Imagine drinking ten cups of coffee throughout the day, then sitting down to practise ten minutes of relaxation.
You follow the instructions, take some lovely deep breaths and try to relax.
But you still feel restless and wound up.
Does that mean the relaxation exercise didn’t work?
Not necessarily.
It might simply be that you’re expecting ten minutes of relaxation to overcome everything else your body has been dealing with.
And that’s something I’ve seen many times over my years in practice.
What are you expecting your self-care to do?
When we follow health advice, we usually have a particular result in mind.
Perhaps we’re walking every day to improve our energy, practising relaxation to feel calmer, or changing our diet in the hope of feeling healthier.
But sometimes we expect one piece of self-care to do more than it reasonably can.
You might be making good progress with your walking, but still feel tired because other aspects of your wellbeing need attention.
Or you might find that a short relaxation exercise helps you feel calmer for a little while, then dismiss it because the effect doesn’t last all day.
In both cases, the self-care may be helping. Just not quite in the way you expected.
Different kinds of self-care don’t work in isolation
One thing I found fascinating during my years in practice was how closely different areas of our wellbeing were connected.
What we eat can influence how we feel emotionally. And how we’re feeling can influence what we choose to eat.
A poor night’s sleep might leave us less inclined to exercise, while a gentle walk might help us feel calmer.
We tend to think of diet, exercise, relaxation and mindset as separate things to work on.
But our body doesn’t experience them separately.
And that means something we’re doing in one area of our self-care may be influencing the results we’re hoping for in another.
Think back to those ten cups of coffee and the relaxation exercise. The relaxation might be perfectly helpful, but the caffeine could be making it harder to feel the benefit.
It’s not necessarily that the advice is wrong. We may simply be overlooking something else that’s influencing the outcome.
Not all self-care works in the same way
There’s another reason our expectations can sometimes lead us astray.
Some kinds of self-care support our everyday wellbeing through small actions repeated regularly. Their benefits may build gradually over time.
Others are useful when we need them. A few minutes of relaxation, listening to music or stepping outside for some fresh air might help us feel better in that moment, even if the effect doesn’t last all day.
Both can be valuable.
But if we’re expecting an immediate result from something that takes time, or a lasting change from something intended to help us through a difficult moment, we might miss the value of what we’re doing.
Could your expectations be hiding useful results?
Sometimes our self-care really isn’t giving us the results we need.
But sometimes it may be doing something useful, and we’ve been judging it against expectations it was never likely to meet.
So if you’ve followed good advice but feel disappointed with the results, here’s another question worth asking:
Am I expecting more from this self-care than it can reasonably give me?
You might discover that something has been helping more than you realised, or that another area of your wellbeing needs attention too.
What if there’s more to your results than you realise?
This is just one of several reasons why you might not see the results you expected, even when you’re following good advice. Different reasons can come into play at different times, and sometimes more than one may be influencing your results.
Understanding what might be influencing your results can help take away some of the confusion and uncertainty about what to do next.
If you’d like my help, I’ve created the Make Self-Care Simple Method to help you navigate that uncertainty and find your next step, even when the answer isn’t clear.
And you can get started for free by discovering your Body Guidance Style — because we don’t all notice our body’s feedback in the same way.