Escapism Vs. Self Care

Hi there. Welcome to the Design Your Dream Life podcast. My name is Natalie Bacon and I’m an Advanced, Certified Mindfulness Life Coach, as well as a wife and mom, if you’re here to do the inner work and grow, I can help. Let’s get started.

Hey gang, welcome to the podcast. I’m so glad to be here with you today to talk about escapism versus self-care and really what is real self-care and how can you take better care of yourself. I’ve been doing a lot of work in this area in my own life as a wife, as a mom, as just a woman in the world who’s got a full life and wants it to be that way. How to take better care of myself. Before I dive into all of that, goodness, I wanna make sure that you are joining me tomorrow for Ask Natalie Anything.

This is a public coaching call for women in this community. It’s completely free for you to come and try out coaching to see what it’s all about. I know that therapy is a tool that is now popular in our society and I am very much pro therapy. I’ve had a therapist in the past. Um, I am not a therapist in the work I do is not therapy, but most of my clients find that they’re not good fits for therapy either. They don’t have, um, anything that would be diagnosed from a therapist, right? Therapy is very diagnostic and um, yet they want to have tools that can help them navigate everyday challenges. And that’s really what life coaching is all about. And I’ll be talking more about the difference between therapy and coaching, and specifically the type of coaching that I do, which is causal coaching, which helps you really get at the root cause of any challenge that you are having and gives you better tools and practices to help you feel more inspired, more joy, and really just feel better in your everyday life. So come join me, it’s momonpurpose.com/asknatalie, I would love to get to know you more, answer your questions, hang out with you and see you there.

Now let’s dive into escapism and self-care. I have been thinking about self-care as a regular daily practice versus an escape. So if you think of an escape, it’s reactive. There’s a need to get away. So if your self-care is reactive, it’s because the home front is so bad. Life is so bad, work is so bad. Whatever it is, you gotta get away. Contrast that with when self-care is part of your everyday daily routine. It’s very proactive. It’s pre-planned as a way to take care of yourself. If you think of just the basic necessities that we typically engage in to take care of ourselves, we shower, we brush our teeth, right? We plan on doing these things to take care of ourselves and there are lots of other ways to do it as well that we’ll talk about. But thinking about it in this way I think is a really useful framework because I don’t know about you, but there are times where I get to the place of, oh my gosh, I just need to get away. And that’s cue to me that I haven’t pre-planned well enough to take care of myself.

So a vacation, a retreat, a spa day, typically those are escapes. So would scrolling on your phone or watching tv, typically they’re escapes, not always, but often. And that’s not to say that these are bad. I love a good massage. I love a good Housewives episode. I just wanna point out that these things aren’t a replacement for daily practicing of taking care of yourself. So you can’t watch enough episodes of housewives or scroll enough Instagram or TikTok to feel more contentment, joy, peace, inspiration, motivation in your life. And that makes sense when I say it that way. And yet, I don’t know about you, but in the, in the moment, in the day to day, it often feels useful and I think it’s because we get that dopamine hit. Like there’s a sense of relief from the emotion that we’re feeling in our everyday life. And the key is to take a look at that emotion and what’s the cause of that, and then work on your mindset and make any changes through the actions that you wanna change in your life. I think using planning ahead of time as a key distinction between escaping versus real self care is really helpful. So just notice if outside of like those bare necessities of showering and brushing your teeth, maybe putting on some nice clothes outside of that, do you plan other forms of self-care?

You might have a girl’s night where you all get together and you watch tv or even you just do this by yourself, but it’s pre-planned and it’s something that you love and you have popcorn and you enjoy it and you really do feel like it’s, it’s helpful. That is amazing, that is not typically how I use screens in my own life. I’ll just speak for myself. I typically use them as a way to escape. And so I’m just noticing that I’m not mad at myself, I’m not rushing to change it, I’m just noticing it because escaping quite literally means avoiding your feelings. So it’s numbing out of the emotional discomfort by using some external false pleasure. So the same is true not just of screens, but we can escape in in many ways. I don’t know if I’ve mentioned this on the podcast, but one of my girlfriends was talking about how she quit drinking and how um, she had no choice but to feel her feelings.

And I thought that is definitely not true, there are so many ways in our modern world to escape our feelings outside of alcohol, right? Screens, sugar shopping working. Most of the time we kind of stop one escape and just start another escape. So if it’s not drinking it’s sugar, right? I, when I used to drink, I um, can relate to this. I would like kind of go back and forth between escapes either being like good Reese’s Cup, like a chocolate or glass of wine. And it’s not that either of these are bad, it’s just that when we’re doing them to escape our feelings, what we’re missing out on is what’s really going on in our lives that is really challenging, that we need to take a look at that if we took a look at we could solve for and then create a better life.

So it’s not that you’re necessarily harming yourself, it’s it’s more like making it a little bit worse and, and stagnant and um, not living into your potential and not growing. The same is true though for other types of escapes that you wouldn’t necessarily think of like a vacation or a wellness retreat. If the intention is to travel to have a new experience, it’s something that you do a couple times a year that’s very different than, oh my goodness, I need to get away. Where you get relief from the negative emotions like overwhelm or anxiety that you experience in your everyday life. So it’s not so much the activity as it is the motivation behind the activity, although I will say that for most people, most clients who I work with and, and definitely myself, there are just certain types of activities that lend themselves more towards escape.

So scrolling social media for one, right? I don’t plan out during the day ahead of time when I’m gonna look at social media. So that means I’m looking to get that little bit of escape from my everyday life and it would be probably useful for me to put some parameters around that, some constraints, some planning so that I’m not falsely thinking that it’s some form of self-care. Now, going on a wellness retreat sounds amazing. No shame in that at all. I would love to go on a wellness retreat right now, but what I want to just make you aware of is that when you’re doing it or wanting to do it because of the discomfort and the displeasure that you’re feeling in your own life, it’s doing it from lack to get out of the feelings that you’re currently feeling instead of doing it from a place of contentment and peace and just wanting to have a new experience that you haven’t had before.

So one is going to help you grow and expand and it’s really from abundance. And the other is from scarcity. I think one of the biggest goals for doing this work, and particularly for what we have time for on this episode, is just to become aware that this is happening and to the extent possible, incorporate more daily ways to take care of yourself so that you need or want fewer escapes. This is how you create a life where you are genuinely happy because you’re taking care of yourself and you’re meeting your own needs. And then if you want to incorporate some of those other activities from that place of my needs are met, it will be a completely different experience for you in a much better way because you won’t be doing it to escape the overwhelm, the frustration, the stress of your life. So a good way to check in with yourself is to ask yourself, what is it like for me to be alone with myself without any escapes?

And what am I doing daily to connect and take care of myself? If the answer to the first question is that you are very uncomfortable alone without any escapes, this is a sign that you have work to do on processing and allowing feelings. Again, this is just a skill. There’s nothing wrong with you. I wasn’t taught this growing up and um, most of us weren’t. It, it just wasn’t talked about then. And, and that’s not right or wrong, good or bad, it’s just noticing that having this skill is a skill. You can learn it and work on it. The only reason you won’t like being alone with yourself without any escapes is because of the thoughts and feelings you have when you’re alone. So this is part of why anxiety was on the rise during the pandemic. People were alone with their thoughts and feelings in a new way that they never had before and the brain just couldn’t handle that.

So even after I continue doing this work, years after finding it, I know that there’s still more work to be done because I have that default brain that just has preferences for escaping certain feelings. So I like to think of it as something that can be simple and doable and fun and I’m not trying to be perfect at. So I think that can be a better, better approach for learning the skill. It’s sort of like, I don’t know how to ride a bike, so I’m going to learn how to ride a bike and I’m gonna make it fun even though I know that part of the process means I’m gonna fall down and kind of scrape my knee sometimes. But that’s okay if you think of it that way. It’s like, yeah, I don’t know how to feel my feelings without getting on social media or turning on the TV or you know, leaving for the weekend, but I am going to work on that and it’s gonna be fun, but also it means that there’s going to be some discomfort because what I’m literally going to be doing is feeling the discomfort of those feelings that I was escaping.

Interesting to think about, can you do this? You will get so much stronger emotionally and then you can really take a look at, and this is what we do with coaching, the thoughts that are creating those emotions and what’s happening in your life that we may wanna take a look at. And feeling empowered to look at the areas of your life that you want to change. We always do the thought work and the feeling work first, and then we take actions to change your life in the way that you want to change your life for the future that you want to create.

For the second question, which was, what am I doing daily to connect and take care of myself? If the answer outside of, you know, daily grooming of just showering and brushing your teeth is nothing, or you know, very minimal maybe once a month or once a week, this is also where you’re gonna wanna do a lot of mindset and feeling work too. Because for most of my clients, and I can relate to this as well, there’s this discomfort that we feel with taking up space on the calendar and prioritizing ourselves. Can you relate to this? It’s like we have no problem signing up the kids or having anyone else in the family do activities and take up space on the calendar. And we think that it’s good for them and their growth and who they wanna become, and yet we don’t give ourselves that same care or attention. I think that is so fascinating. Like I already just think of the the lessons right, that I wanna have my son take and it, it doesn’t even cross my mind that we wouldn’t have time for that. And it’s really good for me to be aware of that because what that means is that very quickly my calendar would fill up with things for other people in the family without including myself in that.

So one of my coaches and mentors who has four adult children said that she only has her kids do one activity and then there’s like one other church activity they’re able to do. So two activities each and mom and dad also get two activities each. And most of the time the activities are more expensive and require more time for mom and dad because that’s just how adult activities are. And I love this. This is what I wanna do in my family because I want to continue to believe that taking care of mom, taking care of me is work worth doing. When you I say it out loud like that, it sounds so obvious and yet for myself, and I know so many of my clients, we think that intellectually, but we don’t act that out if we look at our calendars. So just again, a good goal for this, this episode is to just become aware of how you feel when you’re alone without any escapes and become aware of any daily routines or lack thereof that you have to connect with and take care of yourself.

And then live in that awareness of that without trying to change it or be defensive of it. Just get curious like, huh, that’s really interesting. I have nothing on the calendar to refuel me to take care of myself. I don’t do anything daily that really helps me feel joy or feel better or take care of me. And I have so much on the calendar for everyone else. Interesting. I wonder why. And your brain’s gonna wanna give you all sorts of reasons and excuses of why it’s not the right time, but just live instead of in that judgment zone, live in the curiosity zone. Like what would it be like if I thought of myself, like I think of the other members in my family and I valued myself enough to take up as much space as I want everyone else to take up as much space quite literally.

And also on the calendar. Like what would that be like? I think that kind of zooming out of our own, um, thoughts about ourselves for self-care and taking a broader perspective actually is really helpful for implementing self-care in your own life. I like to think about how all human beings need self-care. Self-care to me just means taking care of ourselves. We need to take care of ourselves. And as we get older into adulthood and into our later years, self-care becomes more dynamic. We have more needs, we have more wants. Babies and little kids are very simple, right? They, they need food, they need some clothes, they need our supervision. So they’re not dying eating, cleaning supplies if you’re like my son. But other than that, you know, their, their wants and needs are so minimal compared to, um, compared to adults. And I think we tend to think that that’s the opposite.

And so I just want us to become a little bit more aware and question that and think about then, if you’re in for believing that all humans need to take care of themselves and that includes you from that kind of larger perspective, then bringing it back more zoomed into your own life, thinking about what you want to do to take care of yourself, not for another thing to check off your to-do list. Okay? I know a lot of women in this community are very successful. We have a lot of doctors and lawyers and um, just professional women who love a good to-do list and I get it. But what you don’t wanna have happen is just add self-care to your to-do list as just another thing to do that is the opposite of taking care of yourself. In fact, taking care of yourself might mean that you only ever have three things on the to-do list, right?

Self-care is about how you feel. It is personal and it’s internal. This is why it’s so hard to, you know, Google or ask chatGBT, you know, how can I take better care of myself? What do I want to do for self-care? It’s hard because you’re going to get actions that people give you and suggestions and I’m all for a good suggestion. But you wanna make sure that you are remembering how personal and internal self-care is. It’s about connecting with you. So getting together with girlfriends to watch your favorite show once a week and chatting with everyone and catching up for some of you might be really re-energizing and connecting and that might feel like really good self-care for others of you that is depleting and you might wanna do it, but you might wanna do it just monthly. Or if you do it weekly, it just isn’t going to count as your self-care because you don’t feel, um, re-energized by it.

I know many of my clients and myself for sure value coaching and self-coaching and doing this work inside Grow You as one of their most valuable forms of self-care because that’s that mindset and emotion management. What is it for you keeping in mind the differences in how you feel? So another example, if you get 10,000 steps in a day because you feel good walking, that’s taking care of yourself. I walk so much in our neighborhood, I love going on walks, we walk to the playground, we walk to the pool, we just walk our dogs all the time. I don’t count the steps, but I walk two to three maybe four times a day and I love it and it’s a way for me to take care of myself, but I’m not doing it as a way to obsess over the number of steps as a way for me to achieve something or check it off my list.

Like if I don’t get more than one walk-in, I’m not thinking, oh my goodness, this is bad. I didn’t take care of myself. I need to go force it. I’m just noticing it. Oh, that’s interesting. I didn’t get my walks in today. What was going on? Do I need to change something for tomorrow so that it’s easier? So there’s this level of compassion and intention but not obligation. So often we make self-care just this next thing on the to-do list and it becomes an obligation and it doesn’t feel good. And so it’s doing the opposite. We are not taking better care of ourselves. Self-care really is an internal process that focuses on you filling your cup. If you think of yourself as a phone, a phone that can be used during the day and then needs to recharge, you gotta plug it in, you gotta do updates to that phone, you gotta take care of that phone.

If the phone doesn’t get recharged, the battery dies. We need water, we need movement, we need sleep. We shower, we brush our teeth, we walk, we exercise, we manage our minds. What is it for you? I know I love a good dance class. I’m not taking dance classes right now just in this season of life, but that’s definitely another form ofs self-care that I like and prefer. So there may be forms of self-care that you prefer where you’re just thinking, you know what? Not during this season of life. And that’s okay, but there’s always another way, right? So in Grow You, you can listen to call replays on the go and get your mindset in the right empowered place to help you. That’s just one small way you could do it. Whatever it is for you. Just notice if it is real self-care that you are participating in and bringing in more of into your life or if the activities that you’re doing are because you need to escape or want to escape the negative emotion from your life.

So keep in mind those distinctions between escaping emotion and real self-care. And the difference really is in the motivation behind the action, the feeling that you’re feeling that’s driving it. So again, doing that form of self-care because you need to escape anxiety versus doing it because you just want to take care of yourself and it feels good to do that. Very different things and they come from awareness and decision making. Keep this in mind. Pay attention to it in your own life and let me know how it goes. I would love to hear from you. You can reach out to me @NatalieBaconCoaching. I love when you share the podcast. Um, let me know what you thought of this and if you’ve noticed any differences once you have applied these tools, I’d love to connect with you over on Instagram. Take care.

If you loved this podcast, I invite you to check out Grow You my mindfulness community for moms where we do the inner work together. Head on over to momonpurpose.com/coaching to learn more.