When our Self-Care doesn’t take care…

We artists will encounter a GREAT amount of stress; it’s just the nature of the job. And in order to have a long and healthy career, we will need to find many strategies to manage and cope with that stress. At the top of those strategies is self-care.

And for good reason! Self-care is a proven and popular recommendation for stress reduction. Feeling stressed, add in some self-care! Still stressed? Add in MORE self-care! Logically, the more self-care we do, the less stressed we should be, right? Yet more isn’t always the answer in stress reduction…   

So what is self-care?

Self-care are the things we do to meet our needs and take care of our wellbeing. All the stuff that makes us feel like us. This includes diet, exercise, sleep, nurturing friendships, family, community, connecting with nature, therapy, religious and ancestral practices, hobbies… It’s a fairly broad definition.

Which means that we get to decide individually which self-care practices work for us! We have a lot of choices and a lot of different areas of our lives to apply self-care. Unfortunately, it also means that with so many options, we may encounter decision fatigue, overwhelm, or pressure to always be optimizing our self-care.

Here’s the thing: most artists already have a lot of self-care practices. I’m talking a lot.

We meditate, go to therapy, yoga, look after our instrument, eat well, take baths…and yet we are still stressed out. We go on that vacation, book that retreat, take that break from the biz, and when we go back to work, to audition, to rehearsal, the stress comes right back too.

We may even panic if we skip or miss a part of our self-care routine. It throws us off! So we fiercely guard and protect that time; we might even stress out about catching back up. This is when self-care has stopped taking care and started adding to our stress!

So what’s going on here?

My colleague Chantal Donnelly says it perfectly in her book Settled: “If [self-care] is only providing a stress interruption rather than a stress reduction, then it’s not truly taking care of you.” What does she mean by that?

A lot of us see self-care as an escape strategy, a way to disconnect from the stress of being an artist. When we escape, we’re removing ourselves from the stress, not addressing or changing it. Which is why the stress response turns back on when we return to work!

Now look, I’m not saying that escapes don’t have value because they definitely do! Yet always treating self-care as an escape might be why adding more isn’t working for us. If we really want self-care to take care of us, then we’ve got to use it to reduce our stress, not just interrupt it. And the way we do that is through regulation.

What is regulation?

This is a little bit of nervous system speak, so bear with me. When we encounter a stressor (perceived or real, internal or external), our nervous system automatically activates our stress responses. These stress responses take us away from our baseline so that we can protect ourselves and respond to the stressor.

Regulation is the process of managing or coping with our stress responses. It is things we do to come home to ourselves during times of stress. More than self-control, regulation is the skill of reconnecting in the moment when stress disconnects us. This reconnection can be to ourselves, our bodies, our environment, or even to our community.

Reminder: this process of disconnect and reconnect is exactly how our nervous system is built to work. It’s normal to have stress responses and we don’t always need to regulate them away.

When we learn how to regulate, we grow our capacity for ease and challenge, including how we perceive and respond to stress. We build this skill through integrating tools and strategies that turn down or turn off our stress responses. These include breath work, exercise, closure practices for stepping out of character, calling a loved one, cognitive reframes, and… self-care practices!

So what do we do now?

First step is to assess where we’re at. What are the self-care practices we already use? When do use them? What are the cues that they are regulating us, that they are lowering our stress responses? How much are they lowering our stress responses?

This will give us great info about when we are regulating, when we are escaping, when it’s both, and how we might do things differently. Just to reiterate, escaping or removing ourselves and taking time to recover is a valid strategy. It’s just not the only strategy we want to use.

Next, count the small shifts just as much as the big. A lot of us only count a practice as working if it completely and totally turns off our stress responses. Which sometimes they will! Yet we don’t need to fully return to baseline every time we’re in a stressful situation. Regulation is about reconnecting, even just a small shift.

This might mean the difference between freezing up or keeping a sense of ourselves at that big stressful audition. We don’t need to be fully calm to do our best work. And when we’re able to value those small shifts, we can better learn how the practice is helping us over all.

Same with self-care. We don’t need self-care to be a transcendental experience each and every time we practice it. We’re not failing at self-care if it only works a little bit or if it worked great the last time but not now. Let’s take that pressure off our practices and off ourselves!

Lastly, let’s keep in mind when we are practicing. If we only practice when we are super stressed out, then we run the risk of treating regulation or self-care as aftercare. I think of it like only practicing turns at high stakes dance calls. It’s much harder to learn turns (and land them every time) if we don’t also practice at home, in class, or other low stakes environments.

Plus practicing when we feel good has its perks! Self-care practices are great at taking care of our overall well-being, which can lower our baseline and keep it low! Same with regulation, regulating when we feel good or not as stressed can widen our capacity.

Practicing when our stress isn’t as high, helps us prepare for when we do encounter high stress. And we artists will definitely need that prep! Cause stress is a part of the job.

Special thanks to Chantal Donnelly for so beautifully articulating this and so much more in her book Settled: How to Find Calm in a Stress-Inducing World.