Why It’s Okay To Take A Break From Self-Care & Healing
The image of perfection.
It’s that constant standard that is portrayed to us in the media day in and day out. If we’re being honest with ourselves here, it’s probably also the standard that many of us continue to measure ourselves against in some way or another (even if we don’t like to admit it!).
One of the things that we hear from so many of you is that even once you’ve embarked on your healing journey, the need to be perfect about it often still creeps its way back into how you feel about yourself.
The thing about that is that if you’re trying to be perfect at personal healing and self-care ALL THE TIME (without ever giving yourself a break or room to mess up), then you’ve probably just turned self-care into another aspect of your life that you can use to beat yourself up.
Have you ever been annoyed or angry or with yourself for one of the following things…
Skipping your journaling, meditation, or any other self-care activity for one or more days
Not sticking diligently to your morning routine, workout plan, nutrition goals, etc.
Continuously practicing whatever self-care habit you’ve chosen for yourself but feeling that no matter how consistent you are, you’re not seeing your desired results
Witnessing yourself slip back into old thought or behavior patterns
Becoming triggered by something, even though you’ve worked through the trigger and rationally understand what particular trauma has led you to behave in that way
Judging yourself in any of these ways (or many other ways!) is so incredibly common that we thought, for this article, we would share a bunch of different reasons why it’s more than okay to take a break or fall off the bandwagon when it comes to your own self-care and personal healing journey.
1. The goal of personal development isn’t perfection (nor is it constant happiness)
One of the biggest risks of falling down the rabbit hole of personal development (which is rarely ever talked about!) is that we’re often subconsciously led to believe that if we only work on ourselves that much harder, we’ll finally reach that level of enlightenment where all of our problems disappear, we’re constantly happy and nothing bad can ever happen to us ever again.
We somehow get it into our minds that if we just force ourselves to do the work without ever slipping up and we’re really strict about it, eventually we will reach that blissful state of happiness where everything is sunshine and roses. And consequently, every time we take a break or skip practicing our self-care habits consistently, the automatic assumption is that we’re going to slow down and get further away from reaching that hoped-for paradise.
The harsh reality of that is of course that the idea that we will ever reach any such state is an illusion. Social media plays a huge part in portraying this image of eternal happiness and perfection to us, but in reality, life is not like that and it will never be, regardless of how hard we try to make it so. If you think about it, nature itself isn’t designed to be perfect, nor will it ever be. So why would you have any other expectation for your own life?
Ultimately, the goal of any personal healing journey shouldn’t be to become a perfect, flawless human being who has no problems, makes no mistakes and is consistently happy. The goal should be to embrace yourself in your truest forms - that includes your strengths, virtues and all the happy moments but also your weaknesses, mistakes and those moments that you feel nothing but despair.
Only when you learn to embrace both the natural ebb and flow between good and the bad as a natural part of human life, can you actually rise above the constant rollercoaster of emotions and find a different kind of peace. A peace that doesn’t erase the ups and downs but rather complements them in a way that makes everything feel more profound and meaningful.
2. Your personal healing progress isn’t linear
Another important thing to remember is that the healing process isn’t a linear one.
When it comes to most things in life, we expect that an outcome always lies in proportion to the amount of effort we put in. The more we go to the gym to lift weights, the stronger we will become. The more hours we put into learning a new language, the better we will become at that language.
But when it comes to our own healing and growth, it can be a bit more complicated than that.
Sometimes, we’ll start seeing the benefits of our healing work but then come to a point where we realize that what we actually need to do is completely take apart some of our current beliefs/habits//relationships/etc. in order to put them back together in a new way and that can actually make our life worse for a while.
Sometimes, we can work on a specific issue for months without seeing any results, and then out of the blue, we have a major breakthrough that we didn’t see coming.
So even though our brains like to trick us into expecting that growth is going to be something very linear and predictable, we’re here to tell you that isn’t always the case and that’s absolutely okay!
Take a deep breath, don’t put so much pressure on yourself and trust that your path will continue to lead upwards, no matter how many twists, turns and breaks you may take along the way!
2. There are benefits to the stillness and silence and you can harness them
For many of us, it will feel very natural to believe that if we want certain results, we have to be DOING something. “No pain, no gain” is a mentality that is all too common these days. But what if we told you that there are actually benefits and rewards that you can reap from pausing and doing absolutely nothing for once?
When we’re constantly working on something, be that our mindfulness, meditation, journaling, etc. what often happens is that we become so used to the activity that we start to do it without thinking, like we were on auto-pilot. After a certain amount of time, once we’ve been repeating a specific habit over and over again, it might slowly start to lose some of its effect on us.
So for many of us, taking a break from our daily habits and activities can actually allow us to take a step back and reassess why we’re doing said activities in the first place. Are these behaviors still aligned with our current goals and beliefs or are we just dragging them along for the sake of it? Is the fact that we’re having a difficult time sticking to our old routine a sign that we’ve outgrown this particular habit and it no longer serves us?
Maybe there is a new habit or activity out there that will help us on this new part of our self-care journey but we’ll only ever find out if we give ourselves enough room to take a break from our current routine. Or maybe simply by allowing ourselves to step away from a certain habit for a while, we will remember why we were doing it in the first place and then we’ll be able to return to the practice with a renewed sense of meaning and motivation.
Regardless of which of these scenarios might play out in your life, one of the most useful lessons to learn on this journey is that stillness and silence aren’t something that you should be afraid of or run from. They present a unique opportunity to slow down, check in with yourself and become aware of your personal needs at this very moment and an opportunity to learn how to serve yourself in the best way possible.
3. Personal healing isn’t school. You get to make up your own rules for yourself.
In today’s day and age, most of us have grown up in an environment where we are constantly praised for doing the right thing or condemned for doing the wrong thing. We spent the vast majority of our childhood, teenage years and young adulthood going through school and university where we are constantly put into boxes of good and bad, pass and fail.
Either we do things the right way, or our grades will reflect our “mistakes”. Most of us have spent our entire lives being assessed against some external standard, constantly trying to see how we measure up.
If we think about how deeply this kind of environment shapes our understanding of the world as children, it isn’t particularly surprising that most of us would be programmed to approach personal healing and self-care as if there was a right or wrong way to do it and we needed to follow some random set of rules so that we could “pass”.
But the reality is that your personal healing journey is YOUR path and nobody else's. There are no grades in self-care and nobody is ever going to come check to see if you’re doing it right. Instead, you are both the teacher and the student at the same time which means that you can adopt whatever set of rules you want and then act them out to see whether or not they serve you.
When we get upset or frustrated with ourselves because we feel like we’re not doing a good enough job, we’re falling off the bandwagon too many times or not seeing the results that we were hoping for, what could be happening is that we are judging ourselves against some external standard that we think we should be achieving instead of listening to ourselves to see what would best serves us in this moment.
And considering how hectic, distressing and overwhelming life can be these days, we’re gonna take a bet and say that sometimes the thing that would serve all of us best is just to slow down and take a break. So girl, this is your official reminder to finally take one.
Want more support like this in the future? Join us in The Self Care Space!
Regardless of where you are on your self care journey, we’ve made it our mission to support you through all of its ups and downs. Our membership is filled with self-guided courses, journal prompts and lessons on self-love, healthy relationships, breaking free from the past and managing a healthy mindset. We have countless guided meditations, healing visualizations as well as weekly live workshops and coaching sessions.
If you want to know more or are interested in signing up , you can find out all the relevant information here.
Whichever route you choose for your personal healing journey, we just want you to know we are proud of you for showing up for yourself in the first place!
xoxo,
The Self Care Space
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