Are We Too Busy to Properly Look After Ourselves?

It’s 9 P.M., and this is the first time all day that you haven’t been slouched over a laptop.

Your back hurts, you have a headache, you’re stressed, and you can’t remember the last time you drank a glass of water. You had a banana for lunch, and there’s still some laundry to do. You should have done it yesterday, but you were even more exhausted than you are now.

You never planned to live like this. Why would you? Nobody does. It just kind of happened.

So what you did was you canceled a gym session here, skipped lunch there, and now you’re doing everything except taking care of yourself.

And the saddest part is that it feels normal to you.

When Looking After Yourself Keeps Falling Off a List

You’re going to start exercising just as soon as this big project is done. You’ll also get more sleep once the holidays are over.

Have you ever caught yourself thinking like this? Of course, you have; everyone has.

The problem here is that people assume self-care is something you can put on hold and do when it’s more convenient.

It’s not practical for you to start drinking more water right now, but you pinky-promise you will when you have more time to think about it. If you keep thinking like that, though, nothing will ever change because life doesn’t stop.

It’s always one thing after another, and there will always be an excuse to put yourself last.

You have a deadline at work, then you have a birthday dinner for one of your friends, then you need to take your dad to the doctor, household chores all wait on you, and along with doing all that, you’re supposed to set some time for yourself.It doesn’t work unless you fight for it, and you can’t fight for it if you’re always exhausted.

So, basic habits are the first to go. You skip lunch ‘just this once’ because the meeting ran long, and you sleep 6 hours ‘just for now’ because you have one more email to send. You don’t spend any time outdoors, even though you know your mental health needs it, because screen time takes up too much of your day.

It’s not a big deal, right? That’s what you tell yourself because it doesn’t seem like a big deal at that very moment.

It’s not like you’ll keel over if you miss one lunch. It feels like something temporary, like you’re making an exception that you won’t make again. And that’s how people get trapped; all those exceptions stop being exceptions at some point and become a lifestyle.

When basic care breaks down, even those who seem perfectly fine can start to have issues. Someone’s health (even life) could be in danger because of such negligence. Your health will show it sooner or later because you won’t be able to keep this up forever.

Minor back pain will become chronic because you never exercise, a small cavity will become a root canal because you kept postponing the dental appointment, and you’ll kick yourself for neglecting your well-being for so long.

The Signs You Might Be Running on Empty

Are you burned out? How do you know?

Here are some signs that you might be running on fumes.

No Matter What You Do, You’re Always Tired

If you stayed up too late last night, it’s normal that you’re tired today. But if you’re tired all the time, even when you get 7 or 8 hours of sleep, that might be burnout. You might wake up feeling groggy, drink a coffee to get through the morning, crash in the afternoon, and then somehow feel wired right before bed.

That’s burnout.

If you keep this up, feeling drained will become normal for you, but it’s not.

You Keep Putting Off Little Health Issues

Who hasn’t had a headache here and there? That’s totally fine. What’s not fine is if you have them all the time but do nothing to address them. And you always have a reason to wait; work is crazy right now, your kid needs this or that, you’ll go to the doctor next week, blah blah blah. The problem is that ignoring small problems means you’ll deal with big ones later.

Everything Feels Like It’s Too Much

If something completely ordinary starts to feel like it’s too much to handle, it probably is because you’ve burnt out. You’ll also notice that you get irritated with stupid things that would never have bothered you before, and that you can’t concentrate on anything for more than 5 minutes.

That’s because your brain doesn’t have the energy to handle the small stuff because it’s always busy.

Conclusion

So, have we become too busy to take care of ourselves? Unfortunately, the answer is yes for way too many people.

But modern life has all but made us forget about self-care because the phones are always going off, and someone always needs something ASAP. It’s chaos, and it’s no wonder you forget to drink your water and eat lunch.

The way to combat this is the small stuff, like taking that lunch break no matter what and taking a short walk every day, regardless of how many emails you still need to answer.

No grand gestures necessary.