Hello, Brains! As somebody with ADHD I have always struggled with self-care and when I became a mom it got so much harder. But it was also so much more critical, which meant I had to figure it out.
[Music] Over the last year of being a new mom, I realized how much I had believed or internalized about self-care that just wasn't true. I learned some important lessons about what actually is true about self care and how to do it, and I wanted to share that with you. In this video, I want to talk about five lies that I believed about self-care as somebody with ADHD and how I learned the truth.
While I learned this stuff when I became a mom, a lot of it would have applied to me before; it just took a major life shift for me to realize it, and a lot of what I learned came out of unlearning some of the lies that I had believed about self-care before. So without further ado, one: "I'm too busy to practice self-care. " I believed this because historically it has been true.
As somebody with ADHD there have been a lot of times where I had to put my needs on hold. I definitely didn't have time for self care because I had to get something done. I had to turn in a project, I had to be there for a friend.
Sometimes it's what had to happen. I needed to keep my job, or it was worth it to me. It was important to me to, I don't know, write a New York Times bestseller and so I pulled a 16-hour day one day trying to get that chapter rewritten to to be as good as I knew that it could be.
And was that ideal? No, but like, was it worth it? Yeah.
. . So I kind of had this message reinforced, right?
That if I'm busy, that like, self-care isn't a thing And there's even this sense of pride in some circles of like, "sleep is for the weak," right? Like, I don't need to take care of myself. When the baby was almost here I sat down with my partner and we were talking about all the things that we needed to do and how intense this was going to be and we were trying to figure out how to manage everything and I asked him like, "Okay, cool, like.
. . how are you going to make sure that you still get the down time you need?
" and he joked, "Self care? I don't get to do that anymore. " And I looked at him and I was like.
. . there was something about the finality of that that just made it clearly ridiculous, right?
Like, we're about to be putting out a lot more energy. . .
we're going to be taking care of this tiny human. You're not going to [re]charge yourself at all anymore? Like, that, to me was like the equivalent of "I am about to take on this new job where I'm going to need to use my phone all the time, so I don't get to charge it anymore.
" The math doesn't math there. Like, you're going to use it more but charge it less? Like.
. . "it's gonna die!
like, what do you think is going to happen here? " We might not have as much time for it; we might not be able to practice self-care exactly in the moments when we realize we need it, but because of that, the truth behind this is. .
. the more we're asking of ourselves, the more we need to strategize our self-care. Because there might be times when we're using our.
. . us.
. . and we can't recharge it, we need to be recharging when we can.
Routine self-care becomes a lot more important. Building that into our everyday so that we don't get to the point where it's an emergency and we have to step away, because we won't always be able to. And also, thinking about what is the equivalent of like a super fast charger.
For me that is getting a massage. I went to school for massage therapy and I I once learned that getting a 60-minute massage is the equivalent of a two-day vacation in terms of stress relief. Maybe not for everybody, definitely for me.
So for me that's getting a massage. and for my partner that's spending time alone. Like, completely alone so that he doesn't have to run do-what-people-expect.
exe in the background all of the time and because that was going to be the most effective for us in terms of getting rest and recharging, we built that into our routines. Every time I get a massage I schedule the next one and we moved his desk and the computer into the guest room instead of in the main area where everybody's constantly walking by so that when he has time to play games or even when he's working on a report or something, he also naturally gets time alone. Usually.
Sometimes I'm reading him scripts. Or filming him taking his alone time. "Babe, how are you enjoying your alone time?
" "I'll let you know when I have it. " Okay we're leaving mhm bye bye love you love you. Two: "I can practice self-care as long as everyone/ everything else is taken care of.
" Why did I believe this? I don't know, uh. .
. the way that I was socialized? I am an oldest child, I have younger siblings that I uh would always take care of.
. . I was in the food service industry, I did a lot of waiting tables and that's just kind of how it was.
Like, you made sure that everybody else was taken care of and then you could go in the back and like shove a bite of a baked potato into your mouth. Like you made sure that everybody else was okay first and then you took care of this did not work as a new mom because there's this constant need to take care of this baby there were so many times where I was like the baby needed to be napping on me but also like I'm not supposed to uh fall asleep like while she's napping so like I'm I'm there exhausted like holding this napping baby and also like trapped I can't get up I can't go eat anything it was so hard to take care of myself just period but like it felt like there was this NeverEnding thing like as soon as my baby was through her cycle like she needed to start the next one I got to the point where I was starving and exhausted and a little bit Manic from the lack of sleep and it was a new mom that came to me and said you don't have to do it this way like you can take care of yourself while taking care of her and she showed me how to do it like it just wasn't in my vocabulary I didn't know that that was a thing I didn't know that you could take care of yourself while taking care of somebody else she's like yeah they won't they won't show you this at the hospital whatever but this is how you do a contact nap safely set up your snacks set up your water set up your entertainment and then sit down put a pillow here put a pillow here baby goes here dog goes here you're all set up and you have everything you need you're doing what you need to do to meet your baby's needs but you're also fully capable of meeting yours at the same time and I remember being really nervous and I'm like but I'm not supposed to fall asleep while the baby's like on me like and she goes what are you going to do Yeet the baby like it had just been drilled into me that you could only take care of others and then take care of yourself that just trying to do it at the same time was such a novel concept for me but but yeah that was the truth that I learned like maybe not always maybe not all of the time but even in this really critical um space where I had this important important task of caring for this tiny human you can practice self-care while caring for others so now that I learned this I use it elsewhere in my life too like at work I have a pre-work checklist where if I know that I'm going to maybe be absorbed in stuff for the day if I'm going to potentially slip into hyperfocus or be busy taking care of people answering emails whatever I will run through a checklist of like making sure that I have all of the things that I need to take care of myself while I'm doing this so that's grab water or tea set an alarm for lunch have a massager at the ready my bike I have an exercise bike that I can get some exercise while I'm working I restock my snack stash I really like Chomps and they're the sponsor of this video oh God these are good those of us with ADHD often uh forget to eat we have interoception challenges some of us uh we don't always notice that we're hungry until like we're really really hungry so I stash these everywhere I put them in my diaper bag I can eat it my baby can eat it I pack them when I travel stick them in my pocket as I'm walking down the street like you can take these with you wherever you go they don't need to be refrigerated which makes them a super easy snack to stash if you like me do not sit still these are great they're great for an on the-go lifestyle it also has 10 gram of protein and zero sugar protein is really good for ADHD brains and not having the sugar is can be really helpful as well and now they have a trial pack um with a bunch of different flavors sea salt, jalapeno, Taco seasoned beef stick um which I haven't tried that one yet I'm going to try that it tastes like tacos the original is my favorite but I think it's really cool that you can get this trial pack um because you can try a bunch of different flavors and see which one you like best if you'd like to try Chomps go to champs. com/adhd15 and enter the code adhd5 and you can get 15% off a trial pack plus free shipping we'll also put the link in the description below.
Three self-care is something I have to do by myself I don't actually know why I believe this but somewhere along the way I internalized it my best guess is as a kid you're told things like go brush your teeth, go wash your hands, go wash your face, it's all like go do this thing go take care of yourself there's also a part of me that's like well I should be able to take care of myself by myself like I'm an adult like I should be able to do this but as a new mom you really don't do a whole lot by yourself sometimes you pee with like a baby strap to you you brush your teeth with a baby there like I took baths with the baby there were so many times that I had the baby around for what is typically a solo selfcare task that I would perform and something interesting happened while it was a bit of a pain to have to take care of her while I was trying to brush my teeth I also was way more likely to do it because I had this self-care buddy now and it was kind of confusing cuz like this should objectively be harder but after a while I realized this is body doubling like body doubling is really helpful for people with ADHD it's a lot easier for us to do things when there's somebody else in the room with us and this was kind of like that and it made me realize like self-care can be social even if it is technically more work I find that I'm more likely to do it if it involves somebody else so instead of doing yoga at home I will do the extra work of getting myself to the gym for a yoga class because if you're on a mat and surrounded by other people doing yoga you're more likely to do yoga I threw a self-care party a bunch of us did face masks and stuff I do video chats to do nails together and then something that I've really been wanting to learn for a long time is learning to cook so I asked my fiance's dad if he would be willing to teach me so now I go over with the baby every Friday and learn how to cook is it more work to pack up a baby and drive over to his house and then learn how to cook there than it would be to do it at my house yeah am I more likely to do it also yes.
