Self Care Routine | How to prepare for a bad day

If you have a chronic illness, mental illness, trauma, and/or neurodivergence, you know that bad days happen and they're often unexpected and can throw you off course for days, if not weeks or months. Today, I want to help you build a self care routine for your bad days so you can make the most out of them without overdoing it.

Watch the video below or read on for the full transcript.

For the best advice on getting unstuck, being productive, and living your best life with chronic illness, trauma, and depression, subscribe to my channel and hit the bell to be notified when I post a new video every Tuesday.

Creating routines is one of the things I help my clients with inside my coaching program. Accountability, Muse. Now it's your turn. We're going to build out two different SOS day routines. The first will be for days when you have the opportunity to focus solely on yourself and the second will be for days when you unfortunately have to get stuff done, even though it's an SOS day.

Before we dive into building the routines, however, you need two pieces of information. First, what is your existing routine? And what are the specific signs and symptoms that mean it's an SOS day for you?

The first question is important because it's a lot easier to revise an existing routine than it is to build a routine from scratch, and answering the second question helps prevent decision fatigue so that when a bad day happens, all you have to do is measure it against your pre-decided SOS day criteria to know whether or not it's time to use one of your SOS day routines. Why is that important? Because it's really easy to underestimate a bad day until you've already gotten to the other side of it, which makes it way too easy to get slight ourselves into thinking that "this isn't really an SOS day, I'm fine," when you're really not. Deciding your SOS day criteria in advance helps mitigate that, so you can actually take care of yourself when you need to, instead of shaming yourself into thinking you don't need extra care when you actually do.

Let's start by brainstorming the elements we'll need for each of our SOS day routines, and once we have those, we can build out our two routines.

Element number one: what is the bare minimum of care you need in a day to simply survive? I'm talking food, water, medicine, hygiene, movement, mental health relationship, et cetera. And when I say bare minimum, I mean it. This first question is about survival care.

Element number two: what are your capacity limits on SOS days? For example, how long are you able to focus before you need a break? How much movement can you do before you need a break? It's crucial to know what your limits are on bad days, so you can build them into your routine.

Element number three: what are your top three favorite and helpful self care activities? And what is their order of importance to you? Examples include self massage, nap, meditation, taking a bath, et cetera.

Element number four: what are your top three favorite and helpful joyful activities, and what is their order of importance? Examples include reading, watching TV, writing, art, contacting a friend, snuggling with a partner, playing with a pet, et cetera. Comment below and tell me one of your favorite self-care activities for me, it's using Jill Miller's yoga tuneup balls for myofascial release and massage. It's really great for my hypermobile Ehlers-Danlos syndrome.

Element number five: what are your productivity priorities, and what is their order of importance? Decide on at least your top three here. It's normal to feel like you can't answer this question until a bad day actually happens because you can't predict the future, right? I want to challenge you on this because while yes, you can't know the specific tasks you'll need to accomplish on a future day, you do have the power now to prioritize your big rocks. If you take time to go through your life and create a prioritized list of all of the areas, responsibilities, projects, and tasks that are on your plate most of the time, it'll make it so much easier on a productive SOS day to prioritize what's on your to-do list, because it's likely that each thing on your to-do list on a bad day falls into one of the areas you prioritized on your master list, which means you won't have to do much work to prioritize your day.

Now it's time to take all of these elements and build your two routines. First, it's helpful to have your normal routine available for you for reference. For demonstration purposes, I'm going to take you over to my Google calendar, but you can build out your routines wherever makes the most sense.

Welcome inside my Google calendar. Again, this is just for demonstration purposes. You can build your routines on a piece of paper, if you want. Whatever works for you. This is just going to make it easy for me to show you. I'm going to start off by showing you what my kind of standard weekday routine is. And then we'll go from there.

So on a standard average weekday, I tend to wake up at nine 30 in the morning. And then my morning routine tends to take about two hours. After that I have my workday, which includes a lot of breaks. Then I have my dinner routine, which includes cooking dinner, eating dinner, recovering from dinner. And then I have my evening routine, which includes my routine before going to bed. So this is the bare bones structure of an average day for me.

Now, I want to show you how I translated my average day routine into an SOS day routine for a self care day. And remember that a self-care SOS day routine are the days when you are able to a hundred percent focus on yourself and resting and taking care of yourself. When you're building these routines, remember that the first thing you pour over is your survival stuff. The things that you can't get rid of in order to function. So for me, that's my morning routine. I still have to have a long morning routine, however, on a self-care SOS date, notice how I get up later. I get up an hour later and that's just what I've learned from experience. I need an extra hour sleeping in. So if like I wake up at nine 30, I realize it's an SOS day, I let myself sleep more if I can and just take longer to get out of bed, and then I still need to eat dinner and I still have a dinner routine.

However, what happens is that dinner routine is different on an SOS day. I'll either like make a pizza, order takeout, graze on snacks. I don't make myself cook on an SOS day because I mainly, I just need to eat to survive and whatever my stomach can handle is whatever my stomach can handle. So that way I'm not overworking myself and I'm still eating food, cause it can be really hard to feed yourself on SOS days. So making that a priority, feeding yourself in as simple a way as possible so that you're getting food, is really important. And then as you can see, I still have my evening routine getting ready for bed, taking care of myself there.

The main difference on an SOS day is that instead of having a workbook, I transitioned between self care, tasks, rest, and joyful activities with a focus on self-care and rest, the joyful activities that I had you brainstorm earlier, really only come into play after you've taken care of yourself, because some days all you have spoons for is taking care of yourself and that's okay.

Now let's look at an SOS day routine where you unfortunately have to get things done. And this is where your top three priorities come into play. All right. So here's an example of a productive SOS routine for me.

Again, my morning routine is later in the morning so I can get more sleep or I can just take longer to get out of bed. Dinner routine is about the same. Evening routine is about the same. However, the evening routine is now a focus on rest and recovery because I've had to get stuff done earlier in the day. And then for the big old work block, I basically break it up to resting after my morning routine. I know that sounds redundant.

However, you'd be surprised how exhausting getting yourself out of bed and fed in the morning can be. So if you don't include rest in your morning routine already, which is something I suggest, add rest after it, so that way you're focusing on recovering. So that way you've got spoons in order to work on your first priority. And then you work on your first priority and then you rest and recover from it. And then you do priority two and then you rest and recover from it. Then you can have dinner and then you can do priority three. If you try to get all three priorities done in that afternoon block, that might be too much for you. Basically when you have an SOS day, but you unfortunately have to get things done, you want to focus on your first priority first, recover, and then if you've got juice work on your priority two, recover, and then if you've got juice work on priority three.

That's kind of the basic structure. How you actually build your routine is a hundred percent up to you. This is just an example of what I might do for myself on an SOS day.

Last but not least, what can you do on a better day, like the day you're deciding on these routines, to make following an SOS day routine and no brainer? Can you store medications, bottles of water, and non-perishable food in your bedside table if you wake up and can't get out of bed? Can you have the list of your personal SOS day symptoms posted on your fridge in your planner or as your phone's wallpaper? This idea is particularly great if you struggle with object permanence, for example. Can you make your self care, joyful, and productive activities more accessible for you on bad days? Can you have your laptop and lap desk ready by your bed if you wake up and discover it's a bad day? If you have a mobility aid like a cane, can you store it by your bed? Can you have low prep or even no prep food available in your fridge and pantry so it's easier to feed yourself throughout a bad day?

The options are endless. Leave no opportunity for accommodation unexamined. You'd be surprised at how much simple accommodations like these can have a profound effect on you, especially on bad days.

Et voila! Now you have a normal routine, a self-care SOS day routine, and a productive SOS day routine. You know what's really great about this? You can use this formula to build even more routines for whatever unique circumstances you experience. For example, you could build out a routine specifically for days, when you have to travel to a doctor's appointment. You could build a routine for days when you see your therapist and needing more emotional self care. The possibilities really are endless, but I get that that can be overwhelming, so for now, start with the two types of bad days that tend to cause you the most problems. Then go from there.

There you have it. You now know exactly how to build an SOS day routine to ensure your bad days have less power to become your worst days.

Meanwhile, if an unfortunately common part of your bad days is a tendency toward procrastination and resistance, I highly recommend checking out my free masterclass, where I teach you three mindset shifts and one simple three-step system to help you kick procrastination to the curb. All you have to do to get access is go to this link and sign up.

By the way, I'm doing research to develop the perfect productivity course for people with chronic illness, mental illness, neurodivergence, and trauma, who just feel stuck. If that sounds like you and you enjoy my videos, I would love to talk to you. Click this link to book a time to chat with me on zoom. Thank you for your help.

Check out this blog post next to learn all about how I time block based on my capacity.

If you liked this video, hit that like button and subscribe and be sure to share it with your friends. I'll be back next week with another video. See you then. Bye.