Imagine you have two plants.
They both look a bit sorry for themselves. Drooping leaves, generally rather miserable.
You water them both.
By the next morning, one has completely perked up. The other still looks exactly the same.
The water worked brilliantly for the first plant because it was thirsty.
But that doesn’t necessarily mean there was anything wrong with the water — or with the second plant.
It may simply not have needed water.
I think self-care can be a bit like that.
Two people can have very similar symptoms, follow exactly the same good advice and see completely different results.
For one person, that advice may provide something their body really needs at that particular time. They may notice a big improvement.
For the other person, it may make very little difference.
And that’s where it gets frustrating.
Because when something has worked brilliantly for somebody else — particularly when their symptoms sounded just like yours — it’s very easy to wonder:
Why isn’t this working for me?
But perhaps that’s not quite the right question.
The second plant has actually given us some useful information.
We gave it water and it didn’t perk up.
We still don’t know exactly what it needs. But we know a little more than we did before.
The same can be true of self-care.
Every piece of good advice you try gives you an opportunity to learn something about your own body.
Over time, I’ve come to think of this as creating your own Menu of Self-Care.
Some things may earn a permanent place because you can see the difference they make. Some may be useful at certain times. Others may turn out not to be particularly useful for you at all.
The difficult bit is that our bodies aren’t quite as easy to read as a thirsty pot plant.
Sometimes the feedback is obvious.
Sometimes it’s slow, subtle or rather messy.
And sometimes we’re so focused on the improvement we expected that we overlook the information our body actually gave us.
That’s why the first step in Make Self-Care Simple isn’t finding another thing to try.
It’s getting better at recognising the feedback you already have.
Your body may be telling you more than you think.
If you’d like my help…
Start with the free Body Guidance Review. It will help you discover how your body tends to give you feedback — and revisit something you’ve already tried to see whether there was useful information you may have missed.