Why a bubble bath is not self care!
As a burnout prevention and happiness coach I read a lot about self care. Other people’s views, opinions, tips and any research that’s been done and I can’t tell you the amount of times I’ve read the top tip to self care… have a bubble bath!
Now I love a bath. Not so much since having the kids, as it’s not quite as relaxing to be surrounded by plastic animals and letters of the alphabet but it’s soothing, warm and relaxing and you get to have some peace and quiet alone. But really when you think about it, it’s just basic hygiene! However many bubbles you have, candles you light or Kenny G you play (for all the Friends fans!) it’s still just cleaning yourself!
My problem here is not really with the bath itself, like I say I get that it’s some people’s way of relaxing but what I’ve learnt and what I help my clients with is understanding that self care is so much bigger than this.
I have a quote (of course I do!!) that sums up exactly what I mean…
“True self care is not salt baths and chocolate cake. It is making the choice to build a life you don’t need to regularly escape from.” Brianna Wiest
This is the issue with so much advise around self care. All of the tips are around ways to remove yourself from your current situation. A day at the spa or a nail appointment and while I love these things as much as a bath and think they should definitely be built into your self care routine, they are a part of it, they are not the whole answer. After an escape, at some point you have to return!
I want to share with you something that happened to me this week to help illustrate why I think this way.
On Mondays I have my little girl at home with me all day. I had started the day with a bit of anxiety, which sometimes happens, but I’d looked after myself, done a meditation and was feeling OK. In the back of mind all day though was a couple of work commitments I had this week that I really wanted to go well. I kept having ideas about them and I’d started feeling a little frustrated I couldn’t plan things out right there and then. So now I was feeling a little anxiety and a little frustration. Then I got a call to tell me my grandma had been taken into hospital as she’d had a stroke. This wasn’t completely out of the blue and as it wasn’t a massive shock I thought I felt OK about it and just kept going. By the time my son came home from school and the chaos of that began, I wasn’t feeling great. I could tell I was getting a little more on edge and the stress was building. In the middle of tea with the kids (which is not always the calmest of times!) my husband finished work and said he was going for a workout. Now on top of everything else, subconsciously, I’m now starting to feel a little resentful. He’s doing what he loves and what makes him feel good and I’m not feeling great. Then it happened. One of the kids did something which normally would just be annoying but the emotions finally boiled over and I lost my temper. The kids were crying, I was crying and my husband came in to rescue the situation.
On top of everything I was then full of guilt for losing my temper and shouting at the kids when none of this was their fault.
When I’d calmed down, made the sure the kids were OK and we’d all had the biggest of hugs and kisses, I tried to explain to them what had happened. I told them I was worried about grandma being in the hospital and that sometimes when we have things on our mind it can make us do things we don’t mean.
On reflection all of this happened because I didn’t follow my own advise. I didn’t make my well-being a priority. I had plenty of ways I could have avoided what happened.
The one thing I couldn’t have done though was go for a bath or a nail appointment! While a relaxing bath may have soothed the aftermath, no amount of bubbles was going to save me in the moment. You can’t always escape when you need to.
The more I discover about self care and what it means to me the more I realise I have to learn ways to cope in the moment. I need tools in my tool box to pull out at a minutes notice to help me navigate my emotions, help me keep calm, ultimately help me look after myself in the best way possible.
This week’s experience highlighted how I still need to focus on this but also showed me how far I have come. On very quick reflection I knew what I could have done differently and that’s a long way from where I used to be, not knowing how to cope.
The thing is, as mums we have a life outside of our kids. Yes we do spend a lot of our time thinking about them but there are other things that go on, other things that take our attention, other things that affect our moods and if we don’t handle these properly our kids may end up being on the end of it.
Some people think that spending time looking after yourself as a mum is selfish, that we should dedicate all of our time and energy to our kids. But what happened this week was selfish. My emotions and the way I was feeling had nothing to do with the kids. The more we push through, the more we ignore how we’re feeling, the more likely something like this is going to happen.
So what could I have done in the moment to avoid this happening?
(By the way I’m not making myself wrong for what happened, as I would never make anyone else wrong for it. This is just my ongoing quest to make each situation the best it can be for all of the family and learn from the ones that don’t go the way I’d like them too!)
My tips for what could have worked in the moment are based on the fact that for some time I had felt my emotions boiling up. They did not come out of nowhere. So with warning, if we are aware and listening to ourselves, we could do one of the following:
I could have put the Ipad on while the kids were having tea and had a cup of tea on the other side of the kitchen while I calmed down and focused on me for a minute.
I could have done some breathing exercises to help me relax as I felt the emotions rising. In these situations I like to do a really easy 4 breath cycle. In for 4, hold for 4, out for 4, hold for 4. Just to give my brain something else to focus on and let my nervous system calm down.
I could have put on some music to change my mood. Music has such a huge impact on our emotions, I even have a playlist to get my energy up and out of a negative state. If you can dance around the room too, the physical movement helps move the stuck emotions in our body.
I could have got my journal out and just jotted down a few notes about how I was feeling to stop it spinning in my head. Sometimes when we note things down in black and white they seem so much smaller or more manageable than when they are in a constant loop in our heads.
Worst case when my husband had come down for his workout I could have asked him to sit with the kids for 15 minutes while I removed myself for a bit.
As a first step, if this is all very new to you, just being aware of your emotions is crucial. It takes some practice but the more you are aware of how you feel, the more you can work out why and also how you can start to change it.
Let’s face it I can never eradicate these type of situations from happening and it’s not about that but it is about keeping my stress levels to a minimum and my wellness a priority so that everyone around me benefits.
So keep enjoying the bubble baths, as I will, but remember that self care is about more than escaping for a few hours!
Much love
Gail x
Photo credit - https://unsplash.com/@maddibazzocco