellent care of yourself, is what I’m talking to you about that I would love to see you do this week. Because if you want a thin, healthy, fit body, then self-discipline is the way to get there. And self-discipline is not being mean to yourself. Self-discipline is out of love to yourself. Do you love yourself enough to give yourself what you need to turn the television off, to say no to the extra drink, to say no to an urge that seems like you’re going to die if you don’t get it, to be able to eat a healthy lunch because it’s planned and ready for you, or to eat a healthy dinner because you come home from a busy day and it’s already planned and all you have to do is do a couple things, or you have somebody else already do it for you? That’s discipline.

That’s what I’m inviting you to do this week is to take excellent care of yourself by using self-discipline to do it. And if you can do that, a thin, healthy body is right at your fingertips. And if you need any help with that, you know, you can always set up a mini session with me where we can spend 30 minutes where I can talk to you about how you can do that and about how you can work in probably one of the best programs in the universe, working with me on not only how to do that, but how to get thin and healthy for the rest of your life. All you have to do is go to drdebbutler.com/workwithme and you can set up a mini session. And you know what, no matter what else you do this week, you know what I’m going to say and I’ll say it every time. I want you guys . . . I want you guys to be so very, very kind to yourself. See you next week. Bye.

Dr. Michael Butler: I hope you enjoyed this podcast with my wife, Dr. Deborah. I’ve enjoyed working with her and living with her. That’s right. We work and live together for 40 years, more than 40 years. It’s amazing how time flies. And it’s been a, it’s been like a little tree growing in the yard. Now it’s a big tree, our love. So I would like to invite you to correspond with Dr. Deborah. Go to iTunes, drdebbutler.com/itunes and you can review the show and you can even give some helpful suggestions on what you would like to talk about in the future to accomplish your mindfulness and your journey into mindfulness. Thank you.