By Pauline Villanueva
If you’re reading this, stop.
Pause.
Close your eyes.
Take a deep breath in and lift your shoulders up to your ears. As you exhale, let your shoulders relax down your back. Keeping your eyes closed, repeat this two or three times (or as many times as you’d like).
Now open your eyes.
We’re heading into what I like to call “gala season” in the San Diego legal community. It’s that time of the year where organizations ramp up their events and programming. The second-to-last week of September alone has at least two conferences and three dinners/evening events in San Diego, to say nothing of conferences and dinners occurring in other parts of California and the rest of the country that we may need to attend. Other organizations start hosting their annual galas and dinners in October, continuing through November, and then we get to the holidays! And then before you know it, the new year starts.
Whew!
If you’re like me, you’re tired just reading that, let alone going through it. For many of us, it will be a busy next few months. It can be really easy to get overwhelmed or even just caught up in everything that’s happening in the legal community, without even touching on what’s going on in our personal lives or in the world around us. When that happens, it can also be easy to forget about self-care — real self-care, not just what we think of as “self-care.” Making sure you exercise and eat well are important, but when we’re busy, they may become just more things to check off your to-do list. They may start feeling like obligations, like chores, rather than things that actually make you feel better. And you might not realize it right away.
So stop. Pause. Take a deep breath. Allow yourself a few seconds, maybe even a few minutes, to sit and think about what you need right now — physically, mentally, and emotionally. Maybe you need a day off from going to the gym to allow your body to rest and recover properly. Maybe you need to eat and if all that you have access to is something you might consider “unhealthy,” go ahead and eat it. Maybe you just need to put your phone on silent for five minutes while you sit outside. Maybe it’s none of these things or all of these things.
As things get busy, try not to fall into the trap of doing “self-care” things for the sake of “doing self-care things.” Instead, let this be a friendly reminder that you can always check in with yourself and recalibrate what taking care of yourself really means to you right now, at this moment. Give yourself permission to do the things that make you feel refreshed and rejuvenated, even if it’s just closing your eyes and breathing.