Yesterday was my day off. I’ve had an extremely busy few weeks and for the first day in 2020 I was taking a break . ‘Well earned’, I thought when I sat down with a coffee watching Loraine on ITV, and there she was chatting to Katie Piper about the #FebYouary challenge. I hadn’t heard of this before but I liked the idea of a month to highlight self care. I’m always telling people “you can’t give from an empty cup” but in reality I think my cups overdrawn and I need to set up a repayment plan! I’m a “ spoonie” which basically means I have a chronic health issue and I need to balance my life carefully to ensure I have enough energy to do what needs doing, and prevent running on empty. I am also an occupational therapist who doesn’t always practice what she preaches, although I do try.
listening to Katie and Lorraine chat about finding time for you, and their participants sharing how they plan to engage with this, made me think about occupational therapy and how what we do influences our health and well-being. I hear lots of stories about health professionals neglecting their own health and well-being, stressed, overworked, feeling responsible, feeling like you have to be indestructible and hold it together for everyone else – this made me wonder what everyone else Is doing to manage their self care? I’m going to take the opportunity to engage in the #FebYouary challenge to re focus on some of my own needs and life balance. I shall tweet about this from my twitter account @GillyGorry and I would like to see other occupational therapists join in.
if you would like to join the challenge please use the hashtags #febYouary #Otalk #occupationaltherapy I will gather up the tweets at the end of the month and add to the blog.
https://www.thebraincharity.org.uk/whats-on/news/691-what-s-spoon-theory
