My brain turned on in the middle of the night last night and wouldn’t quiet down. It was spinning with every random bit of trivia and childhood acquaintance and item on my to-do list in the next month and sleep was out of the question. Needless to say, I’m not firing on all cylinders today. I am groggy and cranky.

My first move was to do prioritize what absolutely had to be done for survival today – do I have leftovers I can eat or do I actually need to make dinner? Do I have clean underwear left or is laundry absolutely necessary today? Do I really need to walk the dog for our standard duration or can we just go until he’s done his business and then go home and take a nap?

We convince ourselves that all the normal chores are must-do things regardless of our energy or capacity. I could push myself today and get all those things done and then be dragging for the rest of the week, or I could take a day and just to the literal bare minimum to keep things afloat. I chose option 2.

It’s a really valuable skill to be able to have the absolutely-necessary list in addition to the to-do list. Theoretically the AN list will be a subset of the TD list. And the more I think about it, the more I can convince myself that the items on the AN list can be dealt with tomorrow. If I have two miles of gas left in my tank, that’s enough to get me to the gas station tomorrow. I’ll choose that.

This is a component of self-care we ignore a lot. I could probably make do today and set myself up for a rough week. Or I could take a day and be gentle to myself to get back to full bandwidth for the rest of the week. I have become a huge proponent of the restoration day approach.

The worst culprit for this is the early sick day. When you start feeling the tickle in your throat and you know you’re not 100% and you feel the impending doom of illness. How many of us still go to work and carry on with our life as normal when that happens? What if, instead, you took that day as the sick day? What if you rested, took vitamins, drank fluids, fed yourself nutritious food and gave your body all the energy it could get to fight your illness? Anecdotally for me, that shaves about three days off my illness on average.

Recognize that you aren’t superhuman. Accept and appreciate that about yourself – and literally everyone else in your orbit – and cut yourself a break. If you can filter down your responsibilities for just one day to give yourself a moment to rest and recuperate when you’re low energy, you’ll be able to address all the things on the list tomorrow.

Take a day. Recharge. Tomorrow is another day…