Self Care - Remember to secure your own mask before helping others!

At the end of my most recent professional supervision session my supervisor concluded with a note on self-care saying "Remember to secure your own mask before helping others". This line that so many of us have heard from aircraft safety briefings might seem out of place when talking to a group of hypnotherapists but it really resonated with me. Why?

Well, consider what that line about making sure your own oxygen mask is secure before helping anyone else really means and why it's important. Don't help the person next to you before sorting yourself out - not even if that person is your own child. That might sound selfish when for most of us our natural tendency would be the exact opposite - 'I've got to help them, they're scared and in trouble!'.

But we'd be wrong, wouldn't we. In this situation, stopping to help another first could spell disaster for both of us as not securing your own mask first would render you unable to help anyone. This resonated because it's exactly the same for any one of us trying to help someone else get through a difficult time and achieve their goal, whether that be reducing anxiety, anger or depression, coping with OCD, losing weight, stopping smoking or building confidence etc.. If we aren't in a good place ourselves, how can we expect to usefully help someone else.

In a time when so many are suffering from increased anxiety, including our nearest and dearest, we want to be able to offer comfort, support and reassurance but we can only do that if we are also looking after ourselves too. That goes for all of us, hypnotherapists or not, and that can be a challenge!

We're used to putting the needs and wants of others first - at work and at home - but to be at our best we have to remember to take care of ourselves and not feel guilty about it. Not all situations are life-threatening and it's OK to say 'No' to the requests and demands of others sometimes.

It's also OK to say 'No' to that primitive part of our mind that says 'you must ...', 'you mustn't....', 'you have to worry about...' or 'this is never going to change/get better'. In fact, the more we say 'No' to unhelpful thoughts and replace them with something useful, the better we feel and the more able we are to cope. We make the negative path the road less travelled. Just by doing something we enjoy, talking to a friend or having a laugh we can make a new road. A road that is more welcoming and pleasant to travel. A road that takes you forward to where you want to go at a pace you want to go at, where solutions pop up like road signs to help you along the way because you're no longer concentrated on the problem.

Self-care is like road maintenance - or aircraft maintenance to use my analogy from earlier. If your aircraft is well maintained there are less likely to be issues and your own oxygen mask may not be needed. You're also in a better position to help those around you should they need theirs. When you feel better, others around you reap the benefits too.

So, ask yourself if it's time for some maintenance. You know the signs in yourself - you might feel short-tempered, irritable, tearful, be sleeping badly, struggling to focus or having headaches. The warning signs are individual to you. Once you identify them you'll recognise them if they appear again in the future and when you do, you'll know it's time to be kind to yourself, help yourself and get your 'oxygen mask' back on first.

Some thoughts for my self-care today:

5 mins peace & quiet - just me & a cup of tea
Start my new craft project
Have a walk
Find out the collective noun for a group of hypnotherapists because that's really bugging me now!

#MentalHealthAwarenessWeek

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