When in Doubt? Self-Care: Building a New Default
By definition, anxious learners are ambitious, driven, and self-exacting. If they didn’t care so much and hold themselves to such high standards, inability to perform and succeed wouldn’t bother them. They simply wouldn’t care that much about academics.
Believe me, I’ve taught thousands of learners. The ones who are satisfied just to pass are very chill.
The Puritan work ethic, which still looms large over traditional academic culture, couples ambition with self-sacrifice. No pain/no gain. The early bird gets the worm. Go the extra mile, etc. etc.
Undoubtedly, there is some value to this perspective. Achievement is not easy and one does need to work at it. Heaven knows anyone reading this column has a robust history of hard work and long hours.
However, the self-sacrifice undergirding this perspective is just that - skimping on doing what’s good for you so that you have time to work more. I hear the mantra recited by all my learners: “In college you get to study and/or sleep and/or socialize, but you can’t have all three.”
If you are firmly in the no gain/no pain mindset, there’s validity to this manta. Heaven knows I lived by it and suffered significantly as a result. I’m sure that’s true for many of my readers as well.
The problem with all of this is that it lacks healthy balance. Self-sacrifice is default: “If I run out of time, I’ll just stay up all night, skip dinner, skip my workout…”
By the time learners have worked themselves into chronic academic anxiety, balance is out of the equation - and that’s a significant part of the problem.
Without exception, all my learners who have found their way back to mentally healthy academic performance find they must put self-care first. Here’s what I see: If they take care of themselves, everything else takes care of itself.
I’m not talking about spa days, of course. It’s the basics that matter: sleep, sufficient nutrition, exercise, attention to mental/physical health, intelligently-used down time, rejuvenating recreation/socializing, mindfulness.
It comes as no surprise that self-care habits are negotiable or expendable for most of my anxious learners socialized to high achievement. Skipped meals, terrible nutrition, curtailed sleep, etc. It’s the typical college thing on steroids. Unfortunately, their vulnerable mental health truly rests on the wellness foundation grounded in self-care.
As my learners regain functionality and begin to thrive, I hear from them only on an as-needed basis if they begin to struggle. When they call, our routine rarely varies: I listen to specifics of the struggle, then take them through the self-care checklist. Always self-care has lasped in some way.
I encourage my students to keep a self-care checklist on their phones as their first go-to when they start to feel symptomatic. It’s a nice idea, but the reality of managing time/opportunity for self-care requires executive functioning and benefits from routine - a difficulty for ADHD brains. It’s really about a shift in worldview.
As they step into the empowerment of claiming their neurodivergence, the internalized Puritan work ethic no longer fits. In lieu of sacrifice, diligence and achievement roots in self-care instead of destructive self-sacrifice.