What is Low-key Self Care?
Sometimes when we are feeling down, that we are just surviving and barely hanging in there, we know that whatever tool or strategy we have will ask too much energy to apply.
In such a situation, besides checking if we have to remove or change something from our Runway, we can have our ‘low-key self care’ plan ready. We can adapt this plan as we learn what works for us as well as follow the instructions in the back of our PowerBook.
In short, we don’t have to do anything that we do not have the energy for. It is OK to just hang!
How it might look like
The plan will be totally dependent on our personal preferences and circumstances, and we can add anything that we come across to our PowerBook.
It can differ from laying in bed all day, getting as many hugs as possible (a challenge right now), reading easy-going fiction, hanging on the sofa together with the children, binging on a Netflix series, eating chocolate or forbidden food (within the limits that we manage) of which we know it’s not good for us but we don’t have the energy to keep up with it right now, or just obsessively eating healthy and reorganising the cupboards, to binging on exercise and not allowing ourselves to relax and keep on working, going to bed too late and being busy busy busy.
Stay compassionate with yourself
The only challenge with low-key self care is not to let it trigger your unhelpful train of thoughts about self, and within the ‘low-key self care’ period to appreciate your ability to recognise that this is what you need right now to restore your energy and resilience. You can remind yourself that to be able to cope with whatever life throws at us we need to be able to step back from our path. When we do this, we can be grateful and proud of our awareness and that we managed to give ourselves low-key self care. When we have the energy we can use it to raise our emotional resilience and energy level and strengthen our Baseline by writing it in our PowerBook and applying the Awareness Mantra.
We are the best
Always remember, we are the best people we can be at this very moment and that’s good enough!
If not distracting enough…
When we are overwhelmed sometimes it’s helpful to distract ourselves with intellectual challenges that have nothing to do with our situation (forcing ourselves to think critically through using our fine-processing centre in the brain) to prevent ourselves from triggering our most common thinking loops.
We can distract ourselves with films or Netflix, but sometimes that doesn’t distract us enough. If that is the case, we might have to find a level higher engaging intellectual challenge.
Not too challenging though. Refreshing a new language through a phone app e.g Memrise, doing maths or science online (Khan Academy) are examples, or following an online course about something that we find interesting and has no other value to us (to prevent any ’shoulds’).
Strengthening our Baseline will enable us to step into the director’s chair again and be back in the calm zone.
“It is not what happens in our lives that defines us, it is about how we relate to it.” Greek philosopher Epicetus
———