Body Check-ins

When do you bring your thoughts back to your body so you know how to care for it?

Transcript

0:01 Hi, this is Katie and thank you for joining me on the My Senses, My Space podcast. And this is a podcast about connecting with your body, feeling its senses and making space, whether it's physical or mental or emotional, to just take care of yourself.
0:20 And don't <laugh> try. Don't expect me to remember how I say that every single time, like I am making this up on the fly.
0:29 And it may vary from time to time or I might actually write it down at some time, but those are my feelings about what this podcast is about.
0:40 Today I wanted to talk about body check-ins, and I do this all the time with my son. I feel it's really important when we're either overwhelmed, ruminating, just busy with being distracted by something, with having a deep dive on a hyper fixation, something along those lines where we're actually
1:07 feeling disconnected from our body and we actually aren't keeping track of what it needs. And so he can be usually like really excited about something or he's really into playing his video games and I say, Hey buddy, real real quick right here, look at me, body check in.
1:25 And he'll look at me <laugh> and he'll be like, whoa, I'm really hungry, <laugh>. And, and that's the thing is like, it's very easy for us to either kind of separate ourselves from our body and just kind of be in the moment and have these really intense focusing moments where we're like working
1:46 really hard on something. Or just really entranced, what is the word? Not entrenched, entranced, very just into our work, right?
1:59 We can get into just like, I love what I'm doing and we lose our ability to feel through all of our senses.
2:10 We may be using our site and using our sense of touch to type things out, but we may not be paying attention to like our inner needs of like water, food, rest.
2:26 And so I find these moments where whether I have like a alarm go off or some kind of standup reminder on a watch or some kind of thing where I know at particular points in the day I'm checking in and going, wait, how does my body feel?
2:48 Especially for me when I'm having flareups or when I'm having my period or something where my energy dips up and down.
3:00 So I may go into the day going, okay, I'm gonna get all this stuff done, but sometimes I know at the beginning of the day like how my body is and what it needs.
3:12 So that morning time is really critical of going, okay, I'm doing a check-in first thing off the bat, right? Like wondering if should I nourish myself more?
3:25 Should I drink more water in the morning just because of the day of the month? Or if it's between infusions that I'm getting, like what is their what, how can I nourish first thing in the morning?
3:38 But after that, it can be kind of hard to remember to go, wait a minute, what am I doing today?
3:44 Because then my ADHD kicks in and goes, oh, you know, let's, let's pause, wait, you know, my hyper fixation, I need to pause for a little bit and really go, okay, we need to remember that we need more water today.
4:01 We need to ha eat something that's just going to really help our bodies instead of possibly causing it to go in the other direction.
4:14 So, so it can be hard. So I have notes in my planner, I have re reminders, I check in with my son.
4:23 So what could help you, what could help you in your particular day-to-day needs? Figure out like, this is a day that I need more.
4:36 This is a day where I'm more self-sufficient, where, you know, I, I already have like maybe some pre-made meals that I know are gonna be healthy.
4:45 Maybe I have certain snacks at certain times. It can be temporary, it can be for the week. It can be something that you're doing every single day for a month just to make sure that you're like, or the year or <laugh>, you know, forever, which is like more like water is what I'm thinking.
5:08 But it could be that you're nourishing yourself with certain types of foods for a whole month. And I'm not talking about diet stuff.
5:16 It's not about that. It's about what you may be trying to figure out is works best for your body. Or it could be just for that day of just going, okay, this is going to be a really hard day, so what can I do to balance that out?
5:32 Do I need, need to take like a mid-afternoon like power nap or full nap? Like it's okay to take naps if you really need that.
5:46 And I found my husband and I in the evenings are taking these little cat naps cuz we are just exhausted right now.
5:55 I'm going through my own bodily things, but we're like going through life and you know, as soon as it's after dinner we're just like, oh my god, <laugh>, we need to like close our eyes for a bit and then we perk back up.
6:10 We are night owls. So that kind of fits with our rhythm. A lot of people couldn't do that, right? But for us it works because we know that our brains are gonna be up.
6:22 They'll, they'll kind of rev back up in the evenings, but still it's important to do kind of like that body check in around that time too and go, okay, how can I best nourish myself for the evening?
6:37 And I think it's really important to talk about self care and self soothing, which I've been hearing a lot about lately.
6:46 We can self soothe with things and I don't think there's anything wrong with that. Maybe we need to have a snack that's crunchy, maybe we need to wrap ourselves up in a blanket.
7:01 But what does self-care then look like? Are those self-care? I consider those like self soothing. It's blurry, right? <laugh>, it's blur.
7:10 It can be both. It can be both. We don't have to have like things in strict boxes, but we also have to realize like self-care things may not be providing enough self-care.
7:23 And what I mean by self-care is also community care. So there's self-soothing, self-care and community care and partner care and <laugh> family care, you know, so there's all these different ways that we can care for ourselves and be taken care of by others.
7:43 So is it providing you know, having doctor's appointments that really are helping you step through your goals for health reasons?
7:56 Like for me it's, you know, staying on top of talk, talking to certain doctors concerning my conditions. It's getting those annual visits to make sure nothing else is going on on top of these.
8:12 Are there ways then that I can donate if I can, if I feel my cup is overflowing a bit, then I can help provide communities to like the local food bank or any type of local communities, how can I support them to help take care of my community as well?
8:33 How can I volunteer for them? How can I do things if they're at home? Like I, I'm more restricted to doing things at home, but how could I support that community?
8:44 How can I support myself? How can I support my family? How can they support me? And along the way there's going to be self soothing because I need to regulate my body.
8:58 I need to have comforts along the way if I'm becoming overwhelmed and everything and there's no shame in that. So what do you need right now?
9:12 What do you need? What does your body need right in this moment right now? Like seriously right now? What does your body need?
9:22 My needs water and probably some lunch soon, <laugh>. So I hope this helps and I'll catch you next time on the My Senses, My Space podcast.