This is the Moment for Radical Self Care

“If I could sign up for a medically induced coma and wake up at the end of this stay-at-home order, I would sign up for that.”

This is the response I got from a manager when I asked how they were doing after the latest stay-at-home order. 

It hit me at my core because I’ve been there. 

I’ve struggled with my own self-care journey for over a decade. Now, after a year of living with the pandemic as a single mom with two kids schooling online, I felt the numbness creeping back in.

The days blended together, and the four walls of my home started to taunt me.

At the beginning of the pandemic, I relished the opportunity to make my kids a hot home-cooked meal and have lunch together. Those days have melted away, and now I ask my kids to boil hot dogs on their own so that I can take a nap or a walk during my lunch break instead.

I just felt so “blah” – despite exercising, protecting my sleep, watching what I eat, and my strong spiritual practice.

Most of the people I speak with echo the same “blah” feeling as well.

Adam Grant recently wrote in this NYT article that people are experiencing what he describes as “languishing”: a sense of stagnation and emptiness. It feels as if you’re muddling through your days, looking at your life through a foggy windshield. He says languishing may be the dominant emotion of 2021.

He’s right, but I’m optimistic because the year still has lots of runway.

With the proper measures, we can do something about the collective state of “blah-ness” that we’re feeling. Now is the moment that, as leaders, parents, partners, and friends, we need to launch a movement of radical self-care.

Radical self-care is unapologetically and audaciously prioritizing our personal health and well-being and that of our family above everything else. Yes, above everything else. Above our work, our kids finishing their online schooling and any other commitment, priority, or activity.

It means radically re-prioritizing, re-shuffling, and renegotiating to carve out, protect and preserve our own mental, physical, spiritual, emotional, social well-being.

We will need to be brave and bold. And foster a strong coalition of people, organizations, and society as a whole to make it possible. 

Our movement requires a fundamental re-think of how individuals, communities, and organizations define success. How organizations enable career and professional development and how culture normalizes and supports the health and well-being of the entire body – especially the mind and the spirit.

This needs to be a social movement similar to the type of systemic change required to address climate change or racial and social inequity. It may seem audacious to put radical self-care in the same category as social inequality and climate change, but it’s a prerequisite. 

Arianna Huffington describes this idea in her article Burned out People Will Keep Burning Up the Planet: “When we’re burned out, exhausted and depleted, we operate on short-termism and day-to-day survival, just trying to get through the day, or even just the next hour. We’re not just less able to create new and more sustainable habits, we’re also unable to think about the future, make the wisest decisions for the long term and come up with creative and innovative solutions to complex challenges — like climate change.”

The longer we wait the more significant and harder the problem will be to address. We must start prioritizing well-being now, and we need to start on all three levels; individually, organizationally, and societally:

Individually, what can you do to implement radical self-care:

1.      Permit ourselves to say NO. Stop doing things that are sucking your energy and motivation.

2.      Renegotiate our workload at home and work. 

3.      Set boundaries for work to start and end. Disconnect fully and entirely without regret or guilt.

4.      Use our time off to rest and recharge. If you’re sitting on time off waiting for that trip – stop waiting. Take time off now – you need it. 

5.      Create a schedule that works for you and ask for the flexibility you need.

6.      Create a baseline for your well-being and protect it at all costs. A baseline is a list of things you must do every day or within the week to protect your well-being. Write your baseline down, share it with your boss, family, and friends to create an accountability group. Post it on your wall and check it every week.

7.      Know the signs of burnout, anxiety, languishing, and depression, tune in to what you are experiencing, and ask for help when you need it. Asking for help is a sign of strength, not weakness.

What organizations can do to prioritize radical self-care:

1.      Prioritize well-being from the top-down and the middle out. If you haven’t already taken well-being to the c-suite and your board to make it a strategic priority, you need to immediately.

2.      Implement a cross-functional task force to take an audit of existing programs, identify the gaps and implement a long-term plan for organizational resilience and well-being.

3.      Encourage leaders to share their own stories, as they too are struggling. When leaders share their stories, it creates cultural permission for others to do the same.

4.      Create the space for courageous conversations across the organization around languishing, anxiety in the workplace, and mental health.

5.      Partner with organizations that can bring easy and accessible resources to employees like telehealth and Thrive Global. 

6.      Educate leaders on how to listen when their employees indicate they need help and how to respond. It’s not good enough to send people to a third-party employee assistance program. People need wise compassion now more than ever.

What we need to do as a society:

1.      We need to fight the stigma around mental health and establish a new normal of holistic well-being.

2.      We need to have this conversation in schools, universities, and across the public sector.

3.      We need to educate people of all ages on how to take care of their well-being emotionally, mentally, physically, spiritually, and environmentally.

4.      We need public health campaigns on well-being. I grew up with “Say no to drugs,” and today we need a public health movement on “Say No to Burnout, Anxiety, and Languishing.”

5.      We need free, local, accessible, and high-quality mental health and well-being support for anyone who needs it.

Self-care is a muscle I have built over many years.

I have grown into my confidence and conviction to ask for help and renegotiate priorities in my life.

Four weeks ago, as I felt the numbness of languishing creeping in, I had the muscle to recognize it and chose to radically re-prioritize my environment. I booked a one-way ticket for my kids and me to be physically closer to family, friends, and nature.

I left the four walls of my home office for the mountains and a kayak.

Since doing so, I have felt completely reinvigorated. It’s as if the connected tissue between me and the rest of the world has been stitched back together in a small way, something I was desperately craving.

You may not be able or interested in working out of Airbnb’s through a pandemic, but that doesn’t mean you can’t prioritize your well-being. Whether it’s taking a nap or a walk during your lunch break, turning off your phone when you are off, or taking all your paid time off, there are steps that we can all take, both big and small, which make a difference. 

It starts with a mindset that prioritizing our whole selves is the most crucial part of being our best selves, and that is what the world needs of us the most right now.

Let’s collectively start building that muscle together at home, at work, and across our communities. We have the power to influence change – it’s not too late. 

In Partnership,

Nabeela

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