Today Dr Alice helps us to look again at self-care: questioning some common assumptions, and suggesting what genuinely looking after ourselves might look like. She looks at ideas including doing less, boundary-setting, kicking the dopamine cycle, mindfulness, listening to your body and managing stress. The result could certainly be ‘good enough’, more sustainable, and even increase our capacity to support those around us.

Keywords:

self-care, boundaries, outsourcing, good enough, neuroscience, family, relationships, children, pressure, commitments, multi-tasking, availability, caseload, priorities, treadmill, managing stress, coping, burnout, outsourcing, overwhelm, sustainable, standards, compassion, Pomodoro technique

1:20 Challenging the stereotype of self-care

5:09 Multi-tasking

6:00 Doing less

10:30 Setting good boundaries

11:00 Being caught in the dopamine cycle

12:32 Paying attention to what you are losing to work

13:32 Outsourcing

17:30 Lowering standards – cooking aids

19:10 Mindfulness – granting yourself permission to listen to your body

22:49 Managing stress – Pomodoro Technique

25:30 Using your calendar rather than a to do list

26:00 Good enough

27:00 Increasing capacity

29:00 Relating this to the personal injury field

Quotes:

5:45 “There is no such thing as multi-tasking.”

12:12 “The place to take a step back is not when you’re starting to feel burnt out, it’s when you are feeling great and thinking, ‘I’m just going to add a bit more’. It’s when you feel invigorated that you need to slow it down.”

16:05 “I really believe we should be trying to live lives that we don’t need to retire from.”

19:40 “We’re really good at learning to tune out our bodies and ignoring them, but actually to look after ourselves, we need to tune back in.”

21:15 “Self-care can be just doing the small things that your body needs in the moment.”

Guest: Dr Alice NIcholls, PsychWorks Associates

Presenter: Dr Shabnam Berry-Khan, Director of PsychWorks Associates

Editor: Emily Crosby Media