I didn't see the exact self-care post you were mentioning, but I do know that sometimes I use self-care as a way to avoid what's making me anxious, and that's no good as an effective coping strategy because it just makes things worse if I do avoid. For myself it's hard to know when it's okay to take a break and when it's not. I tend to procrastinate a lot. Honestly, I have no idea where I'm going with this ask, but it's nice to put it into words.
Hey, thanks for taking the time and effort to drop this in my askbox! I appreciate it a lot.
I think the concern with the original post - which I frankly don't have the energy to go and dig up - was that those fluffy self-care routines that most of us use to relax and take a time out from our problems every now and then might become all we ever do, and really, I don't blame you if you end up practicing avoidance every now and then.
I do it too, and sometimes it is difficult to know when it's alright to take a break and when it's not. For example, yesterday I really should have taken a break instead of going to the gym, but I didn't, and now I feel like shit emotionally and physically. I made a mistake because I don't know enough about self-care to know when to apply it properly, and it sounds like you and I might have the same problem, but from the other side of the fence.
Let me be clear: Neither side of this problem is "better" than the other. I did not "do better" than you yesterday because I forced myself out of bed three times to go to the gym, because I am now paying for it in multitudes, as I historically always have done whenever I've forced myself to keep doing things when I should have been taking a break. This is a terrible habit that resulted in my having an enormous mental breakdown a few years ago, which cost me my job and my ability to keep pretending I was well enough to work.
I suppose the question you need to ask yourself is whether you're managing to be balanced or not. If you spend all day every day feeling like the worst kind of garbage even though you're technically getting things done, as was (and usually still is) my problem, then you probably need to apply self-care more often! However, on the other hand, if you're coasting along alright but you're not actually getting things done when you reasonably should, because you're too busy staying wrapped up in your warm and fuzzy self-care routines and don't actually do anything else, then you might want to consider putting the self-care aside to a degree so that you have time to handle at least some of your business yourself.
Balance is important! Finding the balance, though, takes some considerable honesty and self-examination. No one expects you to function exactly as well as a person without any mental health concerns, because that's not reasonable or realistic, but at the same time, you want to make sure that you're doing what you can, when you can.
Be cool to yourselves, folks.
