#51: Is looking after yourself just another thing to fail at?
You've had 50 episodes of this podcast so far (well, 51 including this one). That's 50 bits of advice for you to absorb, think about, and implement to make yourself feel better about stuff. We've looked at what to do about procrastination, how to feel less anxious about productivity, how to deal with impostor syndrome, FOMO, your inner critic, goalpost-moving, and more. Does all this advice leave you wondering, 'Where do I even start?!'? Do you beat yourself up about not managing to implement it all, and how to fit implementing it around all those other wholesome things you're supposed to be doing like exercising and getting enough sleep? Don't worry, friend - you're 100% off the hook. Here's the low-down on how to embrace imperfectionism about looking after yourself.
Reference:
Duhigg, C. 2012: The Power of Habit (Random House).
Episode transcript:
Is self-care just another thing to fail at?
You’re listening to The Academic Imperfectionist. I’m Dr Rebecca Roache. I’m a coach and a philosopher at the University of London, and week by week I’ll be drawing on philosophical analysis and coaching insights to help you dump perfectionism and flourish on your own terms.
Hi friends. This is an episode I’ve been thinking about doing for a while, and the more episodes of this podcast I release, and the more bits and pieces of advice I offer you, the more urgent the message I want to focus on in this episode becomes. What I’m doing in these episodes is, largely, offering you strategies to help you cope and even thrive despite all the demands and pressure that you face from your job, your family, the standards you set for yourself, and everything else that life is throwing at you. Feeling overwhelmed is something I’ve talked about here. And not only overwhelmed, but something a bit more sinister and morally loaded than that - shame. Shame about not doing enough, or not doing it well enough, as if what you produce is the measure of your worth as a human being. (It’s not, in case you need reminding - the very idea is bonkers.) And I’m increasingly aware that, unintentionally, this podcast might be adding to that pressure, especially for those of you with perfectionist tendencies, which - let’s be honest - is all of you. I’m aware that there’s a way of using this podcast - and it’s not a way I’d encourage - as if it were a kind of bucket list where you need to tick everything off. Things that you definitely need to be doing if you care about looking after yourself, and if you listen to an episode but don’t implement the advice contained in it, or if you don’t listen to every episode, then you only have yourself to blame if your life doesn’t improve, because are you even trying? If you’re someone who does that, stop it right now. In case it helps - and here I must let some of my cats on the table (that’s a quote from the philosopher J. L. Austin’s How To Do Things With Words, by the way, and a saying that I don’t think is even remotely as popular as it needs to be) - in case it helps, I don’t always implement my own advice. Knowing what I should be doing is different to actually doing it. Rebecca the coach and the podcaster is far more sensible than Rebecca the flawed human being with the overflowing email inbox and the missed deadlines who spends far too much time in her pyjamas and doesn’t wash her hair or shave her legs as much as she hopes people think she does. But anyway, none of this is helping get to the crux of the issue I want to address, which is this: faced with a seemingly bottomless well of useful advice about how to feel more at peace with yourself and your life and less overwhelmed - more advice than anyone could ever implement - how do you avoid turning all this helpful stuff into yet another stick to beat yourself with - another thing to add to the endless to-do list, another way to fail and feel ashamed about not doing enough?
On my way to an answer, let me tell you a story. In one sense, the reason I’m here doing this podcast is because, just coming up to 2 years ago, in January 2021, I stopped using my mobile phone after 9pm. Kind of a weird claim, right? A bit clickbaity. Start up a podcast with one weird trick. It takes a bit more than that, of course - but still, there’s a pretty straightforward sense in which what I’ve just said is true. Some context helps, so let’s rewind to early 2021. I was burnt out. The pandemic was in full swing, the schools weren’t back to normal, and I’d been signed off with work-related stress by my GP twice in the previous 6 months. I ended each day with a little less energy than I’d had at the end of the previous day. Whatever I was doing to recharge and recover from the demands of my job and parenting and all the stuff in between wasn’t enough. I was stuck in a trap that I know many of you get stuck in too, and which is going to be the focus of another episode of this podcast at some point: where you’re so tired that you don’t even have the energy to relax properly, which means you do things like sit there scrolling through your phone while you procrastinate about doing the dishes, when if you had a little more reserve in your tanks you’d push through and get all your chores done (or at least make a conscious choice to leave them) so that you could enjoy some better quality downtime by doing something like reading a novel or watching a movie or organising a video chat with a friend. I wasn’t getting stuff done at full power, and I wasn’t relaxing at full power either. And at some point I realised that this couldn’t go on, and I needed to do something, because my health was at stake. So I did something, in a pretty thoughtless and distracted way: I decided that I wouldn’t look at my phone after 9pm. I didn’t have any high hopes about how that might change my life - all I was thinking was: using my phone in the evenings tends to go hand-in-hand with not relaxing properly, so I need to stop. I experimented a little - at first I decided that 8pm was the curfew time, but it turned out that that was too early and I’d miss opportunities to connect with friends and family, so I moved it to 9pm. And, you know what? It worked. Because I wasn’t faffing around on my phone, I started going to bed at a reasonable time, and I spent less time procrastinating about things I needed to do around the house. But, and here was the interesting thing, these effects weren’t somehow automatic, passive consequences of the phone curfew. I still had to make the effort. The important thing was that I felt motivated to make the effort, whereas I hadn’t before. Putting my phone away at 9pm turned out to be what Charles Duhigg in The Power of Habit called a keystone habit: one that leads to other positive changes.
The consequences of my phone curfew didn’t stop there, though. It was as if something inside me had woken up and decided that enough was enough. Because I was sleeping a bit more, I was feeling ever so slightly less exhausted during the day, which made me realise for the first time just how exhausted I’d been and how much I’d normalised chronic tiredness. I could see the cause and effect: my exhaustion wasn’t just a fact of life, something I had to live with, it was something I had some control over. Over the next few months I started looking for other positive changes I could make. I stopped drinking alcohol. I cut out caffeine after lunch. I started doing 16/8 fasting. I tore my way through a load of books about science-based ways to improve life and health. The changes eventually spread outwards like ripples through other parts of my life, so that in the end I wasn’t merely concerned with feeling less tired, but also with how I could feel better in a more general sense, and how I might be able to help other people do the same. I made changes to my workspace. I hired a coach and then a therapist. I faced various anxieties around writing and productivity. I made an effort to be a bit more tidy around the house. And I started this podcast. All this happened due to the momentum that was kicked off by that one modest change: the phone curfew. And, because we’re imperfectionists here, let me emphasise that it hasn’t been a steady upward curve. The phone curfew fell by the wayside a while back - I keep meaning to get back to it and I still spend the odd evening using my phone to inhabit that horrid, stingy-eyed, achy-necked limbo between what I’m supposed to be doing and actually relaxing. I don’t stick religiously to the 16/8 fasting - I maybe manage 5 days out of 7. The caffeine is creeping back into the afternoons. I haven’t been as consistent as I ought to be with the tidying. It’s been very much two steps forward, one step back. But the lesson here is this: it only took one small, positive change. Just one, and imperfectly executed. It led to other positive changes, also imperfectly executed - and that’s still net positive progress. I was lucky, in a way: there were so many things that needed changing in my life - sleep, diet, home, work, and more. I could have got overwhelmed with the sort of ‘where do I even start?’ mindset that I sometimes experience when I think about tidying the house, and which often results in not starting, and instead ignoring the problem. I could have analysed whether the phone curfew was the best choice for a positive change, or whether I should do something else instead, and what if I chose the wrong thing to change, or failed to choose the best thing. I didn’t do any of that, probably because I was too knackered to think straight.
So what is it about making one imperfect positive change that leads to other good things? Well, a confession here: if this were any normal week, I’d have taken a dive into the literature here and seen if any scientists have had useful things to say about this, which I expect they have. But this isn’t a normal week: I’m emerging from 3 weeks in which my kids and I have all at various times been ill with a horrible bug that wasn’t covid but felt like covid and in my case was actually worse than covid and lasted longer. And I’ve just finished marking a load of essays - on time, but by the skin of my teeth. And two days ago I got up hours before dawn to travel to a conference on a day of a rail strike, arriving less than 5 minutes before my talk start time, and then when I got back home I had to stay up late to drop my daughter off at her school at midnight for a coach trip, and I still haven’t caught up on my sleep and I could probably fall asleep right now if I shut my eyes - so, bear with me while I model imperfection for you and dial it in by just giving you my own thoughts on why one change can have this ripple effect where other positive things start to happen.
When I look back on my own experience of this, I think that what that one change - that 9pm phone curfew - what that represented was me deciding that I was a project I was willing to invest in. I was no longer treating myself in a way that expressed the attitude, yeah, you’re exhausted but so what? Suck it up. That attitude to myself was really quite callous - and we’re often callous to ourselves, in ways that we’d never be towards other people, even people we dislike. Taking action - any action, really - towards fixing the problem expressed an important shift in attitude. It was no longer: suck it up. It was: I deserve to feel better than this, and I’m going to do something about it. And then, as I mentioned, seeing the effects of the change is its own form of motivation. It was, I’ve taken a positive step and I feel better and it wasn’t even that hard, so what else could I do?
For these reasons, if your response to looking at the various episodes of this podcast (or to any other bits of advice about how you can feel better and how you can look after yourself) is to feel overwhelmed and ask, ‘where do I even start?’ you’re looking at it in the wrong way. It’s not like trying to tidy a hideously messy house, where you’re not even going to start to notice any improvement until after you’ve put in at least half a day of work. It’s more like doing something kind for someone. If your friend is going through a hard time - divorce, redundancy, bereavement, that sort of thing - then your sending them a thoughtful card isn’t going to fix their problems. But it’s probably going to lift their spirits a little and let them know that someone cares about them, and that’s a difference worth making. It might even give them enough of a boost so that they find they have a little more motivation to do something they need to do. By making even a tiny positive change in your life, you show that kindness to yourself. It doesn’t fix everything. You can never fix everything. But if you want to fix anything, it’s the only possible first step. Take care everyone.
I’m Dr Rebecca Roache, and you’ve been listening to The Academic Imperfectionist. If you enjoyed the episode, please subscribe on whatever podcast app you like to use. I want to help as many people as I can with these episodes, and I’d really appreciate it if you’d share the podcast with any friends who you think might find it useful, and if you’d consider leaving a review on your podcast app. If you’d like to support the podcast financially, you can do that at patreon.com/academicimperfectionist. For more information about me, the podcast, and my coaching, please visit the website - academicimperfectionist.com. You’ll find links there to The Academic Imperfectionist on Twitter and Facebook too. If you have an idea or a request for a future episode of The Academic Imperfectionist, please drop me a line, either via my website or by tweeting your idea with the hashtag #AcademicImperfectionist. Thank you for listening, and see you next time!
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