Lindsay Rios is the Head of Sales & CS at zeroheight, a company building the DesOps platform for UX, starting with UX documentation.
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What does self-care mean to you?
To me this means two different things.
1) You are doing things or spending time on something that is completely for you and nobody else and re-energizes you mentally. For me this could be locking myself in a room to make things with my cricut machine all day or spending a day with my mom and sister without any strong agenda.
2) It means having your boundaries be respected. When we get burnt out it’s probably because your boundaries are not being respected. For me, if I am asked to do something without enough information or time to do that task well, it gives me a lot of stress. It’s up to me to express this “boundary” but also up to the other end to respect it if I am going to be taking care of myself.
How do you know when you’re feeling stressed or burnt out?
Interestingly, we had a great thread going about this in our mental health Slack channel at work the other day. Someone was brave to share that they have been really struggling, and they wanted to be vulnerable to take the first step to taking care of themselves.
I jumped in to echo I’ve been feeling the same and what I do know is I feel anxious and burnt out when I don’t feel like I have any control over anything in my life, when it feels this way in both work and personal. I may or may not be a little bit of a control freak.
Do you have a regular self-care routine? If so, what does it look like?
I don’t have anything too regular yet. I am so much better at making sure others are doing self-care than myself, however the above situation sparked new inspiration to take some action so I came up with something new.
I am going to start in June: “Me days!” Once a month, I will take off a work day to do whatever it is I want for self-care. I shared it with my team and CEO recently and have also encouraged others to do the same. Luckily for me, I work at a company where this is celebrated, not only supported.
What bumps you off your self-care routine and how do you get back on course?
I’m a little redundant here but, I really get knocked off my groove when I feel as if I have zero control of anything in my life. At this point in my life, I know this much about myself and it’s something I try to work on.
It takes a lot of work to learn how to “let go” more. That being said, this is also how I am naturally and fighting it when I am in fight or flight mode doesn’t help. So when I feel like this, I try to do small things that I can “control” to get back on course to help remind myself that it’s not true. It could be as simple as tidying up my work space or revisiting my planner.
Where do you go for inspiration, ideas or tools for self-care?
Well, Balance the Grind is pretty great for inspo on this topic. I often just get inspo from something online or a show I was watching but I also tend to get most of my sudden ideas for self-care when talking with those closest to me. Which in itself is a bit of self-care too.
Before you go…
Self-Care is our new interview series exploring the different self-care routines and habits of people from all walks of life. Get in touch with us today if you’d like to talk about your self-care routine.
