Greetings, greetings, and welcome. Welcome back. You're back at the sweet spot, and you're listening to Self-Care Saturday. I'm Dr. Derek Sweet. I'm a board certified psychiatrist. I work with high performance individuals, and as you know, I enjoy every minute of speaking with you because together you and I have been journeying on this pathway we call life, this mysterious journey of life. And today I want to talk to you about something I've been sitting with for a while. We've been talking about alignment all week, the power of alignment, staying aligned. And yeah, this is Self Care Saturday, and we're trying to figure out the relationship between alignment and self-care. And I don't mean alignment in the corporate retreat sense, I mean the feeling, that feeling you get when your life actually matches your values, when what you say matters and shows up in how you spend your time. And here's what I've noticed in myself and in the athletes I work with, and the high performers across every field. I've noticed that when self-care starts slipping, it's rarely a discipline problem, it's an alignment problem. Something in the system is off, and the body usually knows it before the mind will admit it. So today, beautiful souls, I want to explore that connection with you. Not self-care as reward, self-care as a mechanism that keeps us aligned. Let's start by getting honest with what alignment is and what it isn't. I know we did this earlier in the week, but it bears repeating that alignment isn't having your goals written down, it isn't a vision board, it's not even this idea of achieving everything that you have set out to achieve. Alignment is when your internal values and your external behaviors are in a conversation with each other, and there's coherence between what you're saying and how you're actually living. And here's the thing: you can be successful and completely out of alignment. I've seen it. Some athletes at the top of their game, or executives hitting every single metric and number, and something underneath is misaligned, something is cracking underneath. Because the success wasn't built on a foundation that matched who they actually are, or or was aligned with their deepest values. So when I talk about alignment, I'm asking: does your life make sense to you? Not your audience, not your organization, to you. And you know, the first place misalignment shows up is in your recovery or your lack of it, your sleep or your lack of it, your ability to stay still or your lack of it, and all of that ties into self-care, and that's why we're here today on Self-Care Saturday. So now here's where it gets a little interesting, right? People treat self-care like a luxury, something you earn after work is done. But I want to flip that script. Self-care is not a luxury, it's a diagnostic tool. It tells you what's going on, what's actually going on underneath the performance. Think about what you cut first when your life gets demanding. For most of us, it's sleep, movement, maybe time alone, things that don't have an immediate return on investment, right? And no no immediate ROI. Yeah, those aren't, but these aren't extra. Sleep is not an extra. I'm writing a book right now on sleep, and more than ever, I'm realizing that sleep is not an extra. Yeah, when you start giving up sleep, that's an early warning system. When you override your fatigue, that's a warning system. Yeah. Because here's the pattern I see over and over again: misalignment creating anxiety, and anxiety driving hyperactivity, and hyperactivity squeezing out every bit of recovery, and with no recovery, there's no stillness, and there's no recuperation, no resetting, and there's nothing but misalignment. It's a loop, and self-care is out the window. So, but there's another weird way in self-care can look odd, and and I see a lot in in high sports and stuff. There's a version of self-care that just looks like another metric that you have to dominate, right? Cold plunges and sleep trackers and morning routines and taking two hours to do this and that, and and before you know it, it's all the protocols. And it looks like self-care, but it's work. And up and you're optimizing self-care, and it becomes an obstacle. I write about this in my new book, Sleep as Performance Medicine. When we over-optimize self-care, it's not self-care anymore. You're just competing in a different arena. So, real self-care has to be simple enough to survive your worst days, not your best ones. The question isn't what's optimal, the question is what will I actually protect when everything is falling apart? And do I have a plan for protecting myself? Do I have a recovery plan? Look, I talk a lot about science, soul, and success. That's my framework. And the soul piece is where alignment lives, in my view. Alignment requires that we have to get still, we've got to slow down so you can hear what's off, so you can check in with your body. We talked about interceptive awareness in the last podcast. You can't hear what's off if you never stop moving. And self-care, real self-care, it creates a level of stillness, not as an escape, but as a way to return. There's a spiritual discipline to rest, it's not passive, it's a practice of saying I trust that my value isn't only in my output. I trust that stopping right now won't cause everything in my life to collapse. I trust that I'm allowed to need what I need and to take the break that I need. That's alignment, that's integrity. Where your actions reflect the belief that you're worth caring for, that you are worth it. Not because you earned it, but because you're human and you were you're worth it. So here's what I want to leave you with on self-care Saturday, beautiful. Self-care is not selfish, it's how you stay honest with yourself about what you can actually sustain, what you can do and not do. It's okay. And alignment? Alignment is just another fancy word for living in a way that you don't have to recover from all the time. You see, when everything is working together, when your recovery matches your demands, when your practices reflect your values, that's when performance becomes sustainable. Not just high performance for a season, but for a life that's going to hold together. So the question I'm leaving you with this beautiful self-care Saturday is what's the first thing you sacrifice when life gets hard? What do you give up? What do you what do you not do that you know you ought to do, but you give it up when the pressure hits? And what would it mean to protect that thing that you're giving up? Not as a luxury, but as a foundation that everything depends on. Your foundation. Sit with that. And I'll see you tomorrow for Slowdown Sunday on the sweet spot. This is Dr. Derek Sweet. If this hit you and if it landed, I'm asking you to please subscribe. And if you're already subscribed, even if you're not, and you know someone who might benefit from hearing this message on self-care and alignment, share it with them. Self care Saturday. I'll see you tomorrow for Slowdown Sunday. Love and blessings, beautiful soul.