Happy Easter Monday! During the season of Easter I would like to highlight the topic of self-care. By self-care, I mean more than just pampering yourself with a spa treatment, retail therapy, or a night out with friends at Buffalo Wild Wings – I mean the overall sum focus on caring for your health, body and spirit.
Self-care involves humility wherein we admit the limits of our bodies, recognizing that we depend on our Heavenly Father for all of our needs, including needs for physical rest, nutrition, and emotional rest. Without taking self-care seriously, we profess that we have it all taken care of. We may indulge the fantasy that we can ignore whatever limits we feel in our bodies for a later time when we will catch up with rest. How common this is in the fast paced world in which we live!
As a mental health counselor, one of the most frequent problems I encounter is that of a lack of rest. Often, reasons for struggling with adequate rest are multi-faceted. On the one hand you may struggle with too much work and too much stress in your life. Daily life tasks feel like they pile up and overwhelm to the point where you may feel tired, worn out and spent.
On the other hand an equally troublesome cause of unrest is the strain you may put on your mind: repeated automatic self-states of worry, self-doubt, self-punishment, and resentment. All contribute to living too much in your head and feeling out of touch with your body’s natural calming rhythms. As a result of this mental torment, you may feel quite tired even on a day off from work responsibilities.
Come night time, mental unrest accumulated during the day can turn into racing thoughts at night, leading to difficulty falling asleep as a person tries to solve and think through the next day’s problems while lying in bed in a frustrating state of wakefulness.
Many a time people have asked me how it can be possible to feel so much anxiety first thing in the morning, before even encountering anything to be stressed or worried about. When I am asked such a question I usually want to know more about what things someone was worrying about the previous evening and likely as a result also dreaming about.
What a contrast to this litany of worries do we find in the counsel of God’s Word.
“In peace I will both lie down and sleep, for you alone, O LORD make me dwell in safety.” -Psalm 4:8
Our ability to have true rest is very much tied with routine. It is a routine of faith to lie down each night and die to the concerns of the day, entrusting all things even our very life to the safety Jesus gives to us.
We find rest in many of the daily routines of life. God designed our bodies this way. It has long been a recommendation of the medical field that it is best to go to bed around the same time each day and get up around the same time each day. Following such routines requires the humility of seeing our limits and responding with decisions to care for ourselves by setting boundaries of how much we will work on something in a day, how late we will stay up, and how much time we will allow for relaxation, good eating, recreation and play in order to manage the stresses of daily life. Building up the ability to rest is a gradual process. The various forms of media entertainment at our fingertips requires the ability to say no to one more Netflix episode, or one more quarter of a football game in order to say yes to whatever calling of service awaits you the next day.
“Come to me all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.” – Matthew 11:28
I wish you all peace and mindful rest. ~Pastor Nick