Me, myself and I, or, the importance of self-care

Like so many others, my childhood imaginings about the freedom of adult life turned out to be far from the truth. Instead of indulging every whim, my time was spent at work, and looking after my family, the pets, and our home. Over the years I’ve usually been able to make sure I had some time for my main hobby - music - and I’ve always had a book or two on the go somewhere. But still, even with the hard lessons I’ve learned over the past 3 1/2 years, I’m not good at self-care.

I’m very fortunate that I’ve been given the opportunity for counselling through the oncology unit at my local hospital, as my mental health has perhaps unsurprisingly been less than great particularly over the past few months. One of the areas we’ve identified where I want to make some changes is around self-care. As a starting point, I’m working on improving my evening/bedtime routine at the moment as I know I need 9-10 hours’ sleep a night, and very rarely get it. For the past week, I’ve been aiming to not use screens after about 9-9.15pm, to get ready for bed by 9.30, have my sleepy tea while I’m reading my book, then to settle down properly absolutely no later than 10.30pm.

One of my usual way of wasting far too many hours is by endlessly scrolling Facebook and Reddit, and although I have wanted to cut down on this, I’m finding it surprisingly difficult to not just pick up my phone and start doodling around. I’m determined to stick to it though!

Something which helps me enormously is using a sleep podcast - this focuses my mind enough to stop it racing and thinking about all sorts of things. I tried a few different ones about 18 months ago when I decided to give them a try, and settled on one called ‘Nothing Much Happens’. The writer/narrator’s soothing voice and gentle stories are a wonderful way of lulling me to sleep, and I’m often drifting off after just 15 minutes!

So, five evenings into my new resolution I’m keen to keep going. I know if it was just for my own good, I’d be likely to fall back into old habits very quickly - but fortunately for me there’s a self-care badge in the Rebel Badge Book, and this new routine covers three of the four clauses I need to do for three months! It’s amazing what I’ll do for a badge (and no, I didn’t tell my counsellor that the badge was a better motivator for me than just my own well-being!) :D

And with that, it’s just past 9pm so time to publish this and go to bed! Goodnight :)