I have OCD - and I am not afraid to talk about it and what helps me. I feel like talking about my OCD with people in platforms like The Fabric helps me help others as well as keep my own mental health status in check. To be honest, there is one area so many of us struggle with - and that's self care. A lot of times we feel like we don't deserve any type of self care, since OCD is so busy telling us everything that we are not and everything that we don't deserve. :( I see a lot of people post asking about what self care actually is, and how to practice it. I've realized that a lot of people undermine the importance of time blocking in your schedule to structure self care time. I've recently started to make self care my priority during my weekends. Even if I have a lot of work or events to attend, my self care HAS to come first. So I approach each weekend and see what I have scheduled and plug in what type of self care I want to practice and for how long on say, a Saturday morning. Last weekend my self care focus was on Sunday, since my week and weekend were just plain rough. So I went to a local crafts store and bought a book on how to learn fancy handwriting and caligraphy. I realized once I started really spending time on my new hobby, that I don't actually have hobbies. I never try new things to expand my black and white OCD brain. It hit me hard because as I was tracing letters and focusing so hard to train my muscle memory, there wasn't much room for OCD to interfere. I intentionally set one whole hour aside for my hobby and every time I saw an obsession coming, I stopped it, mentally. I didn't even acknowledge it. I just kept writing/drawing. THIS WAS MY SELF CARE TIME AND OCD WASN'T INVITED. Does anyone else make self care a priority, and if so, what is your favorite thing to do to take care of YOU? I want more ideas!!
Hi Kerry -- thanks so much for your post. I really appreciate so much of what you said--the importance of sharing to help others (not easy!) and your tenacity and perseverance in making self-care a priority. I'm not very familiar with OCD, but I can definitely relate to much of what you shared, especially the notion of our thinking getting in the way of what's best for us. Since you're looking for more self care ideas, one of my favorites that I find very helpful on so many levels is laughter. Making sure I laugh out loud every day is a top priority. Laughter feels good, relieves stress, puts things in perspective, connects me to joy, and is just plain fun. And there's no room for distracting thoughts to get in the way. Laughing with others is even better, but most days, I queue up some stand-up comedy (I highly recommend Kathleen Madigan) and give myself the gift of laughter. Enjoy!
This is such great insight. Self care is so important. One thing my wife and I have been doing is really trying to slow down in life. Whenever we move from one thing to another, we try "land" before we move to the next thing. "Landing" is really just giving yourself a few minutes to acknowledge that you're moving on from the last task and on to something new. I was always the type of person to just keep moving and try to just check things off the list but now I'm being more aware of settling down and always paying attention to how I'm feeling.
I love this post. Built into the structured time is prioritizing that you deserve that time. In my experience, not as someone with OCD personally, there's so much judgment, frustration and even anger at oneself when the OCD comes in. Setting up that you deserve time for yourself, that you deserve acceptance of yourself, is so so important. Because in life we're all trying as hard we can.