The Hidden Costs of Always Putting Others First

Spam Filter For Your Brain - Episode 133

This week's podcast is a little reminder of something that I'm sure you know, but I bet you've often forgotten, especially when it comes to yourself, and that is the ever-brain breaking news that you have been socialised to put yourself last.

Especially if you have been socialized as a woman, to put food last, to put your health last, to put your romantic needs last, to make sure that everybody else in your work environment is all right before you get onto your workload and maybe even take some things off other people's plates, just to make sure that that everything is going smoothly.

We are taught and socialised that we must ensure everyone else is okay. And this is what makes us "a good person". Everybody else, when we are taught this message subtly and not so subtly, rarely includes ourselves.

This is evident in many different areas. The number of people I know who must feed everyone else, ensuring everyone else has their food, while they're always the last person to get the plate or the last person to take whatever is left of what's on offer for others.

The amount of people that I hear talking about what is unpleasantly known as sleep revenge, where you feel like you've given so much of yourself to everybody throughout the day that at the end of the day even though you're really tired, you end up staying up really late and doing things that aren't actually that interesting, but just then you've got a little bit of time to yourself.

The amount of people I speak to and coach who have slots in their diary which are frankly rest breaks or moments where they just need some time to themselves, but when they look in their diary, they consider "free space" to be the same thing as other people, available to other people time, and they don't safeguard and protect their own time and their own well being in the same way that they would protect and safeguard and respect a meeting with somebody else.

Protecting your own needs has to be an active choice because it's working against the stuff that we have been taught if we want to disentangle our moral whip that we have been handed in this lifetime to regard anything that is in looking at our own self care or our own self worth or prioritising ourselves as "selfish". Even the word selfish is seen as a bad thing. I mean, what could be more important than looking after yourself? Because if you don't, you become someone else's problem and that's kind of selfish.

Taking this idea of looking after ourselves as being just as important as any other human can be so much more of a gentle step rather than feeling like you need to put yourself above everybody else, which I think people think is the opposite. I have to put myself last or I will be selfish. I have to put myself last; otherwise, how will all of this stuff get done?

And my dream in this world is to try to build systems, structures, and places where none of us are ultimately holding all the stuff, so that we. If we disappear or we become ill or we get tired, the whole thing tumbles down.

Ideally, what we want to do is create structures, systems, and environments around us where everybody shares a little bit of the weight. There's that beautiful analogy that in a choir, if there is a mass group of people and everyone is singing the same note, people can take breaths at different times, and the song will continue because the whole group as a whole is holding that space together. And I invite you this week to have a think about where this could show up in your life. Where could there be a chance for you to take a micro step back so that other people can step up and say that you are not holding quite so much for everybody all the time and so that you're not ending up so exhausted.

Prioritising your needs is a deliberate choice. I wonder where that could be possible for you. I'll speak to you next week.

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