During the pandemic, self-care took on a new role of importance. Pre-pandemic, self-care was seen as a new-wave hippy mantra that productive people didn’t have time for. Slowly, this idea of self-care has transformed from a joke into an essential. Speaking of essential, while society was championing the self-care revolution, the burden placed on essential workers made it virtually impossible for their self-care. Advocating self-care to them was just paying lip service, when they should have been paid. Sorry. Getting off my soapbox now.
The pandemic seemed to split people into two camps based on their strategies with how they coped with stress and anxiety. The first group tried their best to handle their business and make it through the other side, but they took a break from the diet, exercised less, or both. The number one priority was staying employed, keeping the lights on, and feeding your family. The second group saw the pandemic as an opportunity to slow down. With nothing open, it was like life hit a giant pause button. This was the time to try that diet or exercise regime that was put off too long. My personal journey started with the first camp and slowly shifted to the second. At first, I had to figure out how to teach PE virtually (which was no easy feat), and then I had to teach virtual summer school classes. The next year started with a strange hybrid / virtual PE that was better than all virtual, but still not ideal. Trying to manage all those changes left little desire to stay on a good diet. After my weight ballooned it’s highest point, I made the conscious decision that if there were no more powerlifting competitions, than I am not going to eat like a powerlifter, and I am going to lose some weight that I desperately needed to. Eight months later, I feel so much better than I had before and I’m down about fifty pounds.
Now that it seems like we are nearing the home stretch of the pandemic, I can feel the physical and emotional toll that it took (and is still taking). One thing I’ve noticed about myself recently is my patience for (seemingly) minor inconveniences is gone. The more I thought about why I was getting triggered so easily; I began to notice a pattern.
My anger stemmed from the inconsideration of others, especially if someone had not taken an extra second to take care of their own mess and just left it for someone else. I felt like one person with a lazy selfish attitude could ruin a good day. As much as I knew I needed to find my moment of Zen, an equal part of me demanded accountability and justice. After cursing out the offending party in my mind as I clean up their mess, I would enter a downward spiral of thoughts that typically went down this trajectory:
· How can people live their life this selfishly?
· Do they not know how their actions inconvenience others, or do they just not care?
(I’m going to skip ahead past the thoughts on people’s faulty moral compasses and the current state of humanity and get to the eureka moment I had recently)
· I wish it were more commonplace to think of others.
· Not having to pick up the slack from inconsiderate people would go a long way for my mental health.
· Mental health.
· What’s the purpose of self-care? To improve health, especially mental health, right?
· So, if we really want to practice self-care, we need to care for others as well!
I know there is certain percentage out there that actually needs to ignore this message. There are the selfless few that do too much, and they end up grinding themselves into dust for the sake of everyone else. While noble, this is ultimately tragic, since someone cannot properly care for others if they themselves are severely compromised. It’s the parents who make sure the rest of the family is fed and rested, but ignores their own diet and sleep. It’s the healthcare workers trying to make everyone around them healthy while their stress levels skyrocket. It’s the teachers who constantly filter their language and emotions with difficult students (and these students have had it rough too). It’s the coaches who are yelled at by a parent during a game, when just a few months ago, couldn’t even go to any games because sports were cancelled. There are plenty of people that need to make their health a priority, or at least stop putting everyone else’s above their own. Usually there is some type of self-worth issue that needs to be resolved for this to truly happen, otherwise this self-care message falls on deaf hears. For some people, they really do need to help themselves the way that they help everyone else. They have swung too far on the pendulum of altruism. What they need to do is self-advocate too.
A definition for altruism is the unselfish devotion to the welfare of others, but by this definition, I don’t know if anyone is truly altruistic. Make no mistake, there a tons of caring, generous, loving people in the world who do lots of good, but they feel good doing good. We could argue that this is a remnant of our early human days when a key to survival was being helpful in a tribe. Being caring could be hard-wired in our brains, which means the pleasure and good feelings we get from helping others ensured our survival long ago. Lots of the feel good brain chemicals are there to reward things that help keep us alive (they can also be hijacked by not so good things too). Being social animals, we reward ourselves with dopamine and serotonin when we help our neighbor, and when we help our neighbor; we are ensuring the survival of the species. So, helping others can help ourselves. It gives us a sense of purpose, relief, and joy when others feel good too. Interestingly enough, many activities that we recommend for self-care are self-isolating, which may not be helpful to a large percentage of people. For the person who gets his or her endorphins by seeing the joy in someone else, they might be practicing self-care through the care of someone else. It’s a paradox that helping others can cause self-harm through the neglect of one’s own needs, while also being a source of self-care through the fulfillment of other’s needs.
If you are someone who believes in karma, you believe that if you help others, the universe will return the favor. I would argue that at the very least, don’t make anyone’s life worse. Like I mentioned before, seemingly small things can really get to me. The common theme behind them is inconsideration. Someone ignores what they should do, so I now I need to do it. In my case when there is bad weather, classrooms have to use the gym for lunch. Nothing gets me quite so angry as seeing food and garbage left on the ground, especially when there was none before they got there. I know it’s hard to sweep when you are watching lots of young students. But I also know that those same teachers would not let the students leave their garbage on the ground if they were in their own classroom. I wish they treated shared spaces like their own classrooms. When we go out into nature either camping or hiking, the motto is Leave No Trace. The same should be true anytime we are using a space that is not our own.
The same thing goes for materials in the gym or the classroom. I treat all the equipment in the gym like it is my own. The grace and courtesy of respecting the materials is the golden rule version of how we care for things; treat it like you own it. Most people don’t want their things broken and will naturally take care of them. Similarly, if we borrow something, we need to return it when we are done using it. Think of a time when you really needed something and were desperately looking for it, only to discover that it is not there or in the wrong spot. When you finally do track it down, the offender who misplaced it usually offers the carefree “oops, sorry I forgot to return it” apology. However, they were not the ones who wasted half an hour looking for it, had a lesson derailed, and now have to somehow return to a state of calmness before interacting with other adults of students again.
If we are to really practice self-care, consistency of the environment is important. Consistency in general is important, especially for our young students. Consistency grounds their reality so they can adventure into the unknown and explore. One of the most important jobs we have as educators is when the home is not consistent, we become the consistency our students can anchor themselves onto for their own mental wellbeing. We need our own consistency as adults if we are going to thrive in our ability to help our students. If we look out for each other and don’t add unnecessary and unexpected work or stress onto others, we give them the gift of consistency, which means they can do the most good for themselves and others. When we leave a mess for someone else to clean up (when we should have taken care of it ourselves), we have thrown a monkey wrench into their environment, stolen their time, caused them mental grief, and this will flow down to the students. If we really believe that self-care is important, we cannot be the reason that someone else cannot care for themselves. If we really care about self-care, we better care about other people too.
Maria Montessori had a beautiful expression for this idea. She used the term Grace and Courtesy. Grace is the individual being in harmony with oneself, which sounds a whole lot like the goal of self-care. Courtesy is being in harmony everyone else. Courtesy is what we need to extend to everyone else so that they may find their grace, because it’s hard to be in harmony when the environment is not. It’s why Montessori took so much effort, time, and care with the prepared classroom environment. The prepared environment is integral for the student to be able to find their concentration and work flow, which is the grace that we are hoping they will find. As adults, we must be courteous by making sure that the environments we use are left the way they are supposed to be. It can be as simple as making a new pot of coffee when you take the last cup. It can be as simple as putting in a new roll of toilet paper when the last one is used up. It can be as simple as sweeping up well enough so there is no trace of food leftover. If we really care about self-care, we need to care for others as well.