This week has been a rough one at the hospital. We consistently were getting a lot of new admissions, and unfortunately, many of them were very medically and socially complex. As a hospitalist I can’t cap the number of problems I deal with: I go home when the work is done and all the patients are seen and their needs addressed, not when it is the “clock time” to go. Thus I was coming home later than usual. I stayed late to finish the paperwork and to communicate with specialists about coordinating care for my patients. When I was getting home I was spent. I paused attending yoga classes (I could not make it to the studio schedule) and cut my meditation and journaling to the bare minimum. I was starting to feel like I was failing at wellness.
A friend asked me what I do when self-care activities feel like a chore. That was a perfectly timed question because I could see where she came from. These tasks were getting between my survival and meeting my habit goals.
It made me reflect on why we want to create those habits of meditation, journaling, bedtime rituals, fueling food, and daily movement. For most of us, it is to live a good life and achieve mental and physical well-being, to have the optimal amount of stress and recovery, to set up a foundation for a good healthspan, so we can enjoy our lives with friends and family longer. Some also want to keep the body well to achieve peak mental and physical performance. The common denominator here is to contribute to our well-being.
Why It Feels Like a Chore
The modern culture creates an image of successful people who somehow manage to work really hard, get great results, make a lot of money, look picture-perfect, and somehow have time to post about their rigid wellness habits that add up to more than 24 hours a day. This can lead to us setting unrealistically high expectations for ourselves: “I will journal for 20 minutes a day, then meditate for 20 minutes, and will practice yoga for an hour every day”. Well, that’s not sustainable. It might be helpful to ask yourself “What is a reasonable amount of time I can spend on this habit 80% of the days per month?”. Nobody will be perfect every day anyway.
It is important to acknowledge that the lifestyle changes often don’t feel like are making a difference for a long time, and we get frustrated by not seeing any result after some time of trying. We assume the habit is useless and jump into a new thing. Or we keep trying but it gets daunting because it seems that we are not getting anything out of it.
Sometimes life just gets too uncontrolled: emergencies, travel, high work demands, strain in relationships, you name it – we have all sorts of threats coming at us every day. We live in unprecedented times of stress and negative news attacking us from all corners. With touchless digital access to information, we are exposed to atrocities of war and suffering literally from everywhere in the world, often without warning. We may not consciously recognize it, but our bodies are not used to so many threats, even virtual. We used to live in communities with limited insight into other tribe’s problems or remote natural disasters. I am not saying it’s bad we have an awareness about world events. It’s great we can all help out and a lot of good things came with the advancement of technology and speed of information. I am saying we should learn to take good care of our body: learn to recognize stress and how to soothe our nervous system that is not well equipped to handle that much not only sensory overload from all the social media, but also the emotional burden it brings. When we get into survival mode, it could be hard to do nourishing activities, because our brain is telling us to get ready to fight or flight. It could also be the freeze response from activating our dorsal vagal nerve to protect ourselves (and pretend we are dead to the predator so he walks away).
Finally, there is toxic productivity. This is an emerging term that often applies to many high-achieving, high-performing people. And I think this is when we go through the motions at all costs, at an expense of other parts of our wellbeing, or our nature, thus beating the purpose of wellness habits in the first place.
Troubleshooting
My take on how to deal with this problem is that we should use reason when deciding on how manageable our life is at the moment when selecting what to input into our day. There is probably a fine line between using business and fatigue as an excuse but having a modified routine for the sick/long days at work or emergencies might be handy here. Finally, one should be able to skip a day of everything guilt-free if circumstances demand. I mean, I see emergencies every day at work: life could be just brutal. I do not expect a son to leave the hospital to work out when his mother has minutes to live, so just he can keep up with the habit. People drop everything when things like that happen. But I remind my patient’s caregivers to take care fo themselves when the life or death situation is resolved and we are going now into a more slow and steady part of recovery. There will be peaks and valleys in our life, that’s for sure: rather than reacting to them, it would be helpful to accept them and learn to adjust.
One helpful approach is behavioural activation. This is often used in cognitive behavioral therapy for patients with depression and other mood disturbances with low motivation. If you just get to do something when you don’t feel like doing it, for example, go for a walk, then it makes you feel better. Your mood improves from engaging in the activity, even though initially you really didn’t want to do it. I often use this when I am in an inertia slump on my vacations or long weekends when it feels like I have so much time, that I indulge in procrastinating on workouts or meditation when my mood starts to deteriorate. But this is different from overwhelming, “survival mode” stints in our lives.
Another tip I found helpful is from the author of the Atomic Habits. James Clear states that it’s ok to skip a habit for a day, but try not to do it for two days in a row. I really find it useful especially when I am working on building a new habit and things just keep falling apart.
Another hack example is on missing workouts. Instead of skipping it altogether, go for a walk, dance to your favorite music, or do a gentle stretch. You will still get some movement in (as long as it’s not a harmful activity) and will probably feel less defeated about it.
Still, when wellness activities conflict with rest, recharge, and sleep, I think you could skip them. If you had a night on call, and you must choose between sleep and workout – get your snooze. If you are coming up with a cold and feel unwell – skip your yoga if that feels right for you at the moment. It’s about common sense and self-compassion.
Also, it is normal to not feel like doing a meditation or working out. We evolved to seek pleasure and avoid pain. So if the wellness task feels like potential painful stimulus in the circumstances of exhaustion, illness or emotional overhelm we should listen to it compassionately. Explore what is the fear or feeling behind the resistance. Examine it. Invite curiosity about why this has become a chore rather than a meaningful task. Perhaps, create something else instead that would serve a similar purpose? If you don’t feel like meditating, could it be because you got bored from the track you are using or the place you do it is not giving the right vibe today? Could you try 3 minute practice instead of a usual 10 minutes meditation? Could you do just ten mindful breaths? How about one cycle of inhalation and exhalation?
If you don’t feel like journaling, is it because you feel rushed to go to bed and drop dead? If so – I would say sleep is a holy grail, so go ahead and sleep. You can review tomorrow how can you carve a few minutes of your awake time to self reflect. Or are you dreading journaling because you have difficulty even thinking about and relieving the events of today, so you avoid writing about it? If so, can you journal on one positive thing you are proud about today or a positive event of today? Or maybe about what have you learned today about yourself or the world? Could you try a different journaling method perhaps to make it more interesting?
Also, when life becomes too regimented we get bored and it feels like we self-sabotage. Perhaps some people exist who can live same routine for years. But I would imagine most of us have a lot of variables in our daily lives: job changes, family changes, travels, illnesses, celebrations, emergencies. You can’t possibly stick to all the routines 100% of the time. And when it’s too rigid it loses it’s charm. You want to do things that bring joy and make you feel proud, not just go through the motions.
Final Thoughts
So this is what I would say to my friend: analyze yourself. Become a curious explorer of your own persona and really dig into why this feels like a chore? Give yourself permission to take a break from any of them from time to time, or even allow wiggle room with the rule of 80/20: committing to practicing something 80% of the time, and skipping it guilt-free in 20% of the days. Sometimes we set our expectations so high, we are trying to win a losing game. Often self-help recommendations are given by people who have a totally different lifestyle, maybe they don’t work, or don’t have an elderly parent to look after, or a small toddler to chase and attend to 24/7. There is no one-size-fits-all when it comes to self-care and wellness routines. It’s great to have a toolbox and on “regular days” do the long list of things, and default to bare minimum on some of the tougher days. Track it with a log book and see a pattern: are you consistently skipping same activities or just a day here and there? Is it the same activity every day or there is a one or two you consistently avoid? What is it about those “chores” that make you feel like skipping? What story do you tell yourself about these habits?
I have created a long list of “wellness chores” for myself. They are all small and short, but they do add up. There are days I come home from the hospital completely exhausted. On those days I eat and go to bed, I don’t push myself to exercise or read. But I listen to audiobooks on my commute and I do a short journaling practice on my phone called Storyworthy (basically a one line per day) briefly before bed. I pick the shortest meditation on the app or do ten mindful, luxurious breaths before falling asleep, indulging in the relaxing sensations it brings while mentally scanning my body for any tension and letting go of the day and its stressors.
Sometimes we feel we failed at wellness if we didn’t tick all the boxes on our healthy habits list. We somehow forget to acknowledge all the good things we did in the day that positively contributed to our wellbeing like getting a good sleep or connecting with a friend.
Remember, there is no lack of self-help advice out there, but there is no one-size-fits-all.
I hope this gives you some encouragement to give yourself permission to be flexible with your routines and to let go of unrealistic or rigid expectations and embrace self-compassion. Let me know in the comments if you have other tips on managing at times when your wellness activities feel like chores.
All pictures taken during Seattle trip to see Esther Perel tour in September 2024
Journaling Prompts for then a Wellness Activity Feels Like a Chore:
Examine the activity and how you feel about it. Get curious and write for 5-10 minutes:
- Why did you start doing it in the first place? How did you learn about it and what is your why for doing it?
- Did it ever bring joy to you or relief in suffering? If yes, what were the circumstances? When, where and with whom were you, what else was happening in your life? How was it different from now?
- When did that become a chore rather than a meaningful task?
- What would it take to make it feel less like a chore?
- What other activity you could do instead that would serve a similar purpose?
