Sometimes Life decides to test how serious you are about self-care. Not even necessarily by throwing major curve balls – those would be obvious. When there’s an emergency, clearly sometimes boundaries need to be crossed temporarily, for the good of all. I’m talking about a form of scope creep.
Scope creep is a concept from project management. It’s what happens when a project’s scope changes beyond what everyone originally agreed upon, without adjusting the corresponding schedule, budget, or resource needs. People find themselves confronted with extra work that they hadn’t planned on doing, and it can be very draining and damaging to team morale, as well as potentially sending costs skyrocketing. Project managers spend a lot of time and energy trying to prevent this from happening, and it is generally considered to be a bad thing.
In real life, outside of a work environment, we can also find ourselves dealing with increased demands on our time, energy and caregiving resources. It’s OK – it happens, but it’s important to recognise when it’s happening, and be sure to adjust our own self-care resources as much as possible.
As an example, I recently had a situation where three people who are dear to me all required extra care from me – all in the same week, and all for excellent, completely legitimate reasons. It would have been easy for me, as an inveterate caregiver, to spend all of my time taking care of other people’s needs, while neglecting my own. It’s natural, it’s what we do, it’s what those of us who were socialised as women have internalised as the way of the world.
If you have followed me for any length of time, you know that exercise, especially running outside, is a staple of my self-care – more for my mental health than physical, although of course some form of exercise is crucial to maintaining our vigour as we get older. I have certain time slots set aside in my schedule for running, and I found that I wasn’t honouring them as I should. It was just a little too easy to let my own needs slide while dealing with those of others. This is why I refer to this phenomenon as a form of scope creep – the extra demands creep up on us, and before we know it, we have let go of everything we had set aside for ourselves. If we find ourselves feeling burned out and resentful, the voices in our heads tell us we are selfish for feeling that way. It’s not selfishness – it’s an important reminder about the need to allocate more resources when the scope increases.
Just as a reminder, I’m not talking about an emergency situation here – just other people’s needs being increased, hopefully for a limited time. The scope of caregiving increases, but we sometimes forget to allocate extra care to the caregiver, too.
I take it as a sign of how much I have grown in the past decade that I have been able to say “I’m going for a run, I’ll be back in about an hour and a half, we can continue with this then.” Doing what nurtures us in times of stress and extra demands, even if we have to be creative in finding time for it, is crucial for being able to give the kind of care we love giving to people who matter to us, while avoiding resentment and burnout.
How do you protect your self-care in times of stress? I’d love to know!