Calibrating your self-care dose

For those of you who’ve been reading our newsletter for a while now, you might recall a piece I shared a while back about my experiences with menopause symptoms and emotional reasoning. In case you missed that one, you can read the original post here.

Despite success with curbing my emotional reasoning (most of the time), I found my physical symptoms persisted and there were days when I still noticed their effect on me. (I was less playful, less energetic, less talkative). Armed with self-compassion, curiosity, and determination, I became a better observer of my symptoms and noticed some ebb and flow.

After several weeks of self-care experiments, my efforts paid off and I found what seems to be the perfect self-care practice for my postmenopausal life as a clinician: cardio exercise. Yup, who’d have figured! I’ve even managed to figure out the specific dose that works best for me—30 minutes on a treadmill (I won’t bore you with the details of my incline and speed), no less than every third day. If I go 3 days without my dose of “cardio/treadmill self-care” I start to notice those pesky physical symptoms starting to creep back in.

I honestly can’t begin to tell you what a game changer this has been for me personally! Particularly interesting to me (because I’ve never experienced that post-exercise “high” that people who exercise describe) has been my dedication to maintaining this self-care strategy. Don’t get me wrong, there have still been times when I’ve gone more than 2 days without my dose, but this has happened infrequently.

I think my motivation to maintain this particular self-care practice has happened for a couple of reasons:

1) I identified specific “symptoms” that I was trying to target and how I wanted to feel instead - i.e., more playful, energetic, talkative

2) I monitored the impact that different strategies had on these areas.

By doing so, the benefits were so incredibly clear to me that I’ve been able to use this as a motivating tool on days when I might feel too tired, busy, or fill-in-blank to take my dose of “cardio/treadmill self-care.”

And to be clear, this strategy is less about exercise itself, and more about tuning into the evidence about what self-care strategies work best for me. We could just as easily be talking about reading, or dancing, or deck staining.

In what ways would you like to feel differently and what does the best version of yourself look like? Do you notice times when that happens? How can you use that information to design self-care experiments that help you figure out not only the type of self-care that works best for you, but also the dosage?