How to take care of yourself
And how I learned to love flossing my teeth
I now schedule my entire life around flossing.
I have to clean my teeth three or four times a day. It takes 14 minutes any time I want to eat. I didn’t expect this to be how I would spend my Summer, or the next year of my life.
But here we are.
Last Monday I got Spark Aligners, which are like Invisalign, but the brand my orthodontist carries. As far as mid-life crisis purchases go, this felt better than buying a convertible or selling my house and moving to Nova Scotia. Fixing my teeth is something I’ve wanted to do for myself for a long time, and in a surprise to no one, it is something I’ve put it off because I am not good at doing things that are for me.
Last week I wrote about how to take care of your people, which is something I’m very good at. This week I am writing about how to take care of yourself – something I’m learning how to be better at.
There are many lies we tell ourselves about our mental health, and the terrible ways social conditioning makes the act of self care seem like woo-woo bullshit for 14 year old girls. But self care is real, it’s important, and someone I care about asked me to share what I’ve learned – so I’m summarizing it here.
Emotional endurance
On a recent Peloton ride, Christine D’Ercole said “we are training for physical endurance, but we are also training for emotional endurance. As you drop your shoulders, drop your baggage.”
I find the idea of emotional endurance very powerful, because I think I have physical and mental endurance, but I am still working on my emotional endurance. With running, physical endurance takes training – it requires gradually increasing the work and includes rest. But with emotional endurance we just expect ourselves to… have it?
Emotional endurance is a skill. It takes practice and work to develop. It’s something you can train yourself for, the same way you can learn to run a marathon.
Emotional endurance, or self care, aren’t solutions to your problems. But self care will help you remove the roadblocks in your mind and your body that stop you from solving those problems.
Without self care everything is harder than it needs to be.
Start with your relationship with yourself
Your relationship with yourself is your most important relationship in your life. Without it, all of your other relationships (including the one you just lied to yourself and said is more important) will suffer.
Think about how you would respond if a friend told you they were in this kind of relationship:
They’re constantly pressuring you to do more, to be better
When you try to relax, they shame you
They’re constantly comparing you to their family, friends, and neighbours
When you make the smallest mistake they berate you
They can’t let anything go, reminding you about mistakes you made ages ago
They can’t ever tell you what they need
They make up excuses to stop you from doing things you want to do
And they never want to make plans with just you, other people always have to be around
You would probably tell your friend it’s a very unhealthy relationship, that no one deserves to be treated that way. But many people, including me, have relationships like this with themselves. The good news is that you can change your relationship with yourself, since you are the person treating you poorly.
This is a choice you need to make. It is work you need to do. It won’t happen by accident.
As the mug says, believe in your fucking self. Believe you are enough and that you are worthy of love – then treat yourself like that’s true. You don’t have to tell anyone else. It’s between you and you.
Thinking about thinking
I resisted mindfulness work for a long time. Sometimes it comes across as a very woo woo spiritual practice. If you’re not used to this kind of work, phrases like “set your intention” sounds like you’re being pretentious. It just means “choose to think about something specific instead of attaching meaning to whatever chaos your brain decides to throw at you today.”
Mindfulness, for me, is learning to recognize that you are in control of how you respond to your thoughts and feelings. It’s how you think about thinking.
There’s a quote I always see on the internet – I can’t figure out who originally wrote it. “Your first thought shows how you’ve been conditioned, your second thought shows your character.”
You can’t change your thoughts, they just happen. But you can choose which thoughts you hold onto. And you can choose to reframe your first thought for your second (or third, or fourth) thought.
The thoughts you hold onto shape the rest of your thinking. As Elsa says, “let it go…”
“I can’t afford to be broken”
A lot of people are conditioned to bottle up their own needs and vulnerabilities. I did this for a long time – there’s this illusion of emotional stability from stoicism, but without being able to really live a full life or regulate your own emotions. I used to spend so much time being attuned to the needs of everyone else that I completely lost myself. It can work for a time, but eventually it leads to sabotaging relationships, acting out, and burnout.
This is really prevalent in men, who society has conditioned need to be unfeeling providers who can never fail and never share any emotion past anger. There’s this TikTok meme about weight lifting that I think makes the point really well (again, I can’t find the original – remix culture is weird.)
“What do we do with our feelings?”
“We put them in our muscles!”
“What do we do when we have bigger feelings?”
“We make bigger muscles!”
Often I wouldn’t share my feelings, like “I feel hurt because you forgot about our plans” because advocating for my own needs would cause someone else to be hurt. “Well he just has so much else going on, why add my hurt to his plate?” I used to shove it down and grow resentful. I don’t do that anymore.
For me the solution is to accept my feelings are valid. Maybe I need to share them, sometimes I don’t. But I do need to feel them. My friend Kelly’s solution to this is scheduled Saturday morning crying. If you’ve seen Shrinking (you should watch it, it’s great) you’ll see this in action.
Learn to name what your needs are and advocate for yourself
It took me a long time to figure out what my needs are. I know my needs aren’t being met when I become overcome by anxiety. In the past I would let the anxiety spiral, but now I go for a walk or journal and that helps me figure out what need isn’t being met.
If you are having trouble naming what your needs are, it’s often because you’ve been conditioned since childhood to shove your own needs down and attend to everyone else’s first. If you’re like me, it feels selfish to have any needs at all.
Naming your needs is important, because once you know what they are you can start taking action to help them be met (or recognize they can’t be right now):
“I need a day free of everyone else’s obligations.”
“I need a break from communicating about hard things.”
“I need a day where I am not responsible for everyone else.”
“I need to be taken care of.”
“I need to see what I’m capable of doing on my own before I accept help.”
“I need more communication than is happening.”
You still might not be able to get your needs met – but you can create a plan. You can get ahead of the problem next time by being proactive. Rarely will you find someone who will know your needs telepathically and advocate for you.
You have to learn to advocate for yourself.
Most people want to help you meet your needs, but you need to help them help you.
Remember that no decision is a decision
Back in my tech days, I sold software that helped managers coach sales teams. One thing we found again and again is that sales people hold onto deals for way too long. The client can’t make a decision, but they keep the opportunity open – sometimes for years! This distracts them from finding new sales opportunities that they could win.
These sales people wouldn’t accept that no decision is a decision.
The same is true for plans and relationships. I always used to get stuck in making decisions. To me, decisions were always saying yes to something – going out with friends, going for a run, cleaning the house. Instead I would say (or do) nothing, which is basically the same as saying no, but with more agony.
Now I reframe this for myself. Agonizing for the whole day on if I should go running is really me deciding I don’t want to run. But I don’t want to admit that to myself, I don’t want to be accountable to that decision, or the consequence of it. So I waste the day until I can blame something else. “It’s too dark now.” “I just ate and I’ll get a cramp.”
Remember that “No.” is a complete sentence. I don’t need a reason to say no. I just need to say no and accept the consequence of that, which in the case of running is not meeting my fitness goals, or choosing to focus on rest and recovery.
The consequence is the same whether I say no, or lie to myself that I’ll go in 15 minutes for an entire day. Saying no has less agony, and I still have the right to change my mind later!
Accept uncertainty
Uncertainty is the primary driver of stress and anxiety for me. Your anxiety might vary. What I’ve found in my own behaviour is that when uncertainty hits a threshold, my anxiety takes over and I try to force a resolution – create certainty – to alleviate my anxiety.
I’ve been practicing accepting the unknown is unknowable, and creating space for uncertainty to reveal itself, which is a fancy way of saying I’m not taking any action. Allowing this space often leads to better outcomes. Here’s hoping.
When something is uncomfortable it means you’re growing
I’m going to quote Peloton a lot, because I think their coaching style brings in a lot of therapy and mindfulness language that’s very helpful to hear on a daily basis.
Recently I was doing a class by Emma Lovewell who said “Learn the difference between discomfort pain and injury pain. You can push through discomfort pain when you know what it is.”
Writing this newsletter and making YouTube videos has made me uncomfortable every week. I’m putting myself out into the world in very new ways. Writing this post is making me uncomfortable! The volume of sexual innuendo in my beet salad video made me uncomfortable! Writing a poem about mushrooms and reading it out loud was so uncomfortable! Writing about my mom dying was uncomfortable.
But the work that makes me most uncomfortable is often my best work. Pushing through the discomfort is helping me grow as a writer and a human. If I stopped because it was uncomfortable I never would have written any of these pieces.
I’ve started learning (and I’m still learning) that most of this discomfort is growth. Very little of it is because I’m making a mistake.
The biggest personal learning I’ve had this year – here and in relationships – is that the more me that I am, the more people like me. It’s wild. Who would have ever thought that people would like me more for being an emotional, funny weirdo instead of a generic handsome white man? (The answer is literally everyone, except when you’re evaluating yourself.)
Remember that both things can be true
Black-and-white thinking is a trap. It’s the kind of thing that divides societies and ourselves. “I didn’t meet my own irrational expectations of myself, therefore I am a piece of shit.”
Often this leads people to thinking they (or their work) need to be perfect – which really stops any progress from being made. For example, I am very stuck in my video editing process. I know that I am capable of filming and publishing one video a week – I did that when I was working full time in tech and doing YouTube at the same time! I have the time, the knowledge, the skills. I even have the videos filmed!
But I’m editing video of myself performing, a video that I filmed, a script that I wrote, and a recipe that I made. All the mistakes are my own. I see them and want to redo the video. Yes, I made mistakes, but I also made delightful jokes, filmed beautiful shots, and made delicious recipes. I get so hung up on making a “perfect” video that I lose sight of a simple fact: a “good enough” video is better than no video. It’s a standard I hold myself accountable to, but not other YouTubers – I watch shitty YouTube videos all the time! I love them.
I struggle with this one a lot still and it’s the biggest thing holding me back in this new career of mine.
So I’ve been practicing believing that both things can be true:
I can be behind in my own expectations for my work and I still need to take it easy to give myself time to rest.
I can see where a video could have been better and it still has value to my audience to publish it anyway.
I can love someone and not want to be with them (until things change).
I can need to lose weight for my long-term health and still be beautiful and worthy of love at any size.
I can text my friend Larysa “FUCK BICYCLE CRUNCHES” and still do bicycle crunches every day.
I can make a very serious point about body positivity and still make a joke about bicycle crunches!
Seriously, fuck bicycle crunches.
“The hardest part of running is putting on your shoes”
I’ve done a lot of long distance running in my life, and one of the quotes that’s always stuck with me is “the hardest part of running is putting on your shoes.” Deciding to run is the hard part. Once you’re out on the road, running is just putting one foot in front of the other for various lengths of time.
So if knowing is half the battle, doing the work is the second half. These are all techniques I use to various degrees when I start feeling overwhelmed, when I don’t know why I’m feeling stuck, or I don’t know what my needs are.
Another quote I love is “why suffer twice?” If you have to do something uncomfortable, you can spend the day agonizing about it and then do it, or you can… just do it. It’s one of the best brand taglines in history for a reason.
Why prolong your own suffering when you could be happy instead?
Journal
I feel journalling is intimidating for a lot of reasons, not the least of which is that it can make you feel like a 14 year old girl. But 14 year old girls, like you and me, have a lot of big feelings. But at least the 14 year old girls are doing something with their feelings.
What stopped me from journaling before is overthinking:
What if my words are bad?
How do I stop re-writing my sentences in real-time?
What if someone reads it?
What if I hate what I write?
What if writing it down makes it real in my mind and I don’t want to face reality because its so much more fun to lie to myself?
What if I change my mind later?
There’s a journaling technique that changed this for me.
Get a blank sheet of paper and pen. Set a timer for 15 minutes. Start writing, and you have to write the entire time. You can’t cross anything out. If you make a mistake you just keep writing. You follow wherever your mind takes you without judgment. Thoughts flow through you to the paper.
At the end of the 15 minutes you burn the piece of paper. You don’t read it. No one will ever see it again, including you!
I like this technique a lot and I do this very often. I don’t like permanent journals. My friend Janice, bless her heart, loves doing 5-year journals where you can reflect on where your thoughts were on the same day from previous years. She’s been doing this for 15 years now? I can’t do that yet, it makes me too uncomfortable to see myself as I used to be (mostly I don’t enjoy confronting how many lies I tell myself.)
Writing is another form of thinking, that like meditation focuses your attention on something specific – helping you shape which thoughts you hold onto. Often when l feel stressed about a specific situation, I just start writing.
Writing, for me, helps reveal the second thought.
Treat yourself how you would treat a friend in the same situation
If you’re like me, it’s a lot easier to take care of other people than to take care of yourself. But when the plane is going down, you’re supposed to put your mask on first – if you pass out you can’t save anyone. This is true for all of life.
You cannot take care of others if you aren’t taking care of yourself. And you can care for them better if you are doing well.
Talk to yourself and other people
Self talk: Self talk is the way you talk to yourself in your head. It can be insidious and sneaky. There’s very obvious examples that I shared above. It’s something you can work on – remember that you’re in a relationship with yourself!
When you learn that you can redirect your thoughts, you’ll start to have more control over your emotions.
Stop should-ing yourself: One of my favourite sayings my therapist taught me is “stop should-ing yourself.” (Say it out loud please.)
I “should” be outside because it’s Summer and the weather is great – except the sun makes me tired and I want to play Pikmin. I “should” have a real job – except I hated having a real job.
“Should” is what society has conditioned you to believe to be true. Learn to identify what your own needs are.
Ask for help: I had a dinner party scheduled for the day after I did something very hard. I was emotionally spent and needed respite. Instead of trying to pull off the dinner party alone, I spent the day sad and playing Zelda (it was also launch day). When my friends showed up I had most of the food done – but I still hadn’t set the table, made the salad, or finished shaping pasta.
I gave everyone a job and it turned out to be really fun. In the weeks since, I’ve been really trying to practice asking my friends for help.
I also stopped apologizing for needing help and started thanking them. This is a profound change in self-talk and how people helping feel.
“Sorry I’m behind schedule.” “Sorry the house is a mess.” “Sorry I’m complaining so much.”
“Thank you saving dinner!” “Thank you for helping me clean!” “Thank you for listening to me.”
It’s no longer about you being bad, it’s about the people helping you being good.
Make plans
Initiate plans: Making friends and keeping friends as an adult is a lot of work. Everyone is busy, especially if your friends are mostly Responsible Adults. When you’re younger, plans just happen. As an adult, you have to make things happen.
I’ve been really focused here, initiating plans with friends every week – whether it’s coffee, a run, going to the market, or coming over for dinner. Sometimes I find errands are the easiest way to see a friend who’s very busy. Who doesn’t love going to Costco? (The answer is Kelly, but Kelly also always wants to go to Costco despite hating Costco. Both things can be true.)
Cook for yourself: I’m not a weekly meal prep person – I don’t want to eat the same thing every day for 5 days. What I realized when cooking food for Brett and Jules was that I could be making freezer meals for myself. I mean, I would probably use less cheese when cooking for myself. But having 2 dozen egg bites in the freezer and a few jars of granola means you’re never far away from a high protein, tasty meal.
Take yourself on a date: I tend to get stuck when it comes to doing stuff by myself. Whether it’s going to the movies, or a restaurant, I always think I’ll have more fun with someone else. And that’s arguably true. But going to the movies alone is more fun than sitting on my couch alone doomscrolling. And I always feel better afterwards.
Lorde has a great lyric that I find motivating here “And now I care for myself the way I used to care about you.” Though if you can care about yourself and someone else at the same time that would be ideal.
Create your own milestones: Time has no meaning anymore and hasn’t since COVID lockdowns. I don’t know when time will have meaning again. To create meaning, create milestones – big or small. It could be coffee with a friend, it could a dinner party, it could be a trip, it could be anything.
You don’t need a reason to make a milestone. You can make one any time for any reason. I find them very helpful and motivating.
Clean
Take a bath: Baths are sometimes mocked as self care, as if soaking in hot, bubbling, scented water is going to make all your problems go away. A bath will not fix your problems. But a bath does trick your body and mind – the warm and heat acts close to a hug in terms of brain chemistry. The quiet time away from obligations helps your mind rest.
Clean yourself up: Maybe your hair is crazy, maybe your beard is unkempt, maybe you didn’t iron your shirt, maybe I’m describing myself this morning in the third person? I don’t know. I do know that I immediately feel better about myself when I trim my beard, style my hair, and iron my shirt. Even if I have nowhere to go.
Empty your fridge: Nothing makes me sadder and less likely to cook than when I need to confront the sad spinach at the back of my fridge, that I bought when I had great intentions on turning my life around. I was going to eat spinach every day! I was going to wake up at 5:30 and exercise! I was going to be the man I was meant to be!
And since none of those things happened the spinach has more meaning that just being rotten spinach. But looking at it (or smelling it) every time I open the fridge just means I’m going to suffer even more.
Forgive yourself, thank the spinach for its service as inspiration for a better life, and then maybe buy less spinach next time.
Clean your space: I love being in a clean space, but I do hate cleaning. However, a clean space does two things. First, it stops you from should-ing yourself or self shaming (“I should be cleaning, this place is a sty, I guess I’ll just eat more Cheetos and be sad.”) and second it acts as a point of inspiration. A clean counter invites you to cook, a clean living room invites you have friends over.
Usually I trick myself into cleaning by putting on a 10-minute podcast (I like The Indicator from Planet Money) and saying I’ll clean until it’s over. Inevitably, once I start cleaning I just carry on until its done. This is one of the helpful lies I tell myself.
If your space is a big mess, do 10 minutes every day. Set a timer, stop after 10 minutes. It adds up and you’ll make a big difference over time. This line is in here specifically for my nieces to read. Yes, Amelie, both of you. No, I don’t care if Emma made the mess. Go clean before I come over with a broom and a garbage bag.
Move your body
I went through a fight-or-flight period of high anxiety for around a month earlier this year. Every time that feeling of overwhelming anxiety crept up I found the solution was to move my body.
Walk: I made a deal with myself to go for a walk every single day, for at least 45 minutes. I have now done this for 117 days in an row according to my Apple Watch!
I walk rain or shine. When I’m feeling impulsive, like wanting to send a text I know I shouldn’t, I go for a walk instead. I always feel better and I don’t end up sending the text.
During this time, my therapist said “Well, at least you’re not spending 10 hours on the couch eating Cheetos” to which I replied “well, I’m not eating Cheetos anyway…” (This was before I went on a snacking strike.)
When I notice I’ve spent too much time being sad on the couch I go for a walk.
Runners know that 40-minutes is a bit of a magic threshold for cardio – the “runner’s high.” I can’t explain the science of it, but what I can say is that at the end of every walk or run I always feel better.
It has not failed me yet.
Breathe: I’ve been doing Crush Your Core with Emma Lovewell on Peloton, it’s been really great – the classes are too short for you to realize you should be complaining, but so intense that you will message your version of Larysa to say “FUCK BICYCLE CRUNCHES!” after every class.
What’s struck me most is the plank holds: you escalate from 30 seconds to 45 seconds to 60 seconds, then to two 60 second plank holds. Time loses all meaning in a plank. The only way to survive a plank is to change your focus from your pain to your breath. If I think about my abs I will fall, but if I think about my breath I will stay up.
Breathing is a way to shape your thoughts.
There are many great breathing techniques to try.
Box breathing is something you can do anywhere, anytime. You change your breath to change your nervous system response. Breathe in for 5 seconds, hold for 5, exhale for 5, hold for 5 – those are the 4 sides of the box. Do that 5 times. You will feel changed.
Meditation is breathing: Meditation often has you focus on your breath because you have to breathe. You can become aware of it. You can control it. You can use it to change your mood. You can use it to change your mind. And you can use this as proof that you can control the thoughts you choose to let go and the thoughts you choose to hold onto.
Yoga is breathing and moving: Many yoga practices have integrated breathwork (pranayama) which can be therapeutic and soothing.
Guided breathing: Somatic breathing is a type of guided breathwork that can be integrated with therapy.
Talk to a therapist
I’ve been going to therapy since 2019. I did not want to go to therapy, but I was leaving an abusive relationship with an alcoholic and recognized I needed a lot of help. If I’m being honest, I went out of spite – believing that he needed therapy, and I was going to prove how easy it was by demonstrating it. Spite is a great a motivator.
What I didn’t expect was that therapy would change my life, my relationships, and my mental health. And now I wish I had gone sooner. It’s a critical part of building mental health, mental endurance, and emotional endurance.
Therapy is very expensive and it can be difficult to find the right therapist for you. I see a registered psychotherapist and I found there is a very large difference from when I saw a counselor. Your Googling may vary.
Emotional Eating
Allegedly this newsletter is about food – so I do have a recipe for you. I think that eventually I’m going to compile these essays and recipes into a larger cookbook called Emotional Eating, as I think that’s the consistent theme of what I’m writing about. Cooking for joy, cooking sadness, for overwhelm, for celebration.
This week, what’s on my mind is that I want to eat a cookie… but I don’t want to take out my aligners, remove orthodontic wax, and remove elastics… and then brush my teeth, floss, rinse with mouthwash, brush my aligners, put my aligners back in, use a “chewie” to make sure they are seated correctly, put new elastics in, put new ortho wax in, and clean my bathroom sink.
Just for a snack.
It’s so much work. It’s more annoying than being hungry.
I posted on Instagram last night that I will only take my aligners out for strawberries that are red all the way through. It’s strawberry season right now.
So here’s my favourite thing to do with them.
Strawberries worth taking your teeth out for
Macerating strawberries is a great way to amp up their flavour, increase how juicy they taste, and make them easy to add to basically anything. These sliced strawberries will keep in the fridge for up to 5 days.
There’s a small amount of sugar added – sugar is osmotic, so it will pull the water out of the strawberries and form a glaze on the outside – so don’t skip it.
You could use lemon juice, but I like orange juice here. Use a grapefruit. Go crazy and use a lime! There’s no black-and-white thinking when it comes to citrus.
Optionally, and for a completely different flavour, you can add vanilla, basil, and balsamic. These flavours are incredible with strawberries. Try this on vanilla ice cream.
Ingredients
1 pint of strawberries, red all the way through
1 tsp sugar
1 tbsp fresh squeezed orange juice
Pinch of salt
1 tsp vanilla extra (optional)
5 basil leaves, ripped into tiny little pieces (optional)
1 tsp balsamic vinegar (optional)
Method
Cut the strawberries: Cut the tops off the strawberries, then slice them into halves or quarters depending on how large they are. Place the cut strawberries in a bowl.
Macerate: Add the sugar, orange juice, and salt. Also add vanilla and basil if using. Stir to coat. Cover and leave for at least 20 minutes, an hour is better, a day is best.
Serve: Optionally top with balsamic vinegar and eat out of the bowl, or add to yogurt, ice cream, put on ricotta on toast, or use in tiramisu.