I have a friend who struggles a lot with mental health issues. Recently, her therapist has mandated working on her sleep health (going to bed at a reasonable time, not using screens in bed, not sleeping during the day, etc). She was sort-of-pretend complaining on a Zoom call the other day about how she was “being mean to herself” by forcing herself to skip her typical three hour afternoon nap. I think she knew inside herself that it was necessary to skip afternoon naps in order to be able to get a full night’s sleep. But she still felt like not taking a nap was “mean.”
This conversation gets at the problem of the whole “self care” movement. The definition of caring for ourselves can mean different things to different people at different times. Sometimes a nap is self-care, sometimes it’s not. If you are occasionally exhausted, allowing yourself a break for a short nap is a kind and productive thing to do. But if you chronically stay up late and have trouble sleeping and end up crashing for three hours in the afternoon, then a nap becomes something unhealthy, a bad habit to break. How do we make sense of this?
A concept that helps me to understand when I’m caring for myself versus when I’m indulging myself is the idea that we are not one person, but three people: our past self, our present self, and our future self. And each of them has a positive and negative side.
Our present self is our self of the moment. It does not want to do anything hard. It wants to avoid pain and seek pleasure. It wants to put in a minimum of effort. But it’s not all bad: the present self is also the one that experiences joy in the moment. The present self is the one that ignores the need to eat or sleep when we are in a state of flow working at a task we enjoy. But it can be hard to motivate to get started. Present self has a lot of inertia. Perhaps you could envision it as a large elephant: it better have a very good reason to start moving, but once it does get going, it can trample anything in its path.
Our past self is a sort of guru. It can help us to see what worked or didn’t work for us in the past. It helps us to learn from our mistakes and to repeat things that brought joy. But it can also be a prophet of doom: “You failed at this before, so there’s no point in trying.” “Your writing never turns out well, you might as well give up.” “Remember how your friend rejected you? Better not reach out to new people so you don’t get hurt.” We have to be careful to keep the prophet’s doom-and-gloom side in check, and focus on how the things we have learned can help us now.
Finally, our future self I envision as a highly motivated entrepreneur. Future self has infinite capacity to imagine what we could be, to create plans to get there. It helps us to get to where we want to be. The problem is that future self has a tendency to ignore how painful things are in the moment. It is busy, busy, busy. It plans to work all day and all night as if there was no such thing as burnout or new release movies. Too much listening to future self can run a person right into the ground.
The act of self care is figuring out how to get all three of these selves to show their best sides. If we’re too much in future self’s “do all the things” mode, a nap can be the best self care there is. If our present self elephant is getting its way too much, we may need to focus on being a little “mean” to ourselves for the good of our other two selves. If past self’s prophecies are getting too much attention, we can get depressed by all the things we have failed at.
The times when I feel the best about writing are when I get into that present-self state of flow and I don’t even notice the kids fighting in the background because I’m so excited about where my thoughts are leading me. But there’s an elephant-like inertia to getting started, which I have to leverage the past self’s knowledge and the future self’s motivation to get over. When I haven’t written all day and it’s 9 pm, my present self says that self care looks like grabbing a bowl of Lucky Charms and watching an episode of something mindless. It’s those times that I employ the prophet and the entrepreneur to push the elephant into movement. I remember how good it feels to have done my daily writing and have gotten thoughts out of my head and onto paper. I think about my goals for the future as a writer. And then I begin to write. Usually, I feel much better for having started and done the thing I set out to do, better than empty calories and Star Trek episodes can make me feel.
In other areas of my life, I have to listen to the elephant more. I have a very past self and future self view about exercise: I want to be back running half-marathons and doing effortless yoga in spite of chronic back pain. I can come up with long and intense plans to get myself there. If I let my future self take over, I will push myself too hard and cripple the elephant to the point that I’m stuck in bed all day in pain. Lately, I’ve been letting the elephant take the lead on exercise, letting myself go slowly and listen to my body’s sensations. In this way, I’m able to keep exercising every morning and also still able to care for myself and my kids during the day.
Which of your three selves are you relying on the most right now? Do they need to be brought more into balance? I’d love to hear from you if this metaphor helps you. Until next week, friends, keep on taking care of yourself and your dreams.
