The Permission Problem

My first daughter, first child ever, is due at the end of October. With our family expanding to Scout, Ashley, Justin, and now Ava, I was beyond excited to realize our initials spell SAJA, a little Easter egg for anyone who's also obsessed with KPop Demon Hunters. Few will get the reference (it’s really a movie about friendship and honesty). Anyway, I’m a nerd, and therefore will digress.

When Ava is born, I know I'll have less "free time" in any sense of the word. But I'm still going to make time to exercise, even if it looks different, shorter sessions, different times of day. That will happen for me because exercise isn't just a task to complete. It's part of who I am, and it's something I want to model for my child.

Here's a pattern I've seen. As people get busier with career advancement, marriage, kids, and caretaking, they stop giving themselves permission to take care of their own needs.

If you're reading this and thinking "must be nice, I don't have that kind of time," that might genuinely be true for you. But in thousands of consults, I have yet to meet someone who didn't have 15 minutes, three times a week, for themselves. I actually surveyed an online group I moderate and asked how much free time they had for self-care: exercise, meal prep, rest, anything that supports their well-being. Only 9% said they had little to no time.

So for most people, I don't think this is purely a time issue. I think it's a permission issue. And permission has less to do with how full your schedule is and more to do with whether you believe you're allowed to be on it.

Is being too busy a reason to skip your child's doctor's appointment? Would you let your dog skip its walk three days in a row because you had a lot going on? Would you tell your best friend you can't pick them up at the airport because something came up?

No, of course not, because those are priorities you've already given yourself permission to schedule. If your boss put a meeting on your calendar, would you just not show up? Your workout is a meeting with yourself. The same rules should apply. They usually don't.

Here's the main difference between working out and some other habits: you don't get optionality with it. It's like brushing your teeth. Skip it for a few weeks and you'll probably be fine, albeit stinky. Skip it for years and you'll get cavities, infections, and eventually lose your teeth. I've seen the trajectory of neglecting physical fitness plenty of times, and it always looks the same: pain, reduced physical function, and a life increasingly lived on the sidelines. But it's never too late to reverse that. It starts with making your "you" time a priority.

Here's the mechanism underneath all of this. What you believe about yourself drives what you do. What you repeatedly do becomes the story you tell about who you are. And once something becomes identity, it tends to stick around for the long run.

Someone who has actually become "an exerciser" feels off when they miss it. That discomfort is identity talking.

Now flip it around and look at the belief causing the trouble in the first place. If you believe you're responsible for everything, every task, every person, every fire that needs putting out, you'll always find a reason exercise can wait. That belief, that identity, means your needs rank last.

For a lot of people, especially caregivers, identity gets built entirely around what they do for others. Mother. The dependable one. The person who holds everything together. Those roles matter, and there's nothing wrong with valuing them.

But when a role requires self-erasure to feel true, taking time for yourself doesn't just feel inconvenient. It feels like a violation of who you're supposed to be. In a survey I ran for a book I'm writing, I asked people to finish this sentence: "Taking care of myself feels hard because…"

Some of the responses:

"It feels selfish, or I worry how it looks to my husband." "As a mother, I'm naturally going to make sacrifices." "Other people need me, and sometimes I play the martyr."

That's identity conflict. Wanting to take care of yourself while believing that doing so is incompatible with the person you think you're supposed to be. When your behavior and your identity collide, you feel discomfort, and that discomfort gets mistaken for a sign that something is wrong with you, rather than a sign that two parts of your self-concept are fighting each other.

Here's the reframe. Caring for your family and caring for yourself were never actually in conflict. That conflict was learned. You can hold both, "I take care of my family" and "I take care of myself," as the same identity, not competing ones.

There's a version of self-sabotage that doesn't look like sabotage at all. It looks like generosity. It looks like being the person everyone can count on.

Skipping your workout to cover a shift, stay late for a colleague, or say yes to one more request doesn't feel like avoidance. It feels virtuous. That's exactly what makes it so hard to catch. You're not avoiding the gym because you're tired or scared. You're skipping it because someone needed you. That's a far more comfortable story to tell yourself.

Two questions cut through it:

Is this actually my responsibility right now, or is it a convenient excuse to avoid something that feels hard?

Have I taken care of what I need before I take care of what they need?

Sometimes the answer is genuinely "yes, this person needs me right now." Both things can be true at once. You can be genuinely needed and also relieved to have an out.

Finish this sentence for yourself, and feel free to send it back to me: "My movement isn't optional because ___."

And if you want to go a layer deeper, sit with this one too: what's one thing you've been calling generous that might actually be Noble Self-Sabotage?

Last thing. You are important, and your health deserves a spot on your priority list. It all starts with permission.