Changing your perspective to manage life’s challenges
Three questions that make it easier to give yourself the care you’d give anyone else.
I’ve been unwell for a couple of weeks. I got to a point last week where I had to pull up stumps, call it quits for a few days, and give my body time to heal. I struggled, though, to make decisions for my own health and self-care, and it left me wondering why we find that so hard.
Researchers at the Universities of Michigan and California wondered whether changing your story might help with the decisions we find difficult for ourselves.1 They found it did, and that three simple questions could produce a more positive and self-caring outcome. This is often what we do in a counselling session when we reframe an issue and find a new perspective.
If you were a fly on the wall, what would you observe?
When I was struggling physically last week, I needed to create some space between my feelings and my worry about letting people down. Being a fly on the wall in my own situation let me watch from a distance and notice that my thoughts and actions were not self-caring at all. They were punitive and harsh. I could see myself pushing, instead of permitting myself to rest.
What would you expect if this had happened to your best friend?
What would you say to them? I would never have any trouble advising an ill friend to take sick leave, see a doctor, get some rest, leave the housework and put themselves first in order to repair their health. So when I asked myself the question, I had to admit that treating myself with the same gentleness meant resting.
Does looking at this from the future change how you see it now?
Looking ahead even a few weeks or months, I can see that I want to be healthy and well, and that to get there I need to take time now to recover, and make good choices about rest and eating and sleeping. That has to change how I act in the present.
Try asking yourself these three questions, and see whether it makes a difference to how you treat yourself.
