Self Care is Not Selfish

Ask anyone what their primary responsibility in life is and the answer will either be to earn money for their family or to bring their children up well or to take care of their old parents.

Seldom will one hear that “Self care” is anyone’s primary responsibility. Many people will consider a response like that selfish; yet taking care of one’s self first and then fulfilling other responsibilities is one of the best things one can do to structure one’s time and life.

This is because a person who considers self care as his or her primary responsibility is likely to do a better job with his/her other responsibilities than people who put other things first.

Considering Self Neglect Noble

Most of us know how to fulfill our responsibilities and we work hard while doing so as well. But self care is somehow low on the list of our responsibilities. Men work hard and earn money for their families since they consider that their biggest responsibility.

Women take care of the home and bring up their children well since they consider that their greatest responsibility. Putting ourselves and our minds last, somehow seems like a very noble thing to do to most people.

By putting other responsibilities before self care, we experience frustration and negativity which leaves its impact on the responsibility we were trying to fulfill thereby hampering it.

As the word itself suggests, our greatest responsibility is our response-ability or our ability to respond to situations or stimuli. The way we respond to the people and the situations in our life is one of the most important things we need to take care of since this is what determines the quality of our life as well as our destiny.

When we take care of ourselves by controlling negative thoughts and planting positive thoughts into our minds, we improve our response-ability.

This in turn starts a virtuous cycle of sorts in our life since we are able to respond to people as well as situations in a logical as well as calm and peaceful manner. This happens irrespective of the quality of people or situations that life brings our way.

What Happens When We Put Ourselves Last

Sarita was a typical middle-class homemaker who had two children aged 2 and 4 respectively. Her daily routine revolved around housework and her children who kept her on her toes for long hours everyday. She had no time for self care.

Her tiring and thankless job as a homemaker left her with little time for herself and that made her cranky and irritable. Some days, she would get so upset that she would get violent with her little ones and even fight over trivial matters with her husband.

She felt helpless in the face of the stress she had to face everyday of her life and such fights and angry outbursts helped her feel a bit light.

Sarita is not alone in her experience. Many women experience such emotions especially when they are responsible for demanding children. It is a well-known fact that happy mothers do a much better job of parenting their little ones than frustrated or depressed mothers.

The latter’s responsibility gets hampered by their response-ability.

Conclusion – Self Care

What is important here is to understand that the mind is like the CPU of a computer. If the CPU is not functioning well, none of the computer’s operations will happen correctly either.

To do a good job with our responsibilities, we must ensure that we take care of our response-ability in life. Self care is important. The more positive, stable and peaceful we can keep our mind then the better will be the way we fulfill our other responsibilities, however challenging they might be.