The insufficiency of self-care

Sometimes individual-level self-care activities are wildly insufficient.

Individual-level mitigation strategies (meditation, yoga, therapy, exercise, etc) work when you have an adequate level of reserves/resilience.  If you've burned through those, you might need a surprising amount of time off to even get yourself to the place where you can use those reserves and pursue self-care as maintenance going forward. Otherwise, it's like putting a drop in an empty bucket.

When facing overwhelming or systemic challenges, individual-level potential mitigation measures are insufficient. They either fall short or, if they aren’t well-established practices, they require too much time/energy/resilience to start in the face of overwhelm. 

At least, this was my experience with grief – that when the well of need is inarticulately deep, self-care seemed like a laughable concept. I needed a week off to even get to the point where I could use words to name what was going on or make a plan and time for “self-care” to continue to slowly rebuild resilience.

And when the need is so substantial, sometimes we need help finding a way out. Perhaps this is why burned people turn to quitting as a solution. In the case of my grief, I needed multiple full professors insisting I took time off, and a peer to help me actually re-arrange my schedule to make it happen – and I wasn’t facing the complexities of re-arrangement that my clinical colleagues experience in attempts to take time off.

I hope whatever you’re facing, you are finding the supports you need.