Why It's Important to Check in With Yourself
For anyone who needs to hear this today: Your needs are important!
Okay, now that I’ve said that, let’s talk about the value of checking in with yourself to ensure that your needs are
1. being identified or acknowledged and
2. that they are getting met.
I know we’ve all heard that cliche saying about needing to put the oxygen mask on yourself before you help anyone else with theirs. And let me reiterate and validate that it’s cliche because it’s true. Sorry, not sorry.
It appears that as a culture, we tend to get very caught up in our engagement with external stimuli -- responsibilities, work, family, task completion, managing the needs of others, achieving external goals, etc. In this process we can find ourselves so focused on completing tasks or making sure everyone else is okay, that we end up neglecting our own needs and likely because we don’t even notice them or feel guilty at the thought of prioritizing them.
That being said, I’d like to introduce you to a Body Scan exercise that I often facilitate with my clients as a tool to help develop interoception, or the sense of the internal state of the body. With regular and/or consistent practice, you can strengthen your awareness of interoception so that it doesn’t require near as much time or energy and just becomes part of your awareness. You can find some videos of my facilitating guided Body Scans on my IG page @Release_CounselingWA or you can follow these simple instructions:
Sit or lie in a comfortable position in a safe place. I like to close my eyes to mitigate distraction by external stimuli
Start with some deep breaths to help ground you into the exercise and transition your attention inward
Scan from head to toe--I like to highlight specific body parts as I go (eyes, jaw, shoulders, various skeletal structures like the spine or shoulder blades, organs such as the heart and lungs, etc.)
As an additional tip, I find it helpful to visualize the areas I’m thinking about by trying to visualize the body part itself, visualize a laser beam of light scanning my body, and/or the various parts of the body lighting up as I highlight them.
As you scan, try to notice any thoughts/thought patterns (such as ruminating thoughts), somatic sensations (tingling, soreness, tightness, warmth, itching), and/or emotions (relaxation, anxiety, sadness, overwhelm, etc).
As you scan, also try to notice if any part of your body is attracting your attention and I encourage you to spend some time focusing on that area by just noticing it, breathing into it, placing a hand on it, maybe some light stretching or subtle movement…
The overall goal here is to just notice… Just notice what is going on inside you. Just notice what your body is cuing you to. Just notice what it is you need in any given moment. And once you notice, my next suggestion is to try to accommodate your own needs. For example, I sometimes have days when I have more energy than others and on the high energy days I feel more productive and enlivened when I am able to complete tasks, chores, errands, workouts, etc. And on those days where I have less energy, I need to tone it down a little by not putting so much pressure on myself to get things done or to tailor my workouts accordingly. Otherwise, I can become irritated or resentful and this can interfere with my productivity or even invite some negative thought patterns.
I was having a conversation the other day about quality over quantity: Y’all, we are humans, not robots. I know we all have our responsibilities and our plates are full, but I encourage you to pull back a little to manage your own needs consistently, even if it means ordering a pizza for dinner, cutting your workout down, or leaving those dishes in the sink until tomorrow so that you can honor your own needs for a minute and/or take it down a notch when need be.
Our bodies can be a very useful tool to living a more qualitative lifestyle.