The gist: Struggling with self-care? Explore 3 powerful mindset shifts to make boring routines more manageable and effective for neurodivergent individuals.
Despite what most people think, Hustle Culture’s obsession with extremes, intensity, and all-or-nothing thinking doesn’t just impact how we work and approach productivity.
It also impacts how we rest…or rather, don’t rest.
When I first started prioritizing self-care more, or at least trying to, I fell into the same mistake a lot of us do:
I approached self-care with the same extreme, all-or-nothing mindset I approached work and productivity with.
My thinking was that, if my self-care was as extreme and efficient as possible, I wouldn’t need to spend as much time on it, and could get back to more productive things sooner. 🙄
For example, at the time I had a lot of problems with chronic, severe dehydration.
One thing I started doing was proactively getting IV hydration therapy before things that I knew would make my dehydration worse.
And it’s not a bad tactic, I actually still use it now and then…when extremes are actually needed.
But back then, not once did it occur to me to try drinking more water on a daily basis, so I wouldn’t need the IV in the first place.
I swear, it never once crossed my mind.
Why did that not occur to me?!
Probably because it felt too boring, too tedious, too time-consuming for the Hustle Culture mindset that was still controlling my every thought and action at the time. 🙈
Needless to say, focusing on extreme self-care like that wasn’t the best approach.
It doesn’t get us out of the burnout cycles we get stuck in.
That’s because these extreme, often luxurious types of self-care tasks that we turn to first with this approach, don’t usually give us what we really need.
They don’t usually recharge the parts of us that actually need recharging most, but we still consider our rest and self-care “done” for the time being and head back to work, draining ourselves further.
Instead of approaching self-care with an “all or nothing,” binge-mode mindset, we’re all much better off approaching it with a “something small, literally anything, every day…or as many days as possible” one. 🙃
And that requires thinking differently in a few different ways.
So today I want to share the mindset shifts that were most helpful to me when trying to embrace the boring side of self-care stuff.
3 mindset shifts that make embracing boring self-care easier
1. Remember you’re building your baseline
This first mindset shift is mostly about managing your expectations.
If you expect huge, drastic, immediate results from the kinds of small, 5-minute habits that boring self-care tasks tend to be, you’re going to set yourself up for disappointment.
But if you look at them instead as small actions that each make small improvements to your overall baseline of energy, health, or quality of life, you can think about the exciting things they make possible, instead of expecting excitement from the tasks themselves.
For example, I love live concerts, but haven’t had the energy or mental health to go to one in years, giving how draining they are for my autistic and disabled body.
This year, I realized how much I missed them, so one of the things I’ve told myself while doing boring self-care stuff is that I’m trying to get myself back to a high enough baseline to go to concerts again.
It took a long time, with both fun milestones and failed attempts along the way (like having a panic attack like an hour into the show and needing to leave), but this weekend I saw Billy Joel live, a concert I’ve been wanting to see for at least 10 years!
I got to yell “sing us a song, you’re the piano man,” directly at THE piano man! 🎹
That was a huge life goal accomplished, and it was possible because of boring self-care.
Reduce burnout with a self-care action plan
Creating a plan for your daily and weekly self-care will help you get proactive about rest and burn out less often. For help creating your own plan, download our free worksheet.
2. Keep Future You in mind
So much of self-care is about doing favors for your future self, and doing things with a small energy cost now for a bigger energy payoff later.
But psychologists have found that a weak connection with your future self can make it harder to make decisions that can benefit it, leading to things like procrastination and impulsivity.
On the bright side, there are a lot of things we can do to try to strengthen that connection with our future self to make it easier to care about things that may not benefit our current self, but are important for our future self.
Simply remembering “this is for Future Me,” or that “Future Me will thank me for this” can go a long way.
So can remembering that small amounts of daily effort now can prevent a lot of bigger issues requiring large amounts of effort later.
For example, I struggle with dental hygiene habits, but I used to struggle a lot more.
But once I had to get my first root canal, and then a tooth extraction when that didn’t work, it got a lot easier.
The whole ordeal was very painful and very expensive, and I very much do NOT want to go through it again.
And remembering that makes it a lot easier to get back out of bed at night when I’ve realized I’ve snuggled under the covers without brushing first.
3. Boring self-care is a prerequisite for productivity
One thing that can hold a lot of us back from prioritizing time for boring self-care and maintenance is that it’s time and energy that we could be spending on work or something else more “productive.”
It’s definitely how I used to think.
But eventually, I realized that was a false binary.
It all goes back to what I said earlier about boring self-care raising your “baseline” level of energy or health, and the principles of gentle productivity.
A certain level of health and energy is required to be productive in the first place, and that level can be maintained an increased through boring self-care.
But if you ignore the boring side of self-care too much, that baseline can lower and lower until you don’t have the energy and health to be productive until you take some time for self-care.
In this way, ignoring boring self-care actually makes it harder to be productive.
Realizing this after a particularly bad flare-up and burnout in 2022 eliminated, like, 97% of my guilt around focusing on rest and self-care when I feel like I “should” be doing more productive things.
That maintenance is what makes productivity possible.
Boring is good for you
I hope laying out how I embraced these different mindset shifts can help you start thinking similarly about the self-care tasks you’re not necessarily excited about.
And if not, here’s a bonus one: It’s good to let yourself be bored sometimes.
I know, I know, it’s so painful. For us ADHDers especially.
But that doesn’t make it less true…it might even make it more so.
Sometimes I think of boring self-care tasks as a way to “practice” being bored, to acclimate myself to it so it’s less painful over time. And it’s worked in that regard, too.
So if none of these mindset shifts make boring self-care feel more exciting to you, maybe just…let yourself be bored and do it anyway (and advice for that is coming later this month).
Reduce burnout with a self-care action plan
Creating a plan for your daily and weekly self-care will help you get proactive about rest and burn out less often. For help creating your own plan, download our free worksheet.