The Simplest Act of Self-Care I Know
For days when you're tired but wired — here’s the place I begin.
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Dear friends
Yesterday afternoon, a caring reader reached out with a pastoral note: "Please take care of yourself."
Now, I thought I was doing fine. In fact, I thought I was doing better than fine — I was flying! My brain was “working exactly as it’s meant to”, “holding four or five different posts at a time”. I was “calm and hyperfocused” (though I acknowledged I had the mental capacity for little beyond my writing). I was “downloading fully formed ideas while I slept”, and waking up after 4 or 5 hours to write about them.
I was on fire! (Honestly, he must have thought I’d lost it.)
But I appreciated the gentle nudge and I decided to respect it. So I opted to put in place an easy practice for self care.
Less than 24 hours later, I'm seeing things in a very different light.
What I see clearly now is that I was skimming the surface of my own limits — not crashing, not even faltering outwardly, but ever so slightly disconnected from the ground beneath me. It’s the sort of thing that doesn’t register when you’re in a state of flow, especially if that flow is productive, for a cause. But it takes energy to fly, and I hadn’t realised how much I was borrowing from tomorrow to keep myself airborne.
In that state, I couldn’t see how tightly I was gripping the wheel. I couldn’t feel the small ways my body was signalling, quietly, that it needed something different.
Not a collapse. Just… a softening. A re-entry. A hand on the earth.
Rest.
Rest isn’t the opposite of action, it’s what enables action to be sustainable. Without rest, the whole system wears down — mind, body, spirit, even purpose.
The importance of rest isn’t just about energy conservation. It’s about integration. When you rest, you’re not doing nothing — you’re giving your body and brain the chance to process, absorb, heal, and reweave everything you’ve been doing and learning. That’s when scattered pieces come together. That’s when creativity deepens, memory consolidates, immune systems repair, and your sense of self begins to return from the edges.
And yet, in a culture that worships productivity, rest can feel indulgent or even irresponsible — especially if you’re someone who’s wired for service, or who feels the urgency of this moment in history (as so many of us do). But here’s the truth I keep having to relearn: rest is resistance.
It’s an act of reclaiming your body from the machinery of extraction. It’s a refusal to measure your worth in output alone.
And it’s also just really practical. No one does their best thinking, their most grounded writing, or their clearest seeing when they’re sleep-deprived and running on fumes. Rest clears the fog. It returns us to ourselves.
But how do you rest when there is too much to hold, and too few places to set it down? Even when the day is done and the lights are off, your mind keeps going. It turns over everything that’s happened — the headlines, the messages, the unfinished tasks, the quiet dreads. Your nervous system doesn’t get the message that it’s safe to stop. And without some kind of boundary, that cycle continues into the night and starts again before you’ve even left your bed.
This is not a minor problem. And it’s not going to resolve itself.
So today I'd like to share with you the easiest — and perhaps most important — act of self-care I know. It's what I did last night, following that thoughtful reader's gentle prompting.
If you want your mind to rest, you have to give it a clear signal that the day is over, and that it’s allowed to stop holding everything. The most effective way I know to do that is this… ready?
Switch your phone off at least two hours before bed, then place it somewhere you're not going to go — neither in your bedroom nor your kitchen. Leave it there until morning.
Scratch that — until you've had your first cup of whatever you like to drink in the morning.
This isn’t about breaking a habit or reducing screen time. It’s about reclaiming the conditions that allow you to rest, and move forward with intention.
When your phone is switched off and out of reach, your mind is no longer braced for input. You’re not waiting for the next update. You’re not scanning. You’re not silently preparing your emotional response to the next crisis. You are — finally — allowing yourself to stop.
What you do in those two hours doesn’t need to be purposeful or impressive. It just needs to be something you can become immersed in. Something quiet, preferably with a rhythm or a texture of its own — something that draws you out of the day without demanding much in return. A familiar novel. Something you can make or repair. Music. Gentle movement. Nothing that centres around current events, and nothing that asks your mind to analyse or plan.
I'm not going to pretend that I follow some deep and meaningful spiritual practice in those two hours. Sometimes (ok — in extreme cases) I do, but rarely. Most evenings, it’s far simpler than that. I engage with my family. I cuddle with our dog, go for a walk. Sometimes it’s a candlelit bath with essential oils and Epsom salts. Other times, I’m just sitting in the dark beside my partner, watching a drama on TV. Nothing remarkable. Nothing curated.
What matters is that I listen to what my mind and body need in that moment — and I honour it. Without judgement. Without performance. Just a quiet act of self-respect.
Once I’m in bed, and before I drift off to sleep, I have two brief practices — and when I say ‘brief,’ I mean forty seconds, tops. First, I offer myself compassion with these words, really letting the words land:
May I be happy safe and well
May I be loving and loved
May I be free from harm and suffering
Living a life of peace and contentment.
If I’m feeling a little extra energised and have another fifteen seconds in me, I’ll picture a group of the people I most care about and extend the same blessing to them.
And then, quite simply, I tell my brain: You can rest now. There is nothing for you to carry. And I roll over and sleep.
If I wake in the night — as many people do — I offer the same instruction again. And when I haven’t been doomscrolling before sleep, my brain recognises the truth in it. It believes me. So, again I turn over, and sleep returns.
If you wake in the night, your phone’s not there to pick back up. So try allowing your brain that same release. And keep a book beside you, just in case — something gentle, but absorbing enough to hold your attention while your nervous system settles again. Or a notebook, to catch any thoughts your brain still feels the need to carry.
This isn’t a sleep hack — it’s simply my way of helping my mind release what it’s been holding, when I need it to.
When you get up in the morning, leave your phone where it is. This part is just as important. Give your mind something else to focus on as a quiet act of deliberate intention — because it allows you to decide how the day begins. And that, in turn, can shift the direction of the whole day.
Our first focus matters. It shapes what our systems orient to, even before we’re fully conscious of it. A few deep breaths. A bit of movement. Reading something that speaks to what you value. Making contact — a short conversation, a quiet moment with someone you care for. Or simply returning to the compassion practice.
When I’m feeling rested, I’m more able to extend that compassion — not just to those I care for, but to someone I feel neutral about. And eventually, even to someone who’s really pushed my buttons.
Anything that brings your mind into relationship with the world on your own terms, before the feed tells you what to react to — that’s the practice.
None of this is about escaping. It’s about creating the smallest possible boundary between ourselves and a system that treats our attention as a resource to be mined. That system does not rest. We have to choose to. And that choice becomes possible when the device is off and out of reach, and our minds are given something else — something stabilising — to hold onto.
You don’t need more information. You need space to let go. At night, that means creating the conditions for your mind to release its grip. In the morning, it means giving yourself one clear thing to orient to before everything else floods in.
That’s why I keep coming back to this one change:
Switch your phone off.
Leave it behind.
Let your mind come back to you.
It’s the simplest act of self-care I know.
I took that reader’s words seriously — not as an admonition, but as a kind of blessing — and something shifted. I let myself land. I stopped writing. I stepped away from the screen, drank water, stood barefoot in the garden, looked at the sky for longer than a passing glance. And I remembered.
I remembered that I am not a machine, even if I can move like one when I’m in mission mode. That I write best not from the blazing centre of urgency, but from the calm after the fire — the place where insight settles, where what matters begins to shimmer.
And I saw that rest isn’t just what follows the work. It’s what lets the work emerge whole.
So if someone has told you to take care of yourself lately — maybe take it seriously. Not as an admonition, but as a kind of blessing.
Thank you, John.
— Lori
© Lori Corbet Mann, 2025
“… rest isn’t just what follows the work. It’s what lets the work emerge whole.”
This. I keep coming back to a portion of the Catholic Liturgy of the Eucharist that prays that the dead have found “a place of light, refreshment, and peace.” We all need to find that place, regularly, if we are to continue to give of ourselves to our family and our community.
What great advice! I have been taking the time to “touch grass,” walking around my yard wandering from mulberry to mulberry while checking my raspberries (red and black) and blackberries to see how close they are to ripe. There is also a single gooseberry that I am hoping to taste ripe. They are usually harvested and cooked unripe, but can be allowed to darken (I think they turn a kind of purple) and are supposed to actually be sweet. If the birds haven’t paid attention since it is only one berry, maybe this year I will know!
I like the idea of a complete shutoff though. Long ago when we were tethered by landlines and wanted to be left alone, we pulled the phone off the hook and left it, and if someone called and got repeated busy signals, they knew you were either on a long talk or didn’t wish to be disturbed. These mini supercomputers we carry everywhere have rewired everyone’s expectations of reaching us, and left us with a sense we must always be attached.