Taking Care of Myself – Episode 89

When you get sick, do you try to just “keep on going”? When you are overcommitted, do you try to “do it all”? What happens when you do that? Today, I want to talk briefly about taking care of myself. In Al-Anon, we are told that we need to take care of ourselves first. What does this really mean? How does it change the way we live our lives? This week, I had an opportunity to practice self-care, because I caught a cold. I am pretty sure that this cold was my body's way of telling me that I needed to slow down a little, that I was trying to do too much in my life, and that my health was being affected by that. I took a couple days off work, although I worked some from home. The big difference was that when I needed to lie down or take a nap, I could. I was also not inflicting my sniffling and coughing, not to mention germs, on my co-workers. Because of the cold, and because of a commitment I had made for the weekend, I was not able to plan for the podcast episode that I had wanted to create this weekend. Instead, I am reflecting on how self-care has been a part of my life this week, and how I had to change my plans to take care of myself.