Making time for wellness

or yet more about self-care

I don’t know whether it’s just that I’m noticing them more, because of where I am right now, but it seems like lately I am seeing more and more Substack articles and social media posts and hearing more friends and family speak out about burnout, breakdowns, stress and anxiety and also the physical manifestations of these.

Emma Gannon has talked quite a bit about this and is releasing a new book (sorry, it’s too late to order it; I actually left it to the very last day to order mine) talking about her Year of Nothing. Only this morning, I read Sam Baker’s recent piece about her own experiences with breakdowns. Yesterday, I had a long chat with a good friend about our different physical manifestations of stress and anger and anxiety. I also have a number of close family members who are, or have recently, suffered severe physical symptoms from negative emotions of some kind – stress, anxiety, fear, grief…

My physical breakdown

About ten years ago, I had my own physical breakdown that turned out to be all down to stress and anxiety and what those emotions, and the hormones associated with them, do to our bodies. It took me almost two years to recognise this and multiples test and scans and consultants and second opinions.

My symptoms were severe dizziness and numbness down the left side, almost all the time, along with occasional blurred vision, blackouts and hallucinations (the most common one being I would see lumps in the milk as I was pouring it – no freaking idea what that was about, unless maybe it was my brain trying to persuade me to go vegan?). Some of these are symptoms I’ve hear others describe, but there are plenty more that I’ve heard or read about, including varying levels of headaches, severe sickness and diarrhoea, hair falling out, inability to move, insomnia…

A family member’s consultant recently said that any and all pain, of any type, will be made worse by stress and anxiety, so learning strategies to help cope with and reduce those, as well as, where possible, taking away the things causing them, can make a huge difference to pain, even when it’s pain that isn’t a direct symptom of them.

Back then, it took a ten-day holiday to help me recognise that I was actually suffering from severe stress and anxiety. Many of the doctors had asked about stress, though not deeply. They just said things like ‘Do you have a stressful life?’ and ‘Do you work in a stressful job?’. None of them ever asked me the full raft of questions that can help identify if you’re suffering from those (something I got once I self-referred to an NHS stress and anxiety course – the questions here are similar to the ones they asked though I can’t find the exact ones the NHS course asked).

I never thought I was stressed. I associated stress with work stress and, at that time, I didn’t feel I had any of that and I was happy with the work I was doing and not having to work many evenings or weekends and mostly keeping work away from time with the kids (who were 4-5 and 7-8 at the time, so needing a lot of time and attention from us). I wasn’t stressed about money especially, which I think was the other thing I associated with stress (perhaps because I’d seen that cause a lot stress in my parents). I have actually since realised that the work I was doing at the time is definitely a type of work that naturally leads to stress and anxiety and definitely kicks off cortisol and adrenaline. (Mostly I was doing project management. This is probably second only to editorial management, in the type of work I do in our publishing business, in producing those stress chemicals. So work was almost certainly contributing to it.)

But most of all, it was the thousand other commitments I had taken on. In the process of starting up a second business/new career and spending four or five hours many evenings and extra on weekends working on course projects and portfolio building, which meant that actually, while I was keeping the publishing work within school hours, I was working close to double time between the two businesses. I was parent governor at our primary school and chair of one of the committees. I was on the playgroup committee. And then, on top of that, I’d recently joined the Labour Party and started going to meetings and almost immediately took on a tonne of responsibilities there – Branch Secretary, Women’s Officer, Chair of a brand new Communications steering group. I even stood for Town council (thankfully, I can say now, I didn’t win). I spent time out canvasing, time at home working on leaflets and emails, and time at a lot of meetings, including chairing quite a few of them.

And I also felt that my role in politics was pivotal and that if I didn’t do my absolute most to try to get the right people into government (locally and nationally), if I personally didn’t vote for the right leader… I would be personally responsible for the next five years of whatever (yeah, sorry, over a decade of severe austerity is all my fault). I tied myself in knots over whether I was making the right decision and whether I was putting my arguments across in the right way to persuade people to go to the polling station and vote (and even more, to vote for the right person).

And I was also one of those people in the saying ‘If you need something doing, ask a busy woman.’ I would agree to typeset the school prospectus (that one was actually paid, to be fair), to create flyers for many of the school and playgroup events, to design a banner for a fundraising event, to man a stall at one school fair, to paint faces at another, to run an after-school Spanish club… You get the picture. How I didn’t see that I was stressed seems ridiculous from here, ten years in the future.

Incidentally, please, please, please, never let that saying steer you. Do not ask a busy woman to take on even more responsibilities. Please. If she can’t help herself and recognise she’s severely overcommitted, your keeping something off her plate might at the very least stop her from going over the edge.

My recovery

I got through it. I didn’t have to give up work (honestly still feel that that would have been impossible, though I recognise there probably would have been ways to make it work if necessary without losing the roof over our heads). But I did resign from every single one of my voluntary roles. All the Labour Party roles. The parent governance. The playgroup committee. And I learnt to say ‘No.’ when asked if I could do things. At first, I felt the need to explain and tell people all about my hideous time of dealing with those severe physical symptoms of stress and anxiety. But after a while I recognised that it was actually OK to JUST SAY NO and mostly people would just accept that. I also eventually realised that I couldn’t single-handedly effect a change in government or quite probably not even a single change of mind. And that all those committees and schools and playgroups would survive without my help. (That seems to a be a common theme in this level of stress – we become convinced that everything will fall apart without us, when in fact that is so very rarely true.)

And, just as important, if not maybe more important, I learnt the self-care and wellness things that help me. I think everyone will have different things that work for them, to be honest, though there will be some crossovers and things that work for multiple people. For me, the things that work the best are: yoga, regular walking in the countryside, painting (and digital drawing, but physical painting is absolutely the top of the mindful and calming creativity techniques), dancing, deep breaths, balancing and, when it’s super bad, minddumps (kind of liking brainstorming mindmaps about the different areas of my life, with spokes going off and just getting all the thoughts out of my head and onto paper and then looking at it to see what’s all good, what’s particularly bothering me and what needs some tweaking; but mostly to just get it out of my head).

Fastforward 10(ish) years

A surprise (ish) general election is announced. Bam! I am hit almost immediately with extremely tight and rock hard stomach, numbness, dizziness and hallucinations (the lumpy milk – still no idea what the hell that’s about), with the nice background addition of a tension headache that I’d have for the last week or two.

It was a visceral reaction, because historically general elections came with a tonne of responsibility for me (real or imagined!), and despite the fact that I am really not involved in politics anymore (apart from still being Facebook friends with a few comrades from back then – many of whom are also no longer involved, though some of whom are very involved still). My very first thought was ‘I’d better get my street-pounding boots out.’

I think it also came, though, because I had built up, for the first time in almost a decade, a few layers of stress that I wasn’t dealing with. The main work project on at the moment is editorial management. Yes, if you skip back up a few paragraphs that’s THE top stressor for me in this line of work. Because it involves multiple mini deadlines very single week, and often every single day. It involves keeping an eye on schedules. It involves holding how a whole project works, including workflows, changes, series style and a bunch of other things, in my head, to the point where other things can’t be stored or accessed.

One of our kids has some health issues that means she’s missed a lot of school and there’s a whole bunch of stuff there that’s constantly in my head, the biggest part of which is that I can’t solve it and wave the magic mum wand and make everything hunky dory again.

And, actually, that’s probably about it. Maybe a bit of a need to solve everything from for another family member (I am doing my best not identify people and share what are their stories). Maybe a bit of stress or pressure that I’m putting on myself to get fully transitioned from the long-term publishing career to the newer and future long-term (I really really hope) illustration and pattern design career. (Yes, the one that I was starting off a decade ago and still isn’t the full-time career I have been, and am still, aiming for.)

Not making time for wellness

So, not huge amounts of stress, compared to what I had a decade ago. But… what I hadn’t been doing very well at all is the self-care. I had absolutely not been making time for wellness. I kept starting a new 30-day yoga, but never made it past around Day 6. I was going on barely any walks. I wasn’t eating particularly well (while making sure to make smoothies for my daughter every single morning). I was going on trips, but I was always taking work with me, and frequently fitting in more work while away than I would at home. I was working most evening, and most weekends. I was not drawing enough and definitely painting at all and rarely fitting in an hour or two in front of the TV while laying down colour on an illustration (one of my mindful and calm things that also happens to be productive!). Instead, I was just sitting in front of the TV, maybe looking at my phone a bit.

I did my first braindump in almost a decade.

While I don’t think you can see everything on it, you might spot that there are actually two large work circles, with the addition of smaller illustration business one. When I wrote the big circles down I wrote down MFL work, TAG work, Illustration business, Family, House and Politics and only then did I write down ME. And I realise that all of them are part of me in some way, and at least part of what is affecting me, but they are all external things. The internal, looking after myself things had gotten down to the very bottom of every single list of priorities.

Today and tomorrow and tomorrow

This weekend I do not have to do any work. None. That should really really be the norm, but it feels weird and a bit wonderful. I have still had other responsibilities to deal with, of course, including walking round town picking up food for our youngest’s D of E expedition, cleaning the kitchen approximately ten times (it feels like) and the bathroom once, and doing washing for two kids (and, oh, really must remember to put my own washing on today!). But mostly I have enjoyed lazy mornings of sitting on the sofa or in the garden drinking tea and reading my book or Substacks (and the odd social media post, but not very many and very little news at all). I have been to hang out with friends and will be going to hang out with more friends today. I have been out for a drink with my husband and chatted about lots of things. I haven’t done any yoga – oops – but I have done a couple of bits of go-with-the flow sketchbook painting. And I have put loud music on and danced about.

And… on Tuesday I am heading off to France for a week. Without my laptop. I will not be doing any work whatsoever. I am giving myself the leeway to also not try to fill my time with illustration business work, which is my tendency whenever I have publishing work downtime. This is going to be a proper holiday, not a working holiday. A totally me time week with whatever I want to do, whether it’s sitting reading all day, lying in till midday and then sitting on a damp (it looks like it’s going to be raining a fair bit) beach, or heading out every day to museums or galleries or hopping down or up the train line to an interesting town or city. Whatever I want to do and whatever calls to me. With 100% no guilt.

Please please please

Recognise some of these symptoms or tendencies, if you can, and start looking after your wellness, because you absolutely will be forced to do so by your body soon, if you don’t.