Why Self-Care Is Important, Even When You Have Kids
As moms, we always put our needs last. It sucks and we always make excuses for why.
There’s so much that our family, our marriage, our work, needs from us that we don’t think about self-care as a top priority. We brush it off, we rationalize why we don’t need it, and it becomes almost selfish that we should want or need to spend time on selfcare.
There’s also so much that we put on ourselves as moms. Like being “perfect” and on top of your game all the time, checking off our endless to-do list, being everything for everyone. It’s unrealistic but we do it anyway.
Don’t get me wrong, I do this. I have so much to do for work and my family that it’s easy to forget about myself. But from everything that I’ve learned from being a therapist, mom, and wife is: DON’T!!
Re-charge Your Battery
An analogy that I like to use with clients is the phone battery. When our phone battery is about to die, do we think “Oh I don’t need to plug it in, it’ll be fine”? No! We plug it in to re-charge it or it will die, and we won’t be able to use our phone at all.
It’s the same way with your body and mental health. You may say to yourself “Oh I don’t need to relax, there’s just so much I need to do, I’ll get over it.” But when you don’t listen to your body and you don’t take that time to re-charge, your body and mind faulter. It’s like not getting enough sleep, you feel like crap the next day and can’t seem to get anything done or be there entirely.
Being Whole for You and Your Family
The best thing we can be for our kids is be whole. When we take time to take care of ourselves and re-charge, we can be our best selves and the best moms we can be for our families. So prioritize yourself and your needs in order to take care of yourself and re-charge.
Do anything that helps you re-charge your batteries: read, go for a walk, listen to podcasts, take a bath, etc. Whatever it is, make sure you set time out in your day and DO IT!
Rethink Your To-Do List
“But Chrissy, I don’t have time to do any of that, my to-do list is so long!”
I know how a long to-do list feels: overwhelming, exhausting, and impossible. My advice for this is to split your to-do list into three parts:
- I do it
- Somebody else does it
- It doesn’t get done
It’ll be hard to delegate your to-dos, and it can be even harder to put things in the “doesn’t get done list”. You need to accept that you can’t do everything and that everything won’t get done, and that’s OK!
Once you let go of these to-do’s, you can really prioritize your self-care and I promise you’ll feel so much better for it. Take care of yourself mamas because you need and deserve it!
She owns her own sleep consulting company The Peaceful Sleeper, where she helps mamas and their
babies get the sleep that they need. You can follow her on Instagram @the.peaceful.sleeper and check
out her website thepeacefulsleeper.com
Thanks for this simple but real advice. I love to-do lists, being organized, and feeling productive, but I often forget to schedule my own time to relax and end up burning myself out!
The To do list… I don’t know why it never occurred to me to include a “doesn’t get done” section. I had the first two. This simple idea is making me relook at my priorities.