Finding Balance After Self-Care Overwhelm
When I was in my 20s, I had a soft spot for handbags. My favorite go-to was TJ Maxx, and I would let my nose lead me through the aisle to the most authentic-smelling, supple-feeling, Italian-sounding thing I could find. These small pleasures were the indulgences that made me excited about showing up as my insecure self at that time. But in my 40s, I find myself sniffing out and investing in all things self-care.
What fills my online shopping cart these days are all the self-help, self-discovery, and self-improvement programs and books I come across. And thanks to social media, that’s a LOT. There simply is no shortage of tools, tonics and techniques out there for our betterment. The more voices I find on the subject, the more recommendations I receive.
Last year having been a particularly difficult period for me, I really went over the top with all of the self-help things. Included among my shopping splurges were: a workbook for processing trauma, memberships for various healing communities, a program intended to help me with my business goals (two times over), multiple retreats, and oodles and oodles of books, courses, and journals. If I were spending a penny on myself in 2024, there was a 99 percent chance it was associated with self-discovery and self-improvement.
As I found myself reflecting over the recent holiday break and wondering what is next for me, my business, and my journey in life; the self-care overwhelm set in. With so many tools at my disposal, my attention has been scattered, my efforts came in fits and starts, and then I would feel guilty about the things I had purchased that were gathering dust on the shelves (or in my inbox). If I were to take every single tool and book and course that I had compiled, there simply would not be enough time for me to do anything but self-improvement full time for the next 12 months. It's just not sustainable. I felt trapped. I had to come face-to-face with the fact that there is such a thing as too much self-care. I started wondering how I could approach my path to betterment in 2025 in a way that felt balanced and supportive. And sufficient.
I also had to acknowledge that I had fallen prey to the incredibly powerful marketing out there pushing a new version of the “do it all” mantra for women that is tailored for the perimenopause era: “Yes, you can conquer the weird health symptoms and peak in your career and emerge triumphant as a warrior princess who captures everything her heart desires.” I have been on this treadmill of setting expectations very high and laying out very grand goals that haven’t always turned out to be the things I wanted to begin with. 2022 and 2023 for me were about the start of Movement Remedies: building up my client base, securing a commercial space and then expanding to become part of the fabric of my local business community.
And then in 2024, I had to focus on dismantling everything, breaking ties with people and places I love and then rebuilding all over again with a very limited sense of context. True to my own tendencies I often prioritized action over reflection, outputs over substance and progress over inner peace. While the start of a new calendar year doesn’t need to signify a shift in mindset, really the start of any new day is a moment where we can make a new choice. And I just knew in my bones that I don't want to approach my new life in Edinburgh with the same dogged and blind determinism that I had in the early years of my business.
So, if I can't do all the self-help things available to me, how can I possibly prioritize them? Which of the tools is most important? Which aspect of my inner turmoil should I focus on first? Which routine or mindfulness practice or mantra trumps all others? Surely it must be that I have to do all of it. And just thinking of that exhausts me.
This is a recipe for self-care burnout. Overwhelm of my own design, not the kind forced on me by a job or relationship, as I may have felt in the past. So thinking about this over the past several days, I decided the best way to approach my mostly uncharted journey for 2025 is not to discard or hone in on any one practice. But rather, to narrow down to a core set of themes that I see as being important to me in this new season of my life and then organize my inner work around them.
With that in mind, I have put together a first draft of a schedule where each day of the week has a unique self-care theme. And anything that I do in my self-help, whether that be reading, journaling, meditating, or movement, will hone in on tools and activities supporting that theme. All my internal reflection for that day: one theme. Can I do it? Will it have an impact? Only time will tell and I look forward to updating you in a few months to let you know.
Organizing around a theme for each day of the week so far feels like a less frenetic way of continuing to support all the areas of my life where I want to make progress without either becoming overwhelmed trying to do everything all of the time or letting one single area supersede all of the other places where I have meaningful intentions. I know of others who have found using themes on a monthly basis really helpful. This is another way to think about pacing your inner work.
I have not personally found a 30-day timeline to work well for me when it comes to self-improvement projects. I need things to marinate in my brain a while before I can really notice a shift. And I find that if I spend a complete 30 days on a single topic, I either become fatigued or I simply try to move too fast and then get discouraged. Of course I can’t help but wonder – is practicing something, one time a week, going to be enough to make a difference in my life?
Well, as I've said in previous posts, when I started offering the Express Pilates Private Session, I was amazed by the increasing strength, confidence and mobility in my chronic pain and chronic condition clients, who also left with enough energy to complete the day. So I suppose in a way, I'm testing my own hypothesis that there is power in small, focused periods of work on other areas of my life. The upside of focusing on a theme for one day a week is that instead of spending the roughly 30 days that are in a month on a particular topic, over the course of the year I will be spending about 52 days. So, in the long run I get to invest more time in what I care about, but I am doing it in a titrated, albeit fragmented way.
How about you? I would love to know how you are approaching your future planning and personal growth at this time. I really hesitate to use “goal” or any language that insinuates that it should be anyone’s expectation that you have to focus on changing yourself. We already are under such tremendous pressure to be something other than we are every day. It's a miracle to just keep showing up for ourselves and our communities. That by itself is always enough.
What I have found in my own life is that I function best when I have something that I am working toward. It helps give me focus and a sense of purpose. So this is why I like to feel like I am on some kind of path. It makes me feel like I am marking my days not just by the rising and setting of the sun, but also, by the small ways in which I learn to show myself more mercy or demonstrate incremental fortitude or create more joy. I find that I flounder in situations lacking structure, clarity and a clear set of next steps. I guess this is why management consulting was a natural fit for my personality type–I literally COULD NOT REST until I made order out of chaos.
As liberating as that may feel to me, I know it may instead feel oppressive to many. And so I think it's important that you structure your days in a way that works for you. What I do think we want to avoid is having life just kind of happen to us, without us living intentionally. And that can be so very easy to slip into when there are plenty of people in our lives who are more than willing to fill up our time and brain space with what is important to them.
Protect your time and energy and make sure it reflects your own values and priorities, whatever they may be. Even more so during seasons of rest, which are just important as seasons of action. We don’t want to hide from rest, we want to embrace it; do it with intention, just like anything else that has value.
