The concept that you should take care of you and indulge yourself is everywhere, but it’s usually in the form of advertisers advising you to vacation somewhere exotic, buy a new car, a new house, or new clothes – for no other reason than you just deserve it.
But now, pampering your needs has taken a different turn – people are focusing more on their mental and physical needs to promote happiness and calm in their lives as a way of escaping stress.
You’re overworked, underpaid, the house is a mess, the family or romantic relationship is stressing you out and you feel the need to practice a little self care. While there’s nothing wrong with taking care of yourself, it can easily slide into the area of self-sabotage or the development of bad habits that can derail your goals, hurt your health and lead you down a path that you don’t really want to be on.
This can take away what you really want in life and strip you of what you’ve worked to achieve. Many people splurge on themselves every now and then – especially on special days such as birthdays or holidays and there’s nothing wrong with that.
But if you’re not careful, you can let frequent splurges become less about soothing your soul and more about mindless overindulgence. There are ways to examine your life to see if there are signs that maybe you’ve crossed the line from self care to sabotage.
If you do something for yourself, then later wish you hadn’t because now you’re paying the price for it, that’s one symptom. An example of this can be indulging in a binge shopping spree that wrecked your budget to the point that now you’re hurting financially.
Some people refer to this as playing, then paying. If whatever it is you want to do to treat yourself keeps you from reaching personal or professional goals, then it’s sabotage.
Self sabotage can become ritual that you turn to automatically and in the long run, it causes trouble or discouragement. An example of this is feeling upset about something and blowing a day’s worth of calories on a single meal.
You have to take stock of your life and see if what you’re doing is causing you to ignore your goals or suffer setbacks. Look at the self care routine or product you’re about to invest time or money in and see if it’s about to make things better or somehow make them worse.
Self care will always help your life for the long-term, while sabotage may only give you a comforting feeling for a short time.
