The Lazy Genius Podcast - #406 - Big Sister Pep Talk: You’re Not Selfish

Episode Date: February 24, 2025

I’m always honored when you all say I’m the big sister you’ve never had, and I think sometimes we need a good ol’ pep talk from a big sister. Today’s is about selfishness. Helpful Companion Links Order my new book The PLAN or ask your library to consider carrying a copy. Burnout by the Nagoski sisters Sign up for the Latest Lazy Listens email. Grab a copy of my book The Lazy Genius Kitchen or The Lazy Genius Way! (Affiliate links) Download a transcript of this episode. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Welcome aboard via rail. Please sit and enjoy. Please sit and sip. Play. Post. Taste. View and enjoy. Via rail, love the way. Hey there. You're listening to The Lazy Genius Podcast. I'm Kendra Adachi, and I'm here to help you be a genius about the things that matter and lazy about the things that don't. Today is episode 406. Big Sister Pep Talk. you're not selfish. I'm always honored when a lot of you say that I'm the big sister you've never had. Like truly, it's so kind. And I think sometimes we need like a good old pep talk from our big sister. And today we need one. And it's about selfishness. So here's how we got here. I am a, I am a gut person. I tend to make decisions based on a gut feeling on being like lead in a certain

direction. If something feels right or doesn't feel right, I pay attention, right? Well, such a thing happened around this episode. We had a completely different topic planned and it just didn't feel right. It didn't feel like the right time or that it mattered in the way it did when we made the schedule several months ago. So thankfully, every person on Team LG is also a gut person, which is very helpful. And Leah, our director of content and strategy, she felt the same way I did about this, that we just needed something else. So I said to her, I was like, well, I will just sit. I will sit with it and I'll just see what surfaces. And what you're about to hear is what surfaced.

I am following my gut. And my gut says that we need to talk about your perception of what selfishness is, particularly as it relates to you and how you spend your time. I think a lot of you think you're being selfish when you do things for yourself, when you take time to tend to yourself. And therefore, you don't do it as often or with as much enthusiasm or care because you kind of feel bad about it. And I want to burst that bubble today.

I want us to talk about selfishness and how an incorrect view of taking care of ourselves is to our long-term detriment. So in this episode, I'm going to talk about selfishness, how self-care is not selfish, and why your posture towards yourself in this area can make bigger improvements to your life than any system ever could.

So first, let's talk about selfishness. I think a lot of you feel like you are. You feel like you are selfish. If you go see a friend, if you go for a walk or go to the gym, if you sit down to read a book, if you take a nap, if you ignore a mess to work on a hobby, if you cook a meal that you know you'll like, but you're not sure if the rest of your people will.

If you buy the shoes that you need at full price, instead of waiting for them to go on sale, if you don't go to that family event because the energy and relationships there are kind of toxic for you but you also know that your family members will be super upset if you go to bed early if you don't immediately respond to the questions of your children because you're super overstimulated right now if you plan a trip away just because you want to if you do any of those things or a mountain of other things you think you're being selfish now maybe it's a low level feeling of selfishness. It's not like keeping you up at night, but I bet it's

there all the same. And it might also be keeping you up at night. And because you don't like the feeling of possibly being a selfish person, or you wonder if others think you're a selfish person, then you rarely do those things. Or you only do them if there's literally no other option, or no one is around or it's been so long since you've done it that you don't feel quite so bad making the call to do it now. Okay, so let's take a second to define selfishness, like from the dictionary. So the official definition of someone who is selfish is a person who lacks consideration for others and is chiefly concerned with their own profit or pleasure. Let me say that again. It's a person who lacks consideration for others and is chiefly concerned.

with their own profit or pleasure. Now, I'm pretty confident that most people listening to this episode, you're not a consistently selfish person based on that definition. Now, you might, you might feel that way more often than you act on it. That's true of me. But my guess is that the fruit of your life shows a person who is not selfish more than a person who is. You are not a person who lacks consideration for others. In fact, I think you're considering others all the time. All the time. You're not a person who's chiefly concerned with your own profit and pleasure.

You put your own profit and pleasure on the back burner most of the time because you are chiefly concerned with things like being good at your job and it being a spouse or a parent or a friend or being responsible for the things on your plate. your chief concern could be trying to get it all done. And that is often connected to the profit and pleasure of other people. Now, I hope that your chief concern is starting to transition to being a grounded, whole person, despite what you do get done, right? But a concern to stay connected to your life and your people and your tasks,

that is a noble concern. And you're not selfish. You're not selfish. for taking a break or taking a walk or taking a nap or taking a trip. That's not selfishness. Tending to yourself is not selfish. It does not make you a selfish person. That is the first piece of this.

Like the dictionary proves you wrong. Okay. So the second thing that I want us to note is that self-care is not selfish. In fact, taking care of yourself helps you make fewer selfish decisions. I was recently rereading the book Burnout by the Nagoski Sisters, and I was reminded of how important it is that we tend to ourselves. So this book Burnout, it's excellent. It lays out how women in particular have this built-up collection, this storehouse, of stress in our bodies because we don't metabolize it in ways that bring us back to wholeness and equilibrium. We don't

tend to ourselves. We hustle through the day. We experience a lot of stress in that hustle. We don't do things that relieve and release that stress. Things like movement, sleep, creativity, being with friends. And then the same thing just happens day after day. And eventually, we can't take it anymore and we hit a little case of burnout. That might look like getting sick, exploding at your people and ending up in bed, like detached and exhausted, not being able to do your job anymore, be like, what is going on? Having physical stuff pop up like chronic pain or adrenal fatigue or your hair falling out, frustration that spills over into your marriage or other important relationships. Y'all, we've got to deal with the stress of our bodies, with the stress that our bodies are

holding every day. and the way we do that is through what we know as self-care. It's doing something to care for yourself, to tend to that accumulated stress from the day and getting it out. You can get it out in lots of ways, lots of ways. But the most impactful are physical activity, sleep, creative expression, and connection with other people, either in like affection, you know, in like a row. really good hug or in in conversation.

And I think also when it comes to the connection with people, it might be good to do that sometimes with people who also don't need you to get them a snack, you know? I mean, laughing with a kid is quite a balm for the soul and it can absolutely help metabolize your stress. But just saying it's good to maybe widen the relationship circle a bit too. But the point here is that tending to yourself on a daily basis, in a way that helps you release the day's stress. And hate me, but social media does not do that.

It is the opposite of selfish. Caring for yourself is sustaining and required. It's also in the interest of all the people. It's helping you be more available for the people and the things that matter to you. It gives you more emotional reserves to not make selfish decisions. I'm not something we need to travel for. It's something waiting for us in everyday life, whether in a city street or a moment with a work of art. I'm Dr. Keltner, host of the Science of Happiness podcast. Join me for Cities of Aw, a special series on how our public spaces can spark awe, wonder, and enhance the quality of public life. You can find us wherever you listen to your podcasts.

I think we live with this invisible expectation that somehow we're just supposed to do it all and be perfectly fine, putting out the kind of energy every day that we do without any input back in. Or what's unfortunate is the things that have been scientifically proven to be necessary for our stress management and our mental health, they have been distorted into forms that make us feel bad when we do them. like working out. Working out is pound for pound, the most impactful and efficient way to get your stress out. And it has also been co-opted by diet culture. And a lot of folks, especially women of a certain age, myself included, we have such a hard time doing any sort of exercise without feeling like we're giving into this message of diet culture that we've been trying to extricate ourselves from for years.

Right? So it kind of makes that stress reliever stressful. I think the same can be said of sleep. Sleep is so important for our bodies to reset and metabolize stress. When we don't get the sleep our bodies need, especially on a day when we have not metabolized our stress in any other way, we don't comprehensively get back to zero stress when we wake up the next morning. And now we have even fewer reserves to deal with that next day's stress.

And it just piles on. It just piles on day after day. But somehow, whether you get enough sleep by going to bed early or by getting up early, or if you don't get enough sleep because you would like to spend time with your spouse or you want to stay up late reading because you haven't done anything fun for yourself today or whatever. You feel like it's wrong. Either way, whatever choice you make around sleep sometimes feels wrong.

Like famous doctors are telling women that they need eight to 10 hours of sleep a night minimum and that it shouldn't be hard to get, which is hilarious. But we're also told that we can sleep when we're dead. because there's so much to hustle after. Like, it doesn't matter what we do. It just feels wrong. Sleep is steeped in weird messages for a lot of folks, which makes it complicated to prioritize

because you might have to filter out kind of unhealthy feelings you have about it that you didn't even know you might have had. I think creative expression can also feel loaded. Why are you spending time and money on something like art or dance or restoring furniture or making music or tending a flower garden when there's not much to show for it. If it's not your job, why are you wasting resources investing in it?

That's why everything gets turned into a side hustle so fast because we're not allowed to just do something because we enjoy it. If it's just for your mental health, that does not feel like a reasonable tradeoff. I know there's someone in your life who might say that to you or think that about you. I spend money on paint and watercolor pads, and I spend hours and hours of my time using both of them up. And then the pads, they just end up in a stack, like by my art cabinet with my paint. I don't mind the stack now. I actually love my stack. And I hope it keeps growing.

But I had to get over the guilt that I felt by using our family's dollars and my own time for things that were only for me. and my own personal enjoyment and mental health. I felt guilty because it seemed like a waste. It seemed selfish. Listen to me right now. Doing things that feed your soul and tend to your body and that release and relieve the stress that you are experiencing. They are essential for being a person.

They are not selfish. They're not selfish. But I will say, it's easy to feel like they are, and I am guilty of perpetuating this feeling. There have been many times at the gym around like five-ish. You know, I'm on the treadmill. And I see guys come in to the gym in their office clothes, and then they have like their duffel bag with their workout clothes. And do you know what I think? I think, dude, go home and like relieve your wife of being with your children.

But he's just working out his stress. Like, I want everyone to. I think it's just maybe that men have an easier time and path making this happen in their lives, or maybe they just don't feel any guilt about it. They're not doing anything wrong. They're actually doing something beautifully right, but they don't feel guilt about it. And when you don't feel guilt about doing something for yourself, you must be selfish. What an unfortunate paradigm to perpetuate.

And what a horrible burden to live under to make guilt. a prerequisite to doing something for yourself? I know that I tend to do that is a way to communicate to whoever's around me that, you know, I get it. I get that it's a really big deal that I'm doing this thing just for myself on a Tuesday. You know, it's kind of like that, like I need them to know that I know. But know what?

What does our guilt do for our knowing? What does guilt do? I think it simultaneously makes us detached from the importance of self-care, you know? It kind of like keeps us like not fully engaged in it because of our guilt. But then the guilt also elevates whatever we're doing to this incredibly high, unreachable status. So it's like it's unimportant and then deeply important at the same time. That's what guilt does.

Whereas if we remove the guilt, if we consider, our choices of self-care every day is just necessary. They're just as necessary as things like carpools and dinner plans and paying bills. I think if we removed the guilt from those things, they would become more normalized and therefore less steeped in emotional muck. Just do the thing, just like you do anything else. Which leads me to the third part of this, which is what the release and relief of stress does to our lives as a whole. You know how in the plan I say that staying grounded is better than staying on task? And a lot of people don't like that one, which is fair. It's fine. But this is why. This is what I mean. When we are tending to

ourselves and we are focused on staying grounded, it actually enables us to stay on task better. we are able to do the things we need to do, both pleasant things and annoying ones, when we are full, when we are not holding an incomplete stress cycle in our bodies, when we are not forcing ourselves to bend to the demands of life without any fluidity or any compassion, the tending to our bodies and our minds and our stress, while it does take up time, it actually gives gives us more time. It creates emotional and physical margin overall. It is better to stay grounded than to stay on task. Usually what we do is we let the stress build up day after day, causing more overwhelm and a desire to leave everything behind and live in a van.

When that happens, when we're not feeling kind and contented because of that built-up stress, it does not matter how small the outside force is, a stubbed toe. You could stub your toe. You step on that Lego. You see like a spill of milk on the floor. I don't know. It causes you to like either retreat or explode. So I think the answer here is not for us to like first find better household systems

or better time management hacks. Y'all know I don't think that's the answer. In this case, when we are talking about caring for ourselves, the answer, the answer, is to process our stress, to recover from our stress, to fill ourselves up on a daily basis. Energy spent in that direction, it might feel selfish, but it is not. It is the opposite. So one of the areas of my life that I struggled with for so long was the feeling that I had as I tried to fall asleep. I did that thing that women do, where I would just lie awake as my brain spun round and round and round and round. Rehashing what I did, what I said, what needs to be done

tomorrow if I was doing my entire life right. I couldn't settle down and go to sleep. It took long, a long time for me to fall asleep, which made me sleep less and then also sleep less soundly. So I'd wake up still feeling like mentally upside down and not at all rested, right? And the cycle just continued night after night. for a while my my response was to try and um do more at night to like get more done check more things off you know and maybe maybe i would feel better about what i accomplished i didn't really rest at at night i was working all day and then when i did sit down it was more to numb than to fill up right i would just eat ice cream and get on social media in the short time before bed and then i would spin out still as i was lying in

It didn't, it didn't matter how much I got done that day. And that was my rhythm for a really long time. Now, I began slowly shifting that rhythm when I started calling my day kind of done at night. Like I would give myself an arbitrary cutoff time to just like, I'm done for the day. You know, because things are never actually done. So I might as well just decide to stop, you know. So I started doing that and it really halt. And then from there, I slowly moved to more life-giving things in the evening, usually reading. It helped a lot because reading made me slow down, which I needed. And while I did go to bed like a little less tightly wound than usual, I still struggled to fall asleep. That's why I took sleep gummies for so long. But do you want to know

what really started shifting things for me? It's when I started drawing and painting. many nights I will call an end to anything productive and responsible, right? Cut off time is done. I'm done. And I'll draw. Or most likely I'll do what I always do, which is like a continuous line drawing, like where you don't pick up your pen, of a face with a Sharpie, and then I will watercolour it.

That's my favorite. I do that almost every night. When that practice became more regular, I started. sensing a shift in myself. I was metabolizing my stress on a daily basis at night before bed. And I started sleeping better. I don't even take gummies anymore, y'all. Now, that's not the only thing, obviously. Like, I'm not directly connecting painting to better sleep, but there is data that says that physical activity, relational connection, and creative expression complete the stress They literally help stress, leave your body, and they bring tiny levels of healing to your nerves and your organs and your soul.

Reading was restful, but it wasn't necessarily restorative. Like I was experiencing someone else's creative expression, which is rad and still helpful, but making my own, it did something in me. This is why every single day, every day, I prioritize some type of movement, even if it's just a couple of minutes, like just dancing around my living room for a few minutes, working up a sweat. It's fun and easy. It doesn't matter. I prioritize that every day.

I prioritize a relational connection, usually with someone I do not live with every day. And then either reading, painting, or baking every day. Now reading is more accessible and easier to do. That's why it's on the list. I also love it so much. It's my favorite hobby. So even though it's not the most direct creative expression, it kind of scratches the itch, you know, especially if I've already combined it with like I've moved that day

and I've connected with someone that day. But baking and painting are creative expressions for me. They change the way I live. I have seen direct results of that. And guess what? even though I have a ton of tasks that I still need to do, even though I have a husband to enjoy, I have kids to love on and to drive places, I have groups that I'm part of or in charge of, I have a home to tend, I have a job to do, I have a community I want to invest in.

Even though I think I actually have more going on in my life now than I ever have before, like practically on paper, I am not overwhelmed. I'm not stretched too thin. Part of that is because I live with the goal of contentment and interoperable. integration instead of greatness, which I talk about in the plan. That takes a lot of the pressure off of how well things get done, how quickly things get done. But it's also in part to my own stress management. I have seen, I have seen the light, y'all. I have seen the beauty of tending to myself, of not complicating that tending with a big old layer of guilt either. Me going to the gym to run on the

treadmill for 20 minutes or getting out my watercolors at the end of the day or my daily conversations with friends and like pretty regular outings with them. They are all things I do not apologize for or feel like I have to over explain to my family or create some sort of like quid pro quo situation where I have to pay it back. I don't owe my husband because I went out with friends. I don't have to pay him back for that. That's just part of my being a person and caring for myself and managing my stress. Do you see the cycle? Do you see the deception that we live under because of unnecessary guilt? You're not selfish for caring for yourself. I actually think it's not a crazy thing to say that the guilt is causing us more harm. It's creating less margin and opportunity for us to fill our cups

so that we can be available to fill the cups of other people. You're not selfish. Self-care is not selfish. And when you start to believe that and act like it's true, live like it's true, it really does impact your entire life. And that is the end of today's big sister pep talk. Okay. Before we get into the lazy genius of the week to close up our episode, if you would like to submit your idea to possibly get a share on the podcast with your lazy genius of the week, you can email your idea to hello at the lazy genius collective.com. And if you want to be extra helpful to Latoya, our director of community, who gets these, put lazy genius of the week in the subject line, and that way she can filter them through.

We would love to hear from you. All right. Now let's celebrate the lazy genius of the week. This week, no lie. It is Angela Bassett. Probably not that Angela Bassett, but we're just going to pretend it is for a hot second. Okay, Angela writes, a few years ago, I found myself all. always searching for a Sharpie and then the perfect place to put my name on a dish or a serving

utensil when I was heading to a large gathering with friends. One day, a random roll of washi tape appeared in my large kitchen utensil drawer. I grabbed it and quickly marked all of my containers, lids, and utensils with a strip as I headed out the door. Since that day, that same pattern of washi tape has adorned many a dish and made it easy to pick out my instant pot lid and ladle among a dozen others. This decide once and storing the washi tape in its place has saved a lot of time and brain space. I'm planning to gift each of my close friends with a role of unique pattern of the unique pattern of washy tape this Christmas to make our group gatherings a little simpler and more personalized.

Well, this is a really fun idea and a lot prettier than what my husband does, which he uses blue painter's tape, but you could also use that. Also, listen, Angela, I love that you have, so many gatherings that you're going to with your friends that you need washi tape. You all need washi tape for your things. I'm like, can we all give in on that? This is the best energy ever. But it is true. Whenever we take food somewhere, Kats puts a big old piece of painter's tape on it.

It's like, hey, and people know it's ours. They're like, hey, this is yours. Don't forget. It's actually a really solid idea. So thank you for sharing this, Angela. And congratulations on being the lazy genius of the week. This episode is hosted by me, Kendra Adachi, an executive produced by Kendra Adachi, Jenna Fisher, and Angela Kenzie.

The Lazy Genius podcast is enthusiastically part of the Office Ladies Network. Special thanks to Leah Jarvis for weekly production. Thanks y'all for listening. And until next time, be a genius about the things that matter and lazy about the things that don't. I'm Kendra, and I'll see you next week. Have you ever felt like you were living just a B or B plus life? It's so dangerous to live that, more dangerous than a B minus or a C plus life, because when you're living a B or B plus life, you don't change it.

You think it's good enough. Is it? I'm Susie Welch. I host a podcast called Becoming You. People think, okay, an A plus life is not available to me, but there is a way. We are all in the process of becoming ourselves. Listen to Becoming You wherever you get your podcasts.