I was just talking to a group of students about self-care strategies. If you’re trying to enhance your self-care, I think that one of the biggest mistakes you can make is to try to do too much at once. Let’s say you have the goal of being fit and healthy. So, you decide that you’re going to get up at 4am every day, spend 2 hours at the gym before breakfast, eat only non-processed foods, avoid all refined sugar, caffeine, alcohol, and so forth. How long will this plan last? Probably not too long. These drastic changes are hard to sustain. Even worse, I think that the idea that becoming fit and health requires drastic changes dissuades people from even starting. As a result, I often advise people to avoid making a self-care change that they can’t keep up for over a year. You can’t get fit and healthy in a day, a week, or even a month. Fitness and physical health are long-term goals. You can make tremendous progress over time, but your progress on any given day or week is a lot like the effect of water flowing over rocks. You don’t see the change right away, but over time, those rocks become worn down to smooth pebbles. Start small. For example, about 15 years ago, my wife and I were living in a non-walking friendly neighbourhood in North Carolina. We discovered it wasn’t walking-friendly when we went on a walk, and people started to come out onto their porches to watch us go by. We had a gym in our apartment complex, but I didn’t really enjoy going there, and I was a busy intern at Duke University Medical Centre with little time for extra stuff. That said, fitness was very important to me, and I wanted to get back into a healthy routine. I decided to do pushups every morning. I started with 15 or 20, and every couple of weeks, I added more. Eventually, I added more stuff to my daily routine, and even though I’m 15 years older, I regularly do many times the pushups I started with, and I’m keeping up quite well with my teenaged classmates in my martial arts class. The changes that occurred day in and day out were small, but cumulatively, they made a big difference. If you take this approach, one pitfall is that you could get demoralized when you don’t notice big changes. You might find the slow rate of progress to be incredibly frustrating. Indeed, in other areas (such as progress working on mental health problems), slow, episodic, and unpredictable progress can be frustrating and demoralizing. When you become demoralized (and you will from time to time), remember that your goal is to be like water over rocks, not like a jackhammer. A jackhammer will break up the rocks into uneven, jagged fragments. Water will break them down and smooth them into small pebbles or grains. Another thing to remember is that you really can’t subtract progress. If you’ve made progress, and then you slide backward, that doesn’t mean you’re really back where you started. While you were making progress, important changes occurred in your brain that can be revived when you get back on track. Barring brain surgery or a major head injury, the stuff you learned that helped you move forward can’t be erased. In fact, even people who have had major head injuries, surgery to remove tumors, catastrophic strokes, and so forth, have sometimes made startling recoveries. Our brains are amazing learning machines. Keep this in mind. Practice accepting slow progress, and plan for times when it gets frustrating. ~ Alexander L. Chapman, Ph.D., R.Psych.