How alternating work and self-care changed my posture and my revenue
You sit down to work and look up hours later. Your eyes ache. You skipped lunch. You got a lot done, but you do not feel good.
This year I started working a different way. I do a little work, then an act of self-care, then a little bit of work, then an act of self care. This has done wonders for my mental and physical health. What I did not expect was how much it would change my business.
In this post you will learn:
Why short breaks make your work better
How self-care helps you find your stopping point
Why capacity is what grows your business
The shift from doing to being
What happens when we work too long
When I work without stopping, I disconnect from myself. I stop being a person and become someone just doing things. Every act of self-care brings me home.
When I feel more connected to myself, I do better work and I do less of it. I stop overworking. I can see what enough looks like. I can find my stopping point. I put in enough work today. I will come back tomorrow.
“Every act of self-care brings me home.”
If you have ADHD, hyperfocus makes that line even harder to see. The breaks keep your higher self in the driver's seat.
Your body has been talking this whole time
Years of chair time had changed my posture. So I started using my breaks for posture exercises. One day I walked past a mirror and my neck looked straight and long again. This is not a cute self-care idea. This is your health.
The breaks also helped my intuition speak up. It told me to sleep on the floor, lower my desk, and break my workouts into small pieces through the day. I am sitting on the floor as I edit this blog post.
Capacity is the real growth strategy
When you first try this, you will hit tension. The work is not done and the deadline is coming. One path says you cannot take breaks. The other says the work needs to change.
The fear is that the business will not grow if you do not do it all. That is the lie. Once you refuse to sacrifice your well-being, better questions show up. How can this be simpler? What boundaries, prices, or systems would help?
You will only act on ideas you have capacity for. Small capacity, small ideas. Big capacity, bigger ideas and bigger revenue. Capacity grows from taking care of yourself more. So when I want my business to grow, I do not ask what I need to do. I ask how I can take better care of myself.
ask yourself: