Why forcing a self care routine will always backfire.

• You’re not ready to relax yet

If you’re keeping yourself busy and avoiding slowing down, there’s usually a good reason! When our system is on high alert, we need to burn off the stress hormones before we can relax. Forcing ourselves to relax while we still have high levels of stress hormones in our system often results in agitation and anxiety. Instead of beating yourself up for being bad at relaxing, try getting curious about how your body want to move. It might surprise you!

• You’re stuck in a time loop

When you don’t fully burn off the stress hormones from an overwhelming experience , your nervous system can get stuck in a time loop. It keeps responding as though you’re in an emergency, even when you’re not.

Sometimes we might even create emergencies in our life so that our nervous system response feels confruent. Ultimately, the goal is to bring your nervous system into the present moment. But forcing yourself to “be in the the moment” never works because…

• You’re getting flooded

Overwhelming experiences contain huge amounts of unprocessed sensory information. When we sit still, close our eyes and deep breathe, we can get flooded with all of that information backlog. If you’re managing a big backlog, your system may keep you distracted so that you don’t have to process everything all at once. If you have a meditation corner that you built with good intentions and have never sat in once, that’s likely what’s going on.

• So what’s the answer

Self-Care routines that stick are ones that help us burn off accumulated stress hormones, learn to reliably get unstuck from time loops and slowly and steadily process the information backlog instead of dumping it all into your system at once. There is an art and a science to this!

In resilience,
Caitlin