Imagine you’ve started something new because you’ve been told it should help you sleep.
So naturally, you watch your sleep.
A week later you’re still waking up at 3am.
It’s not working.
Except something else has happened.
You’ve stopped getting that horrible afternoon slump.
You have a little more energy when you wake up.
And you’re no longer reaching for something sweet at 4pm.
None of those were the result you were looking for.
So they’re surprisingly easy to miss.
I think this happens quite a lot with self-care.
We usually start with an expectation.
This should give me more energy.
This should help my digestion.
This should make my joints hurt less.
And understandably, that’s where we look for evidence that it’s working.
But our bodies don’t always give us such neat answers.
Sometimes the change is obvious.
Sometimes it’s small.
Sometimes something completely unexpected changes first.
And sometimes the feedback is so mixed that we’re left wondering what on earth happened.
That’s where it becomes easy to decide:
It didn’t work.
But perhaps there’s another question worth asking first.
What did my body actually do?
Not what was supposed to happen.
Not what happened to somebody else.
And not just the improvement I was hoping to see.
What actually changed?
You may still decide that what you tried wasn’t particularly useful for you.
But occasionally, when you look again, you realise your body gave you more information than you first thought.
And that’s why learning to recognise your own body’s feedback is such an important part of Make Self-Care Simple.
Because before you can decide what to do next, it helps to know what actually happened.
If you’d like my help…
Start with the free Body Guidance Review. (Learn more here) 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.