Not a fan of New Year’s resolutions? Me neither, I’m trying self-care instead
Jan 2025
Written by Billy Black
The summer holidays are over, and it’s time to get back into our daily structured routines. For those who look after children and young people in care, the change in the school year can be a time to reflect on how our goals have been progressing, celebrate our achievements, and consider the lofty resolutions we want to set our sights on for the new year.
Does a resolution help us create positive change? As Tim Minchin says in his viral graduation address, “You don’t have to have a dream”, advocating instead for being micro-ambitious: “passionate dedication to the pursuit of short-term goals”.
For so many carers and care staff, the goal that keeps slipping away is self-care. We need self-care to look after others, because we cannot give what we don’t have enough to spare. Unfortunately, children’s needs are often more urgent, and it can be harder to see our own rising needs past the immediate needs of day-to-day caring.
At the end of last year, social worker and experienced practitioner Belinda Lorek ran a virtual workshop on the Self-Care Mind Platter, a new way to look at self-care and consider our needs as carers.
Based on the Healthy Mind Platter tool developed by Drs David Rock and Dan Siegel, this workshop broke down our self-care needs into the essential components that make up our self-care needs: sleep, physical, focus, connection, playtime, down time, and time in.
This was a new and intriguing way to look at self-care for me, as I quickly became aware that my go-to self-care for coping with daily stressors were connecting with friends and focus projects – while the others were barely on my radar because I have usually thought of them as “not doing anything useful”! But just as you can’t eat pizza every time you’re hungry, you also can’t just live on focus projects when sleep and exercise are suffering.
Mental wellness is all about giving your brain a variety of opportunities to breathe and develop in different ways.
In the workshop, Belinda guided us to think about each of these elements and jot down what each of these elements looks like for us. For the ones we didn’t have much we particularly “do” for that time, we wrote down what we would WANT it to look like. For example, I quickly realised that there are lots of physical activities I love to do, but never feel I have time to between caring duties – but is that true? I have a lunch break every day; do I need to have it in the kitchen? Can I go on a walk and listen to music in the park to have lunch?
Looking at self-care this way also made me consider what’s important in organisations – they say that workers never quit a bad job, they quit bad work cultures. Staff caring for young people don’t just need the break that comes with clocking off, they need positive relationships at work, opportunities to be in nature with young people, encouragement to be playful with young people between the more serious meetings.
I’m never a fan of New Year’s resolutions, but I do like to take time in January to think about how to tweak the daily routine to live a happier and healthier life, which will inevitably improve the care I give to the children and the community. What tweaks can you make to your daily routine to care for yourself in a more well-rounded way?
