How to create more time for ourselves

Finally it seems that lockdown is easing and we are about to start to enjoy a life that we recognise more. However, there has been one challenge that I have seen that hasn’t gone away, despite many aspects of our life having been put on hold, and that is having enough time for self care. 

Self care, to me, is such an interesting area of self development as it is often a chicken and egg situation. Many clients will come to me for help because they want to experience life differently, they are fed up of the stress, the pressure, not feeling like they are reaching their potential, in other words they want to invest in themselves. However, they can barely find the time to make the sessions. Maybe if they engaged more they would find the benefit they seek, including feeling able to invest the time into themselves, but in order to do that, they have to make the time to initially invest in themselves! So it’s not uncommon that we will dance around this for a few sessions, before they have the realisation that they have to make making time for themselves a priority over everything else. 

So how can we make more time for ourselves, so that going forward we take better care for ourselves, because in my mind, that is going to be a key learning for all of us, if we are to keep well and stress free, and so in turn support our immune system.

In my mind one of the biggest realisations that my clients have is that they have more time available to them than they think that they do. 

The other week I asked a group I was working with, what thinking they did about what they had to do. The response was fascinating. Like all of us do from time to time, they would think about how long it would take, how difficult it was, what the outcome would be, how much preparation they needed to do, along with a general narrative of how little time they had, how their list was never ending, why was it that they always had to do it, and for those who were juggling homeschooling, there was a narrative there about how impossible all of this was and they couldn’t possibly continue indefinitely like this.

I then asked them how long they thought they spent in this cycle of thinking, say in a period of 5 minutes, and it ranged from 1-4 minutes, completely in thought and not doing the task in hand. It doesn’t take a mathematician to work out that over period of an hour, or even a day, that is a lot of thinking and a lot of time that they could use doing something else! 

It’s like our thinking about what we have to do has its own personal R number. A little thought that starts with ‘I think this could take ages’ can turn into a whole conversation in our minds, so that one little thought can create a bounty of thinking and before we know it 3 minutes of our life has simply passed us by. An easy win, is simply noticing that that is what we are doing, noticing that that initial thought has no information in it at all that can help us and simply send it on its way before we start engaging with it and it starts to multiply in our minds!

The other realisation that my clients often have is that their thinking doesn’t know how important tasks really are. It will seek to persuade us that other things are important, often in a sneaky way, either keeping us at our desk, doing that one extra thing for the family, or even scrolling on social media rather than focusing on what we know we have to do for ourselves. How often do you know that you need a break or you need to stop, but you find yourself doing things that you know could wait! 

Or more persuasively, that it is somehow selfish to look after ourselves over other people, so everything else is far more important than looking after ourselves. In my mind, there is very little which is more important than self care. If we don’t care for ourselves, it’s not only that we can’t care for others, we run the risk that they then have to care for us, which is something most of us want to avoid. So that thought, again, has very little information, in fact it is incredibly misleading!

Another one that fascinates me a lot is the ‘I’ll just do…’ thought, as it’s a thought that doesn’t even look like a thought, yet it has the power to stop you in your tracks, distracting you from what you were going to do, to squeeze in something else, making that something else feel far more important than it really is. I find many clients share with me how they were going to read a book, or watch a video that I suggested only to find that their minds distracted them with the ‘I’ll just do’ and before they know it, the time they had allocated for themselves has completely been whittled away by other stuff they didn’t need to do. What this thought does is persuading you that the other task is far more important than looking after yourself, and so what I said before, equally applies here!

A thought that I find clients really struggle with is they believe their thinking really knows what it is that they want to do. They may experience the ‘I can’t be bothered now’ thinking, or may simply find themselves slumped in front of the TV, playing on their phone on their favourite game or social media, or even pouring themselves a glass of wine. Again, we innocently don’t realise that our thinking is creating this experience for us, habitual thinking that we do at certain times of the day, or after we have done a certain amount. They may experience a head/heart tension, where they know in their heart they want to do something else, but their head is creating such a powerful feeling that they feel compelled to comply with the habitual behaviour. When we start to notice that our knowing (i.e heart rather than head) is actually our true feelings, it usually starts with ‘I know’ too to make it even easier to identify, we start to see that our thinking doesn’t know what we want all, that the head thinking is out of date. Simply by noticing this, it releases its grip on us, leaving us free to choose what it is that we want to do. 

I have found that the relationship with myself and of caring for myself above all the other demands I have on my time, to be a life long learning journey, but one of the most rewarding ones that I have had. The most important aspect being is to be able to reflect on any experience that I have with any of the above with love, compassion and understanding, and not judgement or criticism, or feeling that I’m failing. We are all human, and our thinking can be as persuasive as the child catcher in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, creating an illusion that it’s something that we want or have to do, when really it isn’t at all. But with each time that happens, I have found there is a beautiful learning to be discovered, that so often deepens my understanding of how I work as a human, and one that will take forward with me, enriching my journey on the way.

with love, Andrea x

Andrea Morrison is a Transformational Coach, Tedx Speaker, Writer and Columnist for The Yorkshire Post. Find out more about her forthcoming events and programmes on her website: www.andreamorrison.co.uk