What about me? Putting yourself first in midlife
Ever put aside your own needs because you thought you were being selfish? Maybe it’s time you put yourself first.
Show notes
If you’ve ever sacrificed not just your own wants but also your own needs because you’ve been told that putting yourself first is selfish, you’re in good company.
But it’s important to realize that being concerned excessively or exclusively with yourself, without regard for others, is 100% different from asserting your own desires.
In this podcast episode, we look at how constantly prioritizing others’ needs leads to feeling unappreciated and undervalued, and serves up experiences of burnout, and mental exhaustion. We note that it’s our generation who often struggles with this idea of “not being selfish” the most.
And because of this, we really encourage you to start with small steps in areas around:
- saying no
- setting boundaries
- honoring your physical needs
Feeling like you might be letting people down is a tough one for us midlife women. However taking care of your own wellbeing ultimately benefits both you and people around you. It enables you to show up as who and how you want to be – and that’s a win all round.
Transcript
Kate: Welcome to the Midlife Spotlight podcast. I’m Kate Campion –
Sara: and I’m Sara Garska –
Kate: and we’re certified life coaches obsessed with helping you find joy in this next act of your life. Whether it’s reviving your midlife marriage, losing weight, or scratching that “what next” itch, we’re here to share our experience and expertise with you.
This podcast is a weekly dose of YOU time, where you get the tools and tricks to improve your health and happiness. Talking to you is so much fun, so thanks for tuning in. Let’s get started.
Kate: Hello and welcome to Midlife Spotlight, the show that helps you enjoy your second act. I’m Kate Campion.
Sara: And I’m Sara Garska.
Kate: And in today’s episode, we’ll discuss why it’s not selfish to put yourself first. So Sarah, we know it’s really common for midlife women to not only put aside their wants, but actually also their needs because they see it as being selfish.
So what we’re going to be doing today is unpacking the impact of this to show our listeners why it’s important to prioritize yourself.
And we’re also going to look at what happens when you start honoring your needs because that can be a bit frightening too.
So in preparation for this episode, I was thinking a lot about being selfish and what it means. And I wanted to ask you that word selfish, if you think back to your earliest memory of being told you were selfish, what comes up?
Sara: Actually, there are – I’m laughing because I got told fairly recently I was selfish, by a family member. But yeah, growing up, that would be taught not to be selfish.
Whatever that looked like, don’t be selfish with your things, don’t be selfish with what you have. So yeah, that was definitely – so I grew up in the 60s and 70s. And so that was a big part of upbringing was not be selfish.
Kate: And I had the same experience, like when I was thinking about it, I thought, you know, my earliest memory of someone saying don’t be selfish was because I had something that I did not want to share.
And so I was being told that I had to share because if I didn’t, I was selfish. So like that idea of selfishness, we’ve kind of come to internalize as being that my needs or my wants aren’t as important as anybody else’s.
And interestingly, I did go and have a look at the dictionary definition because, you know, I like to get my definitions right.
And the Merram Webster definition of selfish says that “you’re concerned excessively or exclusively with yourself, seeking or concentrating on one’s own advantage, pleasure or well-being without regard for others.”
And when I thought of that definition, that’s actually quite different to not wanting to share your favorite toy with someone who might break it, right?
Sara: Yeah, because when you read that definition, at the end of it was like without regard to others. And what I think we’re going to be going into is because we’re so afraid of being selfish, we’re thinking too much of others.
Kate: That’s right, and not enough. of ourselves and I do think you know you talked about growing up in the 60s and 70s and I grew up in the 70s and the 80s and I do think it is something a lot more common with our generation.
And actually earlier this morning before we recorded this episode I was literally reading something on Instagram and it was talking about four-year-olds not sharing their drinks with their moms because they didn’t want to and how that was a good thing and I, and funnily enough, I was, that’s not a good thing you should be sharing.
And I really had to stop and think about you know what I really thought about what was going on in that situation – but that’s something for another day – but I think definitely our generation has been taught to put others in front of ourselves often to our own disadvantage so it’s not like we’re actually disadvantaging somebody else we’re really disadvantaging ourselves.
And I started to think about well, what’s the impact of this? Like when we actually say I can’t do what I need to do or I can’t do what I want to do for myself because of how it might affect somebody else. How does it actually show up?
Sara: Yeah, and I’ll use I’m going to just use like romantic relationships because and so it’s something I’ve been working on like because I don’t have a framework for being selfish in that particular way, like I was raised in a very what I’m going to say a traditional American home where my father went to work every day.
And, and when I was really little, I think he worked sometimes two shifts like he worked hard. I mean, he did his part.
But when he came home, he was the king. Like everything in our family revolved around his comfort. Dinner was the time he wanted it, we watched what he to watch on TV because there was only one TV. He had the most comfortable chair. Everything was for his comfort.
And so I actually didn’t know anything different.
And so what I found is, I just – not being selfish and really overthinking someone else’s needs, I end up getting really resentful.
So that’s one way that I’ve seen. And then at some point, like I said, I’m not in a relationship right now because it was like, I just would find myself losing myself. I end up like, oh, wait a minute. I don’t even know what I like anymore. And I don’t have that in every area, but that’s just one. So that’s one of my personal experiences.
Kate: Yeah. As soon as you said that about resentful, that was a thing that came up for me as well.
Because when you’re in that situation where you’re always taking care of someone else’s needs, I found the same thing.
It didn’t make me a nicer person because I was just doing it with so much resentment. Yeah, it defeats the purpose, right?
Sara: It does because, you know, I think women are so well-meaning and because I work with women, it’s always going to sound like I favor women over men. But it’s just that’s who I work with. And so, but I just see that over and over that women, midlife women do put up.
And I don’t mean just husbands, partners, children, co-workers, not just co-workers, but their employers, the organization. And I’m sure you’re going to get to it like the health effects as well when we are not being selfish.
Kate: Yeah, you talked about what are the effects of actually constantly, like putting others’ needs in front of your own.
And I did write down a few little points. First of all, is you can often feel quite unappreciated, because you know the sacrifice that you are making for somebody else, but they might not actually see it.
So as well as that resentment that is there, that’s that feeling of like, you don’t even recognise or appreciate what I’m doing for you.
This can lead to feeling undervalued, having low self-esteem and then burnout and mental exhaustion. So, you know, there’s a whole lot of negative things that definitely come with not looking after yourself.
Sara: Yeah. And so many women have jobs, careers. I mean, and then they go home and then they start their second job. And so I was talking to a woman, and she’s not a client. But she was telling me about her life where she worked all day, and she had a very demanding job.
Because here’s what happens to not non-selfish people. People, I don’t want to say take advantage of them, but no one is going to respect your time and your energy if you’re not.
So what I see with non-selfish women that are also good workers, good… they just get more. They’re the ones everyone goes to.
Like, she’ll always, like, even though she has a deadline, I know I can go to her and get some help.
And so I meet women that like do more than their job at their job because they’re also doing all this other stuff for other people because it would be selfish not to help somebody.
And so they’re exhausted at work and then they go home and then they’re just doing it all there too.
And it’s exhausting. That’s a good word. But they don’t know a way to not be selfish. So I’m going to you know they don’t know how to prioritize them. Like in some ways it’s easier for them to be miserable, exhausted, resentful than to be uncomfortable telling somebody no.
Kate: Yeah. And I think it’s really important to acknowledge a bit what we said before about the generations in which we grew up. And I think you also really highlighted it when you gave that example of what happened in your own home because we grew up in these situations of seeing the primary bread winner who was usually the man go out and do the job, right? And then like you said, everything in the house would revolve around them. So that was a model that we saw. At the same time, we also got these expectations that we would go and get a full-time job.
And so A, yes, I’ll take care of the home, husband, king, whatever. B, I will also work really, really hard. And that isn’t something, again, that our kids and their kids experience, I think it’s something that’s quite unique to us.
And I had a really interesting example. So Sara and I, of course, both have our blogs out that we run and mine is on relationships. And I was updating an old article where I talked about how to get your husband to help more with the house work, which again, I think is probably a very generational problem because when I first wrote that article back in about 2016, I used some statistics from the US Department of Labor and Statistics or something.
And it was talking about how… I think on average, women did – it was like two and a half more hours of housework a week than men. And by that as well, I’m talking about if some people have got quite traditional divisions of labor in their housework, like my husband loves to mow the lawn, for example, I’ve only mown the lawn once and it was when he had a leg injury.
So you know, even when you took those divisions of labor into account and merely added up the hours, women were doing like two and a half hours more.
When I came to read up to update that article this year, the statistics that I got were maybe five years later, six years later, that time had shrunk by an hour. So you know, that that difference between men and women in the work or couples in the work that they were doing at home was a lot less than it had been prior.
And I really do think it’s because later generations have grown up with different models, right? They’ve grown up with seeing both parents going out to work and try and make the housework or one parent, you know, go and do those things. So they’re much more inclined to go and help.
But women like us who have had those two models, I think we’re the ones that really struggle with it the most.
Sara: Yeah, that is true. I’m gonna just tell a funny story because it just happened last night. I was out to dinner with my, one, of my daughters and her husband and the kids and his mother, and it was a big meal. And there was a lot of leftovers at the end. And so we were packing them up and I think it was my daughter. She says, oh my gosh, I’m not gonna have to cook for a couple days. And everybody at the table laughed because she doesn’t cook. And she said, well, well, there’ll be less dishes to do.
But it’s like, yeah, and so her husband, it’s not, she doesn’t have to ask him to do stuff. I mean, not that she does, but he just does stuff in, you know, talking to my daughter-in-law and my son, same thing. Like, they, there’s not, she isn’t managing all the chores and giving him his assignment.
Kate: Yeah.
Sara: I think that’s a little bit different. Like, you know, yeah, my husband did the mowing and the, those kind of stuff.
And he was pretty good about the inside stuff too. But yeah, what I hear is, you know, a lot of people have to ask their husband or just like, he won’t even take out the trash.
And there’s a lot of that where, you know, now that you’ve said it, when I look at my children, it’s like, they don’t have that kind of relationship. It’s just accepted that both people are going to do their share around the house, which I think super cool.
Kate: Definitely, definitely. And, you know, something, you know, where we can actually really take a leaf out of looking at their book and how they approach things.
And so many things actually, I think around self-care and stuff like that. But going back to us, you know, and the fact that, okay, we might still be stuck in this sort of trap.
One of the things I think that, starts to happen when we’re not taking care of our needs is we initially start to feel like a little bit of discomfort and it’s kind of like that resentment that we talked about that that grows inside.
And then the more that we don’t pay attention to those – I always look at it that like anything in life we’re doing that doesn’t serve us the little nudge becomes a bit of a shove, you know?
Sara: Or it becomes a physical pain.
Kate: Exactly a literal pain that will force you to stop and pay attention.
So for our listeners, you know If you’re resonating with any of this stuff here and you can sense within yourself that you’ve got this little voice or this little nudge that’s saying actually I need to start making a change, here’s your signal. Because if you don’t start paying attention to that little voice it will manifest itself in some ways in some physical reality.
Sara: Yeah, and it’s not just like around chores and things I see it manifest like because you just used the word self-care.
And that’s what starts to go.
Like a woman will feel selfish because she needs to rest. I mean, because sometimes, and I’ll ask this question, like, when do you know you’re done for the day?
Like, when do you know it’s OK to rest? And they’ll say, when I am exhausted and can’t move. I mean, it’s like, OK, we need to take care of ourselves before we can’t, before we’re exhausted.
Because when we’re exhausted day after day, like, that’s going to have bad physical outcomes at some point. But it’s selfish to rest, it’s selfish to rest when things need to be done.
And that’s kind of, I think, where we’re getting to, is like, these things aren’t selfish. So I have another example of being a little selfish.
So I was going to visit my mother back in the fall. And I haven’t been to see her for quite some time.
Oh, maybe through COVID. I don’t think OK, it’s an embarrassingly long time. But it would have been a long time.
Anyway, so I’m an introvert. So sometimes I make plans and then I regret it. But I booked my airfare and I think I booked every single day I had off. I booked a nine, eight day trip or something. It was crazy. Anyway, as I got closer, I could feel my stress getting higher.
I knew it was too long for me to go stay with anybody, not anything against my mom. She’s lovely.
And finally, I just went in, changed my air travel to give myself a couple days when I got home to recuperate.
We still had a nice long visit. And when I went, it felt selfish when I was doing it. Totally felt selfish.
Like, who am, why can’t you… What happened was when I went, I was fully able to enjoy the visit. I was able to be very present to my mother. I was never resenting her because she wasn’t pushing for it, but it was all in my head, like I didn’t want to be a selfish daughter.
But when I was a little bit selfish and I acknowledged that I had needs, that when I travel, it’s tiring for me and then when I get home, I need a rest so I can be available for my clients. And we ended up having the best visit. It was – so being selfish, so what I want to say is my point with that is being selfish is good for everybody in your life. It’s not just good for you. It is good for everybody because when you’re happy, it’s good for everyone.
Kate: It is. But you know sometimes though, even when we first start to do that and put our own needs first, there are some thoughts that come up and thoughts that you kind of alluded to.
And we talk a lot about limiting beliefs or we’ll talk a lot about limiting beliefs on this podcast, which are those ideas that we have about how we think things are that stop us from doing certain things.
And some of the limiting beliefs that come up around being selfish are things like I don’t have time to look after myself or I don’t have the money to put this need of mine first. They’ll be angry or upset with me.
Sara: That’s good.
Kate: I imagine that maybe you thought with your mom, you know, will she be angry or upset if she realized that you’re actually taking time after-
Sara: Taking two days off the trip.
Kate: Exactly. And then even like that I don’t deserve, you know, getting more into the negative things like I don’t deserve to look after myself. For whatever reason or even crazily I’ll be punished in some way if I choose to.
Sara: You say more on that one. That one’s kind of intriguing.
Kate: Like people get mad. There’ll be a negative consequence that’ll come up. Like if I go and do this, someone, okay, so let’s think of an example, not from my own life, but let’s say that you had a partner and that you really wanted to go and do something for yourself, but you felt that if you were to go and do that, that they would react in a really negative way that would end up in you being punished and by them.
Sara: Which can be a real thing.
Kate: Yeah.I hear a story.
Sara: Yeah, not. Yeah, I’m just like, yeah, that can cause problems in some cases. But that’s a whole other thing. That’s like a problem in the relationship. But a lot of times, it’s really our own mind holding us back.
And two of the things that really resonated with me were the time and the money. Time and money.
Kate: I don’t have time to take care of myself.
Sara: And I don’t have the money to. And those are big for women, not being willing to spend money on themselves.
Like, and this isn’t a plug for coaching, but I’m going to use coaching or therapy or getting a massage or any other kind or, you know, when you’re getting like your nails done or something. You know, the things that make us feel good.
Kate: Yeah.
Sara: And it can feel selfish to do those things that are not necessary but feel good. Like, that kind of resonates with me.
Like, selfish when we’re doing something that makes us feel good.
Kate: And so like, let’s say that a client did come to you with that idea of I don’t have time or I don’t have money. How would you coach a client around that?
Sara: Well, with time, so with time, it’s a process because, so women don’t like to take time for themselves.
So because I work with a lot of clients that want to lose weight, one of the things is that they don’t take time to eat.
So having a woman take time for herself just doesn’t come easy to them. And so part of it is, like we talked about, getting comfortable with letting other people down.
Kate: That’s a big one.
Sara: So when we talk about the feelings that women don’t like when they’re so-called, I’m doing air quotes, being selfish, is not just being uncomfortable, but specifically letting someone else down or disappointing someone. Like those are dreaded feelings for women. Like I don’t want to disappoint anyone. I don’t want to let anyone down.
And it took us a while to get there. But those are huge with the women I work with. Not wanting to let someone down, not wanting to disappoint someone.
And so when they take time for themselves, whatever it is, that in their mind is taking away from someone else.
It might be a partner, it might be a child, it might be a coworker. Because when they say no or they don’t do something, someone may feel let down.
Kate: Yeah. And actually I want to say something on that because earlier in the show I- made that comment about how I read that post with the four-year-old not sharing their drink with their mom.
And I actually felt really strongly about that because I do believe that there are certainly times in our lives and there are certainly situations where we should put other people’s needs first because as a functioning society, as a family, you know, there’s like a real a give and take. There’s a flow. There’s like, I’ll put myself aside for this child. Like child rearing is a fantastic one to look at.
So let’s just look at your midlife woman. She’s gone and she’s reared her children and she’s had a job and that’s great that she feels good about what she did.
It’s it’s great that she feels good that she chose to maybe not do some of her own things first.
You know, that’s up to her to feel that way and she should be honored for feeling that way.
But at the same time, when you hit midlife and that job is done, you can take pleasure now on the fact that now you can focus a little bit more on yourself because I still don’t… I don’t want to kind of push the view that I think everyone should be 100% out for themselves all the time because I think I mean a lot of things would fall apart, right?
Sara: I’m gonna push back on that a little bit, Kate.
Kate: Go for it.
Sara: Because unless you’re a sociopath, that’s not gonna happen. So I’m pushing back that that’s almost, yeah. So yeah, I raised kids, no regrets, no regrets.
So I hear what you’re saying, but the problem is the give and take, it’s just more give, give, give at midlife.
So I’m just pushing back. I don’t even push back about that four year old kid. It’s like, no, you don’t have to share a drink with anybody.
Because the first thing that came to my mind is when we don’t even allow our children to have an opinion about who they share with, then that child grows up to somebody that doesn’t have the boundaries because it’s hard.
And so I’m not going wrong. I’m just, you know, but I do love to push back and like, like, no, let’s challenge this.
Let’s in my experience, you know, with most women, there’s not ever going to be a problem of them being too selfish.
Kate: Yeah.
Sara: And if someone is, there’s probably something else going on.
Kate: Yeah.
Sara: And just that idea that somebody could be too selfish is what we need to question. Like even, you know, there’s always going to be give and take. There just is in life. But in my experience, women, especially midlife women are givers, doers and it’s never going to be a problem that they are too selfish.
Kate: I hear what you’re saying. Yeah. And I mean, that was the context of that particular post was about how you learn from an early age to recognize your boundaries.
And I guess what I’m trying to think about or to honor. or as people that might be feeling bad for giving too much, if they sort of did the wrong thing. Because I don’t think that is the wrong thing.
Sara: No, not at all. It’s not the wrong thing, but we learn as we grow.
And so, you know, when you think of your life like three parts, we talk about midlife, which is, but you know, there’s that through, or maybe 30, where we’re learning, growing, going to school, starting our careers, all that.
And then we have the period of our life where we’re if we have a family and we’re doing that, where we’re working, raising our family and all that.
And then often, you know, in the third part of our life, that’s when we start, start really taking care of ourselves. So there’s no reason to ever look back like, oh, I did too much or, you know, you do what you do during those years.
It’s usually pretty active. You’re doing a lot of things, taking care of a lot of people. It’s just, but then we have these habits and this, when we get to midlife, it’s hard to stop the doing and to focus on ourselves. So maybe we’re saying the same thing, we just were saying it differently.
Kate: Exactly. And it’s like, and how do you stop that giving? So I had a bit of a think about how I’d done that in my own life and how that shows up in my own life.
And probably some of the small things that I’ve thought about, that I’ve done that I would have considered maybe selfish or worried about the impacts on others, even as little as going to bed when I choose to.
So, I mean, my husband and I go to bed at the same time every night, and that’s actually something that is really important to me. But even just thinking, no, tonight I need some extra sleep, I’m going to go up, like, it was a big thing for me to do. And then another thing was, and this is even bigger, is choosing not to see certain people in my life because I felt that I had to.
So there were definitely some extended family members that I was just like, actually, you know what, I don’t ever want to see that person again. Or I’ll see that person-
Sara: You can’t see my face but I’m like, yeah, I’ll see that person. Such a taboo thing.
Kate: – if I have to. But you know what? No, I’m done. I’m done with that. And actually, it’s felt really good for these people who have been on the periphery in my life, but like I said, from social obligations or family obligations, I felt like I’ve had to connect with them. I’m not going to give anything out of this so why should I say give up these five days and my holiday to go and visit this person who I don’t even like?
Sara: And that’s such a good one. That’s a juicy one. It could be a whole episode.
Kate: It could be. And probably the bigger, the most selfish or most put in my own needs first was probably when I left my teaching job.
And so because that was something that felt like it had a lot of high stakes things attached to it.
It had financial things attached to it. I took a significant pay cut when I transitioned to another job. We sold our dream house that we built out in the country that we absolutely loved and relocated to a completely new area.
And so at those, at the time, like that felt like that was a really massive decision to make that could have really negative implications for my husband.
And I was just doing it kind of for me. And so that was a challenging thing to do. However that kind of links back to the idea we were saying at the beginning about how life will give you little nudges when you’re not paying attention to the things that aren’t serving you and it will become worse and worse.
And now I can look back and all that’s happened in the years since I’ve left that job and see that it was 100% the right thing to do. It just took a lot of courage to kind of get there.
Okay, so Sara, before we wrap up, is there anything else you want to say about this idea of not being selfish when you put yourself first?
Sara: I think this could be one of our most important topics that we’ve talked about or that we’ll talk about, and I hope we will revisit it because I do think it has – this idea of not taking care of ourselves because we feel like it’s selfish towards other people really affects women and in all ways.
You know, they’re overworked at work, but then it has effects on their health, their relationships, and just their perceived satisfaction with their life.
It, you know, they’re more surviving than thriving. And so just, I love that you brought this topic up, and we had a chance to introduce it.
And I definitely want us to revisit it because this is just the beginning. And that beginning is this idea like it’s, even though we think it’s selfish, it’s not necessarily selfish. And when we prioritize other people over ourselves, we’re not doing any of us any favors.
Kate: Yeah, for sure. And so, but like we said, when you do often start doing it, you can have those limiting beliefs that crop up. And so one way of kind of getting past those is just to take those really small steps first. So like, before you go, burn your job to the ground, for example, you just go to bed before your husband and do that first and then yeah ask yourself I think you said very importantly then it doesn’t it doesn’t like help yourself to do that right but it doesn’t actually help anyone.
So one of the things to think about is if I put myself first in this situation, how will it actually benefit me?
And let’s just even use that trivial example of going to bed earlier, right? So if I choose to go to bed right now because I’m hung- because I’m tired, that’s going to benefit me because I’m actually going to wake up tomorrow feeling good.
How is that going to benefit my family? Well I’m not going to be a complete cow when I wake up.
How is that going to benefit the universe? Well I’m actually going to go up and show up in my life in the way that I want to you know being my favorite self, being my calm self, being my whatever self. So I guess yep like you said this is a really important topic that we’ll look to revisit but first of all just think about what you can do to just like take those baby steps towards putting in your own needs first.
Sara: Yeah, just give it a little consideration. The world needs all of you, not just the part that’s not being selfish. Because I do think your gifts get more of a chance to come out when you’re taking care of yourself.
Kate: Yeah, so did that. And I know we were meant to recap, but you know, I was just even thinking then, if I hadn’t chosen to leave teaching, I wouldn’t have been able to get into coaching.
I wouldn’t be in this conversation with you right now.
Sara: Perfect example.
Kate: It actually gives me so much happiness.
Sara: So yeah, beautiful way to end it. Loved it. Thank you. Awesome.
Kate: Thanks so much for listening to today’s episode. If you loved what you heard, you can leave a review so we know to keep more of it coming. You can also visit our website at midlifespotlight.com and learn a little bit more about us. We love connecting with you and can’t wait to see you next week.
