In­tro­vert-Friendly Saint Self Care Guide: Meet Your Needs to Suc­ceed  

Over the re­cent years, es­pe­cially since the pan­demic started, I took an in­ter­est in start­ing new habits! If you’re like me, some­one with se­vere ADHD, it can be im­pos­si­ble to start new habits and then I get very dis­cour­aged once I don’t make a 180 overnight. Af­ter re­peat­ing that same cy­cle mul­ti­ple times, I knew I had to take a dif­fer­ent ap­proach….

Rec­og­niz­ing that you need to make some per­sonal ac­com­mo­da­tions is just one part of the process, it’s re­al­iz­ing how to im­ple­ment them into your daily life but also at your com­fort level. As some­one with so­cial anx­i­ety, I must fac­tor in the bound­aries that I’m com­fort­able with. For ex­am­ple, fid­get­ing with an item helps re­lease some phys­i­cal anx­i­ety in any sit­u­a­tion. Is it re­al­is­tic to carry around a bright, silly, shape in front of your boss? Maybe not. To ac­com­mo­date my­self, I wear a ring on a neck­lace, and use that as my go-to fid­get be­cause it is eas­ily con­cealed as jew­elry.

To help give me some in­sight on this, I talked to my sis­ter, Mad­die Heine, who is a fresh­man (Psych Ma­jor) here at Maryville! Pic­tured above is her blan­ket she has trea­sured since she was a kid, and she goes more into depth about how she helps her­self on a daily ba­sis. “When I start to get stressed out, I cre­ate a safe men­tal en­vi­ron­ment for me with my head­phones lis­ten­ing to things that calm my ner­vous sys­tem down. I also use my blan­ket as a tac­tile dis­trac­tion to help reg­u­late my body when I be­come a lit­tle worked up.” I have al­ways ad­mired her abil­ity to ac­com­mo­date her­self and use her blan­ket re­gard­less of what any­one thinks.

Keep­ing up with the pace of col­lege can be tough, and find­ing what works best for you can be even harder. “Cre­at­ing a fair amount of time for both re­lax­ing and do­ing work is one of the tac­tics I use to get my work done. I do my work for about 15 or 20 min­utes and then take a 5 or 10 minute break in lit­tle in­cre­ments. That helps me cre­ate a bal­ance of giv­ing my­self a men­tal break and also get­ting things done at the same time. There are six other days that you can be work­ing, so try­ing to take one men­tal health day or break a week is ben­e­fi­cial to re­set.”

I used to feel bad about my­self when I could­n’t do work longer than 10 min­utes at a time de­pend­ing on the day, be­cause some of my friends can do work for hours eas­ily. When I let that go, and fo­cused on what con­trol I have and what I can do, my work bal­ance im­proved. If you’re get­ting down on your­self about some­thing, I rec­om­mend tak­ing a step back and as­sess­ing if you can ad­just it to fit your needs bet­ter, you never know what could hap­pen!