Self-care isn’t always soft.
Unpopular opinion…
Unpopular opinion…a lot of the ‘self-care’ messages out there are doing more harm than good.
They are keeping you from feeling your best, building self confidence, improving your health & achieving your goals.
Achieving anything worth having takes hard work. It takes doing things when you don’t feel like it. It takes showing up when you want to give up.
Don’t work too hard… you’ll burn out.
Skip the gym if you’re tired… you don’t want to overtrain.
Life’s short… eat what you want.
Sounds ‘compassionate’ and caring, right?
But for most people, that messaging isn’t self-care.
It’s enabling & keeping you stuck.
Most people aren’t burning out from training too hard.
They’re burnt out from work stress, never feeling good in their body, from scrolling on social media and comparing their lives to other people’s highlight reels instead of sleeping, from breaking promises to themselves and starting over every Monday.
Most people aren’t overtraining..they’re under-recovered because they aren’t moving enough, fuelling themselves, setting work boundaries, prioritising time for themselves.
What people don’t understand is that when you exercise consistently you have MORE energy, MORE capacity for life because you are FITTER.
Fitness, at its core, is your ability to meet the physical and mental demands of life. Without feeling totally burnt out..with energy, strength, and resilience left in the tank.
It’s not about how much you can lift, how fast you can run, or how lean you look. It’s much more important than that.
Fitness is freedom.
It’s the foundation for doing more, living more, and backing yourself in every area of life.
It builds confidence, resilience, health, lifespan, libido .. I could go on.
And ‘eat what you want’ sounds lovely until you realise you’re in a body you don’t like, you are sacrificing your health and you are constantly choosing short term joy instead of long term happiness.
Self-care isn’t always soft.
More often than not real self care is showing up when you don’t feel like it and doing the things you know your future self will be grateful for.
It might look like an hour of work on a Sunday night so you don’t start Monday stressed and overwhelmed,
it might look like tidying the kitchen at 10pm so you don’t wake up to a mess,
or saying no to desert because it means saying YES to your long term goals.
The easy, comfortable, enjoyable in the moment choice is usually what is keeping you stuck.
Make the choice even when it’s hard - the workout, the walk, the food that fuels you and the actions that build the life you want.
Ready to change? click here