How to be gentle on yourself

0:03Speaker 1:Welcome to Before Breakfast, a production of iHeartRadio. Good morning. This is Laura. Welcome to the Before Breakfast podcast. Today's tip is that tracking your time can help you see how much you have going on. That can then help you be gentler on yourself about days when you may not get as much done as you'd like. As longtime listeners know, I am a passionate advocate of tracking your time. If you want to spend your time better, it helps to have good data. After all, if you don't know where the time is going now, how do you know if you're changing the right thing? The truth sets us free, and we want to make sure the stories we tell ourselves about our lives are true. But as my Best of Both Worlds co-host Sarah Hart Unger recently pointed out, there is another potential benefit. Time tracking might make you more self-compassionate, she said. Sarah tracks her time periodically. In reviewing her time logs a few months ago, she got a new perspective on days when she hadn't accomplished quite as much as she hoped to. She wrote, tracking time has helped me to see that on many such days, this has nothing to do with personal failure or even self-discipline.

1:32Speaker 1:It's just math. I love the insight, it's just math. If you spend nine hours at work, two hours in the car, two hours taking care of small children, 45 minutes on showering and brushing your teeth and eating, and an hour at the dentist's office, there's just not that much time for anything else that day. Consequently, you can be gentler with yourself. about why you didn't go to the gym for an hour on that particular day as well. On a day with limited discretionary time, you are not going to make it to both the dentist and the gym.

2:10Speaker 1:It is most likely one or the other. And that is okay. Because one day isn't all there is. In general, I have found that when people track their time for a week, they feel better about their time. In many cases, I think that self-compassion is part of this, and it stems from looking at time more holistically. People might be telling themselves a story that we never eat as a family. That's because it doesn't happen daily at 6 p.m. But a time log might show that your family is eating pizza together on Friday nights and a meal together Sunday evening.

2:50Speaker 1:Twice a week is not never. It is a lot more than never. You can be gentler on yourself when you see that something is a lot better than nothing. I will also note that self-compassion and strategy can work together. You can be gentle with yourself about not getting to the gym daily, and a time log might show that if you put the kids on the bus two mornings a week instead of driving them to school, you might open up another 20 minutes for exercising at home. These things are usually not either-or. But some days are also just full. When that is the case, a time log will show that and will allow you to make your peace with it. There is no point berating yourself for not doing something that simply doesn't fit. The math is the math. And you can look at the things that did happen that week and be happy about those. In the meantime, this is Laura. Thanks for listening. And here's to making the most of our time. Thanks for listening to Before Breakfast. If you've got questions, ideas, or feedback, you can reach me at laura at lauravandercam.com. Before Breakfast is a production of iHeartMedia. For more podcasts from iHeart Media,

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