Episode 4 Podcast Show Notes - Creating Space for Yourself

This episode is about the importance of creating space for yourself, what happens when you don't create space for yourself, and how both introverts and extroverts, people with a lot of time on their hands or people who are busy can apply this. I talk about having dates with yourself and scheduling yourself into your calendar. We talk about what it really means to be with yourself and will practice that in a short meditation.

If anything, by the end you'll have gotten the message that it is absolutely important to take time to be with yourself and hopefully you can make it a bigger part of your life!

Some ideas of dates with yourself:

Take yourself on a walk
Go on a drive with no specific destination
Take yourself on a picnic
Watch clouds turn into shapes
Plant something
Go to a hardware store or art store to just get ideas
Go on a walk and find leaves and flowers to press
Go to a grocery store and purchase three items you have not tried and try it/make something with it
Look at Google Maps to see parks around you to visit that you may not have noticed before

Activities of things you can do at home to be with yourself:

Play music, and if you don’t know how, learn something for fun
Let yourself just listen to new music, without doing anything else, without it just being background noise
Make yourself the most delicious cup of tea
Write in a journal
Write a short story
Play with something- play dough, legos, etc.
Vision board/cut parts of magazines and collage it
Spend an hour going through your books just for fun
Write a poem
Make a list of future dates you’d love for yourself. Think fun, not just to-do
Write a letter to your future self
Write hand-written notes
Turn all technology off, even lights, and light a candle
Color in a coloring book
Long bath or shower, with candlelight
Create an impromptu podcast just with your phone recorder
Draw or paint along to music, a drawing for each song

Transcript from the first few minutes of this episode: “Hi and welcome. Today we're going to be talking about the importance of creating space for yourself and what happens when you don't create space for yourself. Also, what does it really mean to be by yourself and how to actually enjoy being with yourself? So let's begin. Yes, this topic is a good one and has been popping up a lot for many people in this time of quarantine. This is for the people who tend to be more introverted or like having a lot of alone time and aren't necessarily getting it right now. And this is also for people who tend to be very extroverted and very social and don't actually know how to enjoy time with themselves and really everyone in between. So what happens when we don't create space for ourselves? One is that we get irritable, we get annoyed or frustrated at our loved ones, we snap at things that don't normally make us upset. 

Imagine a cat. If you just kept poking this cat, eventually it's going to hit you or it's going to swat or it's just going to run away. And that's kind of what happens to us when we're constantly bombarded with stimulation or the need to respond to others. Cats are really good at creating spaces for themselves. They know their limits, and they take the time and the space that they need, which happens to be a lot of napping hours, and they're comfortable in themselves. They don't need so much validation from the outside world. We have a few cats at our home and they all have very unique personalities. Even the social ones they have their time, you know, they might have different rhythms and different ways of interacting, but they all take care of their own needs, whatever those needs are anyways, enough about cats for now. 

So several people have expressed to me that during this quarantine period, navigating finding time to be alone is one of their biggest challenges. People are used to having all of their time with the same people every day. And it can get tense if you don't learn to create these spaces for yourselves. 

And I'm going to go into a bit more detail about how you can do that, integrate it into your life, and how you can do that. in any situation. One of the tools that I learned to create space is to have a date with yourself. I learned this from a class that I took in grad school, which was called ‘Innovation, Design, and Usability’, where we had assignments to unlock our creativity. And one of these assignments we had was to schedule a date for yourself and we had to do this every week write about it, report about it. It was part of the class and when this professor was talking about this, I just realized that oh, I've never scheduled myself in my own calendar. I would schedule plans and appointments with others, even if it was by myself needing to run some errands, the time that I had with myself was just something that would happen to occur in between things. Yeah, at that point in my life, I was constantly shuffling things around just to be able to fit in more and more that semester, I was a full-time grad student freelancing on the side learning a language and part-time internship life just felt like a constant game of catch up and the thought of scheduling like a two-hour window to go on a date with myself, which, you know, in my mind could have been great productive time, but towards studying work or anything really, it just seemed counterintuitive. It was never just time with myself that I would put in my calendar.

And so have you ever done that for yourself? You block out a time for yourself and then in terms of thinking about what to do on that day, you might consider what your inner child would want or something that you wish that someone would do for you to take you on your dream date. The point is to find something to do with yourself that isn't part of your regular routine that isn't something that you have to do something that would just bring you joy. “