Read This if You’re Constantly Giving to Others
“You can only give to others what you can replenish back to yourself”
Are you someone who is always going out of their way to give to others? Do you constantly give up what you want to do to help out other people? Or do you feel guilty if you don’t give others what they need before you give to yourself?
If you said yes to any of these questions, first off you might be a people pleaser. Secondly, you might be tired and drained A LOT of the time!
Now, don’t be mistaken it’s a great thing to be able to give to others. The feeling of being able to give and help out someone else who needs it has the power to lift us and the other person up in major ways.
However, giving to others when it compromises your own well-being is different from giving to others because you want and are able to help out.
Compromising our own needs for others may look like:
- Dropping everything for someone even when you were really excited about what you were doing.
- Not doing what you want because another person wants to do something else.
- Checking up on others but not checking up on yourself.
- Ignoring what your body is telling you you need to help or hang out with someone else.
- Not taking time for yourself because someone wants to go out.
These are just a small set of examples that could be instances where you are compromising your own needs for other people.
Of course, there are some cases where we may have to compromise our needs such as when caring for a child. However, if this is representative of your life on a daily basis for multiple people or even just one specific person that’s different than putting a child’s needs before your own.
So what happens when we compromise our needs for others?
We all know the saying “put your mask on before you help others put theirs on”. This captures what happens when we compromise our needs for others perfectly!
What it’s saying is that we have to give ourselves what we need first so that we are able to help others. In other words, if we don’t take care of ourselves we won’t have enough energy, will, and strength to take care or help others when they need it.
For example, if you are running around helping everyone with what they need at some point you will burn out and crash. Whether it be from stress, exhaustion, being overwhelmed, or a combination of it all, it will happen.
But what if someone or something suddenly desperately and urgently needs your attention and suddenly you’ve run out of steam to do anything? Either you push yourself to keep going (which will continue the cycle) or you will have lost any energy to push through.
Of course, this affects other people but I want to focus on how this affects you personally.
When we experience a situation, such as the example above, we are communicating to ourselves that we are less important than anything else we do. And that we are willing to compromise and put ourselves in more pain just to make other people happy.
YOUR happiness, health, and wellbeing are at the bottom of the list of things that you care about and because of that you’re body and mind are paying the price.
This is very common in today’s society. So many people overextend themselves not just to make others happy but because there is this cultural belief that we have to work as hard as we can for as long as we can to get what we want in life.
Where does that get us? Most of the time walking around like zombies with all aspects of our health declining.
How can you give to yourself and others?
“You can only give to others what you can replenish back to yourself”
If you are naturally someone who likes to helps others, has to help others out of an obligation, or overextends yourself for other people you don’t have to stop helping them.
But what you do need to begin doing, if you’re not already, is also make it a priority to help yourself. You need to learn and get comfortable with prioritizing your needs first and foremost.
One important thing to understand about this is that it is NOT selfish. It is selfish only if you completely disregard other people and suddenly make a complete 180 from overextending yourself to not extending yourself at all.
However, the ultimate goal of this is to find the balance. That starts with realizing you are worthy of being prioritized and cared for by yourself.
The best way to create this balance in your life is by setting aside time to do what you need to do, rest, reset, and do what you love whether that be alone or with others.
This is super important because we can only give to others what we replenish back to ourselves. Therefore, if you are constantly helping others without a break you are not replenishing yourself. You are not giving yourself the rest and reset that it deserves and craves.
It’s like waiting to go swimming or exercise until after your food has digested. We have to let ourselves rest and digest before going back into physical activity otherwise we might get sick.
The same goes for your mind and body. You have to let it “rest and digest” so that you are ready to dive into the next thing without overextending or exhausting yourself.
Therefore, to be able to give to others and to yourself you have to prioritize your needs, listen to them, and make the time to rest, do what you love, and replenish your energy.
When you do this, you will have more energy and be more willing to help others, and be able to accomplish what you need.
However, also remember that an important step in this may also include creating boundaries for yourself. If you feel like you are in need of that read this article:
❤️🌻 Thank you for reading!
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