I travelled this weekend to a lifelong friend's wedding that required being on a couple of airplanes. I've been on enough flights that I am pretty familiar with the safety briefing, but sometimes there can be various circumstances that make the familiar new again.
Last week I had several conversations that included the topic of self-care practices - the activities and strategies we use to help us refresh and recoup our energy. Most of those chats involved people who are in some type of helping profession whose primary role is to constantly be giving of themselves to others. In those circumstances it's easy to just keep giving and giving, often sacrificing time for ourselves and many of those self-care practices, because there is so much need around us. I suspect this is sounding pretty familiar!
This is why the oxygen mask part of the safety announcement stood out to me a little more this trip. They tell you that if you are travelling with young children or people who may require assistance putting on the oxygen mask, that you should put on Your Mask First, and then assist those who need help with their mask. From a very practical perspective, if you help them first and then you happen to pass out from a lack of oxygen, they can't help you put on your mask. But, if you take care of yourself first, then you will still be capable of helping them with their mask.
I don't think I need to connect too many dots here for you! If we are running low on critical elements of our own healthy functioning, like energy or emotional well-being, it's possible we could get to a point where we don't have any capacity left to help those people who are around us. But if we take a little time for ourselves and make sure we have what we need to function, that isn't being selfish, it's acting in a way that is actually the most caring for those people who are around us. The struggle is, it's counterintuitive. It feels like what we need to do is just keep helping everyone around us, but it's possible to reach a point where we aren't any good to anyone else around us, and we might actually be doing more harm in the long run by incapacitating ourselves!
If you were going to take some time this week to put on Your Mask First, what kind of activities would you engage? Are there some small steps that you could prioritize this week that would help bring a sense of care and healthy stability for yourself? Would it help to just take a small walk on your break, or listen to music in your car while you eat lunch? Maybe you need to go to bed early one night or spend 5 minutes just being quiet and taking deep breaths? It's important to recognize that small acts of self-care have a cumulative effect on our overall wellbeing, so you don't have to come up with some big gesture, maybe just a series of small actions that help to prioritize you!
Here's to putting on Your Mask First this week!
Be Well,
Stephen
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