Self-Care 101

Image: A big gray heart with a white cross inside, like the Red Cross

What's Self-Care?

• Accepting your limits.
• Caring for yourself like anyone or anything else you treasure.
• Admitting when you need help.

Self-Care is NOT...

• Treating your worst impulses like your best. (Starving and over-exercising is NOT self-care. Don't BS yourself.)
• Endless retail therapy.
• Necessarily fun, easy, or comfortable. It can require reframinhg your life!

The Daily Bare Minimums

• 6 hours sleep, at least.
• 2 meals your spouse/mom/pal/fictional role model would approve of.
• brush teeth at least once.
• shower/bathe every other day.
• take meds (if applicable.)

Add your own!
________
________
________

Adjust this list as needed. (I need at least 8 hours of sleep and 3 meals.)

No can do? Read on...

How Are You?

(adapted from Nicole Kelly and Penney Cowan's "Quality of Life Scale" for the American Chronic Pain Association)

0. In bed all day. Feel hopeless and helpless. All is despair.
1. In bed at least half the day. No contact with outside world. Uuuugh.
2. Out of bed, but dressing is beyond me. So is leaving the house.
3. Up. Dressed. That's all I can manage.
4. Can manage some simple house chores. Yay?
5. Struggling but I'm keeping it together at home. That's it.
6. I can work or volunteer a bit, get out a little, but not long.
7. I can work or volunteer a little everyday, be up and going maybe five hours a day, maybe make simple weekend plans.
8. I work/volunteer roughly six hours a day, hang out on weekends and once during the week. Wow!
9. Capable of managing full-time work and social life, though it's challenging.
10. Why did I even buy this zine?

When You Can't...

Sometimes, self-care seems too much. Everything is awful, you have no time or energy, and self-care seems an unaffordable luxury. Now what?

Plan:: What's your worst case scenario? What will you do? (I have a crisis-plan one-pager I use, the Bad Day Book.)

Prioritize: okay, you can't do everything, but you can do something. Name three accomplishables:

• _______
• _______
• _______

...and When You Don't...

Sometimes we get in our own way.

• "I haven't earned rest/food/exercise/whatever."
  You are not a perpetual motion machine.
• "So-and-so doesn't need that stuff!"
  You are not so-and-so, nor are you psychic.
• "Self-care is just lazy self-indulgence for yoga moms!"
  C'mon, even God rested on the seventh day! Chill out!

Back Cover

Self-care is more than cozy sweaters and hot tea. Fill this out on a good day, keep it in your wallet for a bad one!

Image: a person with long hair and serene expression holding the Red Cross heart in their hands. It appears to be glowing.

Remember, you are the only you there is. Please, take care of yourself!