74| Why Prioritizing Yourself Isn't Selfish & Why Everyone Needs You To

When was the last time you did something purely for yourself, not to be productive, not to show up better for someone else, just for you? Can you even remember? Do you find yourself regularly running on empty and calling it normal? And how do you stop feeling guilty and instead feel worthy and deserving of the time you take care of yourself?

Transcript

When was the last time you did something purely for yourself, not to be productive, not to show up better for someone else, just for you? Can you even remember? Do you find yourself regularly running on empty and calling it normal? And how do you stop feeling guilty and instead feel worthy and deserving of the time you take care of yourself? Listen in asthis podcast is always 20 minutes or less so you don’t have to feel overwhelmed or overhaul everything in your life, but just make small, simple changes to create more calm and peace. To get to your better life, make small changes and begin to live it!

Hello my returning friends or hello my new friends however you got here thank you so much for being here. We’ve got a lot to talk about to take care of ourselves and prioritizing ourselves. Here's the question I want to start with. If you don't make yourself a priority, who will? And I don't mean that no one cares. People care but honestly, someone or something else will step in and fill the space you offer up when you’re not prioritizing yourself. Your boss will fill it with more work. Your kids will fill it with more needs. Your partner will fill it with their own priorities. Your phone will fill it with notifications, cute pit bulls and the best press on nails. Life will just...fill it. And then suddenly you look up and weeks, months, sometimes years have gone by and you haven't actually taken care of yourself in any meaningful way. And what’s worse is that you haven’t even noticed, in fact you adapted to it. You got used to running on empty and calling it normal.

So let's talk about what it actually means to prioritize yourself, why it's so hard especially if you're someone who spends most of your time caring for others, and most importantly, some real, small, doable ways to start prioritizing yourself without blowing up your life or drowning in guilt. Take a moment right now and just think about the last time you did something purely for you. Not because it helped your family, not because it made you more productive, not because someone else needed you to be okay. Just something that filled you up just for you. Can you remember? How long ago was it? If you’re still thinking about it, that's already telling you something.

Now the idea that you need to prioritize yourself isn't new. We've all heard it and I’ve talked about it in past episodes. Put your own oxygen mask on first, you can't pour from an empty cup, all of that. And we nod along because it makes sense logically. But logic and lived experience are very different things, aren't they? Because in real life, when you're a mother and your child is melting down, or you're a partner and your person is struggling, or you're caring for an aging parent who genuinely needs you, and all of it is breaking your heart at the thought of not helping, the idea of prioritizing yourself can feel not just difficult but actually selfish. Like, who has time for that? Who has the right to do that? You do..so let’s get into it.

Here's what I want you to think about. The belief that taking care of yourself is selfish is one of the most deeply ingrained and honestly one of the most damaging stories we carry. And most of us didn't choose it consciously. It was handed to us. By culture, by family, by watching the women and caregivers around us model self-sacrifice as if it were a virtue. And sometimes it is a virtue and that’s beautiful. But somewhere along the way the message got distorted and self-sacrifice became the whole picture we paint for ourselves instead of just one of the colors. Research confirms refusing to constantly self sacrifice is a form of self care. A study published in the Journal of Health Psychology found that people who engage in regular self-care practices report not just lower levels of stress and burnout, but significantly better quality in their relationships and their ability to be present for the people they love. So it's not that you choose yourself instead of the people you care for. It's that taking care of yourself is literally how you show up better for them. It's not either or, it’s both and.

Now let's talk about the guilt, because it happens to most of us. It just kind of sits there in the background and quietly nudges you every time you try to do something for yourself. You book a massage and feel guilty. You go for a walk by yourself and feel guilty. You say no to something and feel guilty. You sit down for five minutes and feel guilty because you can hear the laundry calling your name from the other room. But here's what guilt is actually doing when it shows up in these moments. It's not telling you that you're doing something wrong. It's telling you that you're doing something different and unfamiliar. Guilt and discomfort feel almost identical in the body, and our brain, which is very efficient but not always very wise, tends to label discomfort as danger because it doesn’t know the difference between the types of discomfort, it’s all danger. So when you try to do something new, something that goes against the comfort and routine of always putting yourself last, your brain sends up a flare and says, wait, something's different here, is this okay? And guilt is that flare. It's not a verdict and it’s not truth. It's just a signal that you're shifting something. And shifting something, even something that needs to change, always feels uncomfortable at first. So the next time guilt shows up, you can acknowledge it, you can even say, hey, I see you, and then you can keep going anyway, push thru the discomfort. Because the guilt tends to quiet down the more you practice moving thru it. It doesn't disappear overnight but it lessens over time so that self care starts to feel not only easier but necessary. And it is necessary, you deserve that self care.

Think about what guilt stopped you from doing, maybe one area of your life where guilt has talked you out of something that was genuinely good for you. What did that cost you? And who did it actually serve? Now let's get into the how, of how to put this into practice, a repeatable and easy practice that can become a go to so you’ll be ready for it on hard days. The first thing I want to say is that this doesn't have to be big because as you know, we’re always talking about little by little here. We've been sold this idea that self-care means spa weekends and meditation retreats and two-hour morning routines, and for some people, some of the time, those things are wonderful. But for most of us in the middle of real life with real responsibilities and real time constraints, that version of self-care is almost more demoralizing than helpful because it feels so far out of reach for us. So let's get practical with real life easy changes. Micro-moments of care are real and they count. A 2018 study by Kristin Neff, one of the leading researchers on self-compassion at the University of Texas, found that brief, intentional acts of self-compassion, even moments as short as sixty seconds, can really shift your nervous system and reduce your experience of stress. Sixty seconds. You have sixty seconds. I know you do because you chose to take more than that to listen here and thank yourself now because this right here is guilt free self care. Go ahead, say it out loud...thank you me, for giving me time just for me today.

So what does a micro-moment look like in real life? It looks like stepping outside for two minutes between tasks and breathing in the air while you look at the sky. It looks like making yourself a cup of tea or coffee and stopping, sitting down to drink it instead of wandering around the kitchen multitasking. It looks like putting a song you love on in the car on the way to your kid’s pickup and really listening. It looks like taking three slow, intentional breaths before you walk back into a hard situation. These things sound small because they are small. But small done consistently is how we change the baseline. It's how we begin to rewire the belief that we don't deserve a moment to ourselves. We talk a lot about self-care like it requires a blocked off Saturday and a spa reservation, but the truth is that some of the most powerful shifts happen in the smallest little bits of time. Micro-moments are exactly what they sound like. Brief, intentional pauses that matter. Your nervous system doesn't need a vacation to reset. It needs repetition. It needs small, consistent signals that you're safe, that you matter, that you're not just a function running on autopilot. Every time you step outside for two minutes and actually notice the sky, every time you sit down with your coffee instead of drinking it standing over the sink, every time you take those three slow breaths, you're sending your brain a message. And that message is, I'm worth a moment. That sounds simple but for a lot of us it's a significant shift that our bodies and souls pay attention to.

Neff's work on self-compassion shows us that even brief intentional acts of turning inward can shift our stress response in measurable ways. Your cortisol levels, your heart rate, your sense of being overwhelmed, all of it responds to these small moments of care. The body keeps score in both directions. It registers the neglect but it also registers the care and kindness you give yourself. And here's what I love most about micro-moments is that they're cumulative. Each one builds on the last. Like drops of water filling a bowl, you don't see it happening all at once but one day you realize your bowl isn't empty anymore. You start to feel more like yourself. And that's not a small thing, that can be everything.

Let's talk about parents specifically for a minute, to every parent who's listening and feeling like they've completely lost the thread of who they are outside of that role. Parenthood has this incredible ability to absorb everything. Your time, your identity, your sleep, your headspace, it can feel like it sucks more out of you than you want to give. And it's also one of the most profound and beautiful things a person can experience. Both things are true at once. But what we forget is that you as an individual still exist in there. The person you were before, the things that made you feel alive, the dreams that were yours and not anyone else's, they didn't disappear. They're just waiting. And when you take those moments for yourself, your kids don't just benefit from a present parent. They benefit from watching a parent who knows how to take care of themselves. Because you’re modeling for them what it looks like to be a human being who has needs and honors them. That's not selfish parenting. That's actually amazing parenting. You're teaching them something they'll carry into their adulthood and possibly their own parenthood. Think about that for a moment. What are you modeling right now about self-worth and self-care? Do they see you exhausted and not taking care of yourself? Is that what you want them to take into adulthood?

Now for those of you who are caring for aging parents, there's a weight that comes with that role. Because often you're doing it out of love and also out of obligation and also out of guilt and also because there isn't anyone else and also because you wouldn't have it any other way. All of those things at once. And the depletion that comes from caregiver burnout is real and it’s significant. You can't sustain that level of giving without accepting and taking something more back in. It just isn't biologically or emotionally possible. So prioritizing yourself in that season isn't optional. It's actually what makes it possible to keep going. But how? It might mean asking for help and actually accepting it when it's offered instead of saying oh no, I'm fine. It might mean identifying one hour or two per week, that belongs to you and protecting it. It might mean having an honest conversation with a sibling or another family member about sharing the load or getting outside help just for that one or two hours. It might mean talking to a professional, whether that's a therapist, a coach, or a support group for caregivers, because the processing of this stuff isn't meant to happen in isolation.

And for those navigating partnerships, you might have a dynamic where two people are each waiting for the other one to be okay first before they tend to themselves. And then neither of them is actually taking care of themselves. It becomes this quiet standoff where everyone is running on fumes and nobody wants to be the first to say, hey, I need something. So let me just give you permission right now to say out loud what you need, what you’re missing, what’s not working. It can be the beginning of a much more honest and sustainable relationship built on vulnerability yes which can be scary, but also built on trust to help each other thru.

Now I want to talk about the process of unlearning which we talked about a lot in episode 5. The patterns we're talking about, the habit of putting yourself last, the guilt, the belief that your needs are less important, these didn't form overnight. For most of us they formed over years and decades and in some cases generations. Your mother may have learned it from her mother. And so the unlearning is also not going to happen overnight. And that's okay. In fact, expecting it to happen overnight is just another version of the perfectionism that got us here in the first place and creates that guilt complex. What the research on habit change consistently shows us is that small, repeated actions over time are what actually rewire our defaults. Just small, steady, intentional movement in a new direction. So be patient with yourself. Celebrate the small wins. Notice when you did take those micro-moments, when you did say no, when you did ask for help. Those moments matter and they're adding up even when it doesn't feel like it.

Prioritizing yourself isn't a destination you arrive at and then you're done. It's a practice you continue. It's an ongoing, imperfect, practice of remembering that you matter too. Not more than the people you love, and not at their expense. But alongside them, with them, tucked in as part of the whole. And the beautiful thing is that when you start to do this, even in the smallest ways, something shifts. Not just in you but in the people around you. Because they feel the difference when you're not depleted. They feel it when you're actually present instead of physically there but mentally somewhere else in your own exhaustion. Your relationship with yourself sets the tone for every other relationship in your life. It always has.

So here's what I want you to do before you close this episode and go back to your day. Pick one thing. Just one small honest thing you’ve been thinking about. One micro-moment, one boundary, one minute that belongs entirely to you, for you. Write it down or tell someone about it to help solidify it and hold yourself accountable to your own self care. Because when we say things out loud or put them on paper they become more real and we actually follow through so see what happens when you pick that one small thing that matters and make it real for you. And think about sharing this episode with someone in your life or just someone you know even if it’s an acquaintance who needs to hear it, because you probably thought of someone already while you were listening and that's not by accident. Send it to them. Because sometimes the most caring thing we can do for someone else is hand them the permission to make the change they've been waiting to make. And if someone did that for you by sharing this with you, then reach out and thank them, let them know what you got from it.

Follow or subscribe wherever you're listening, leave a 5 start review if you're feeling generous because it truly helps more people find their way here. You could literally change the trajectory of someone's week and wouldn’t that be amazing...to help someone feel less guilty and make the decision to fill their own cup just from your little message?

Thank you for being here. Thank yourself for showing up today, and when you make those small change this week and take just a few minutes for yourself, let go of any guilt and instead recognize that this self care is not just for you but will help those around you by being more present and offering a better version of yourself, a deeply committed version of yourself, little by little and peace by peace.