Taking Care of Dr. T
As an extroverted introvert, I learned early in my career that I loved seeing patients and working with people, but it came at a cost. The cost was my energy to do other things, especially social things after talking with 20+ individual patients in a work day. The cost was also an almost repulsion to physical touch because so much of my job as a Chiropractor is to be physically touching people during adjustments. It felt like I had nothing left to give to my loved ones outside of work, and that just wasn’t fair to anyone. Awareness of why I was feeling this way was the first step in taking care of myself. I needed to acknowledge that it was happening and realize this wasn’t abnormal. Talking to a friend of mine who had little kids at the time made me realize that because she was experiencing the same thing. She was interacting all day, always had to be “on” and attending to other’s needs. She also shared with me that her loved language was “physical touch” before she had kids. After being touched by those sweet little hands and bodies all day, she wanted nothing more than space for herself.
So many people experience this phenomenon, and to change it takes some serious self reflection and a whole lotta trial and error. My Chiropractic brain perceives this as sympathetic overdrive that requires nervous system attenuation and my Functional Medicine brain thinks more of the physiology of the hormonal cascade that requires nutritional and lifestyle intervention. Both strategies have had their place in taking care of my body and mind to make sure I can keep doing what I love and love what I am doing for decades to come! Here are some ways I have prioritized taking care of myself:
Chiropractic Care
As a Chiropractor, I see the benefits that my patients receive from care targeted at the management of acute injuries. However, the more I experience in practice, the more I have come to witness the outcomes from regular Chiropractic Care as a body optimization practice. This really goes back to the nervous system function and how we can modify the communication between the brain and the body through adjusting various spinal segments. In particular, the parasympathetic system (known as the “rest and digest” system) is housed in your upper cervical and sacral nerves. These are the “brakes” of your nervous system and can calm down the hyper-stressed state many of us get stuck in. By tapping into the parasympathetic system, we can improve sleep, digestion, blood pressure, anxiety…the list goes on! My weekly adjustment with Dr. Gabby in our office are something I look forward to. I have a few moments to focus on my breath, do a body scan to see what I am feeling in my body, and also have her expert technique recognize things I couldn’t see in myself.
Eating Regularly
In the last year I have been doing a deep dive into my nutrition. Not just what I was eating but how I was approaching food. This will be a whole blog post in itself because there is so much to unpack. For now, I have come to realize that eating regularly throughout the day, even if it isn’t perfect, is better than skipping meals. Skipping meals or not eating enough is a stressor on your body. Maybe it feels good in the short term, and I can attest to thinking that I just “felt better” when I hadn’t eaten, but overtime it will start to reduce your resiliency to stress and it will not continue to feel good. It will feel like fatigue, depression, brain fog, insomnia, sluggish digestion, low libido, and even weight gain to name a few. I recognized that I was not prioritizing breakfast and I didn’t think lunch was necessary. Then, I would get home and binge on tortilla chips while I made dinner and have the worst sugar cravings in the evening. It was so obvious, but it took time for me to realize this was a product of not eating throughout the day and my body was in panic mode to get some nourishment, especially because my job is so active. Nutrition is a HUGE thing to tackle and we like to make it super complicated which can keep us from getting down the basics. For me, I started with eating breakfast. I came up with 4 Quick Breakfast options and stuck with those during the week. On the weekends, we may go out to brunch or get fancy with French Toast. This allowed flexibility as well as consistency. I knew what ingredients I needed to have in the house for breakfast and also how long it would take me to make each meal. Once I got really good at breakfast, I tackled lunch. The first step was to literally schedule it into my day. I also approached it similarly to breakfast and came up with a few quick lunch ideas that I could count on having groceries for. I also made time to prep my lunch the night before, literally the way my mom taught me when I was in grade school. Ah yes, those life lessons really come in handy.
Make time for white space
White space is when you take a break from work and other commitments to let your mind travel to where it wants to go. This allows for creativity and allowing you to “be you”. For me, this was reframing how I felt about exercise. It was time I was giving to myself to take care of my body, not something I had to do to look a certain way. Running in particular has become such a crucial way for me to clear my mind and see what naturally comes to me. I have always loved walking and find my best talks with people are done while on the move. Running is a way to have a conversation with myself and I feel like the best ideas come to me during them or I figure out the answer to a problem I hadn’t been able to get to the bottom of.
I am also a creative person and find love in creating art, practicing French, and playing the piano. These things help me to feel balanced and allow me to access a part of myself that sometimes feel hidden away in the sometimes seriousness of working in healthcare.
Prioritizing Sleep
This is a hard thing to admit, but I have the hardest time with the simplest thing you can do to take care of yourself. Having a solid sleep schedule! I don’t know what it is. I am from a family of die-hard night owls and die-hard early to bed folks. There really is no in between, and I fall solidly in the night owl category. I was born at 3:02 in the morning and I will admit, if my husband (who is a 9pm bedtime guy) is out of town, it is awfully tempting to stay up that late. After all, if that was a good time to be born, it must be a good time to be working on a puzzle while watching feel good TV! However, if there is one thing that marriage has taught me, it is that I feel so.much.better when I go to bed by 10pm. Don’t get me wrong, I still love sleeping in. It is one of my absolute most favorite feelings in the world and probably fulfills the White Space category above. That being said, most days do not allow for sleeping in, and if I want to get my morning walk and breakfast in (the things that get me set straight for the rest of the day) I need to be getting out of bed at least 2 hours before I leave the house for work or other commitments that I have.
Creating Boundaries
I read somewhere that walls are for keeping people out but boundaries show people the door. This is something I am continuing to work on and it really is a product of going many years without having boundaries set which requires transparency and honesty. As an empath, I feel perpetually called to be helping people and problem solving. This may be the “oldest child” in me as well! I want to be there at all times, but as my practice has grown, I have found this to be unsustainable to be able to provide so much access to myself outside of appointments. The lack of boundaries has probably been the number one thing that has costed me my energy and affection for my loved ones. Just like you can be addicted to cortisol from going long periods without eating, I became addicted to checking my email and messages to make sure “no one needed me”. Oh that ego. The thing is, I am not an ER doc who can save you from a medical emergency. There are no medical emergencies in my line of work that should take me out of an experience with my nieces and nephews, cause me to lose my focus on a card game I get to play with my parents, or take up brain power while I am watching a movie with my husband and fur babies. Over the last couple of years, I have built some structure around how I am available for communication. I am so grateful to have a phenomenal patient concierge, Natalie, to help implement these boundaries. Bringing on another doctor to share in my Chiropractic workload has also made it possible to not overbook myself with appointments or to schedule appointments outside of my work hours. This has allowed me to be so much more present and energetic during my patient visits as well as have energy left over to come home and still be a present wife, sister, daughter, and friend.
A day in the life
If any of this resonated with you but you don’t know where to start, I would start with an activity that I call “A Day in the Life”. This is where you take a good hard look at how you are spending your time during the day and how you feel as a result. Write it all down, from the first thing you do when you wake up to the last thing before you close your eyes for sleep. Everyone has a different lifestyle, different stressors, different goals. These are all things you can take into account when trying to work out how you can take care of yourself and therefore improve your resiliency to stress. The thing is, stress isn’t going anywhere. You can’t out supplement stress no matter how good your Ashwagandha is. What you can do is make room in your busy life to eat, rest, have fun, and take care of your body. You’ll be amazed as what happens when you start sending safety signals to your body instead of fire drills.