Self-care is something we all need to do. But for many of us, it's an elusive practice.

Caregivers are working harder than ever. Which makes self-care more important than ever.

Knowing how real this struggle is, I reached out to my friend and chiropractor Dr. Sarah Gardner. She gets it, and has so many practical, doable ideas for how we can make self-care happen!

 

The Odyssey: Parenting. Caregiving. Disability. 

The Center for Family Involvement at VCU School of Education's Partnership for People with Disabilities provides informational and emotional support to people with disabilities and their families. All of our services are free. We just want to help. We know how hard this can be because we're in it with you. 

 

SHOW NOTES:

 

Dr. Sarah Gardner is co-founder and co-owner of FLX Athlete Retreat. 

 

All of the suggestions for movement, hydration, nutrition, apps, and much more are here. 

 

 

TRANSCRIPT:

01:00:07 :23 - 01:00:35 :00

Erin Croyle

Welcome to The Odyssey. Parenting, Caregiving, Disability. I'm Erin Croyle, the creator and host. The Odyssey podcast explores the turn our lives takes when a loved one has a disability. My beautiful tangent came in 2010 when my first child was born with Down's Syndrome. I joined the Center for Family Involvement at VCU's Partnership for People with Disabilities. A few years after he was born.

 

01:00:35 :02 - 01:00:58 :14

Erin Croyle

Utilizing my journalism and television producer background as a communications specialist, it's amazing to be in a position where I can share stories unique to families like ours. One thing we talk about in our circles, but certainly don't do enough of is self-care. In fact, many caregivers I know scoff at the idea, myself included. It's not that we don't see its value.

 

01:00:58 :18 - 01:01:21 :22

Erin Croyle

We just can't seem to make it happen. The lives of folks like us who are caring for a loved one for life are just different. The physical, mental and emotional demands are constant. Even if you manage to get some time away, there's no time off when someone you love needs constant support. This is why basic self-care is so critical for us.

 

01:01:21 :24 - 01:01:46 :11

Erin Croyle

So how do we make it happen? To talk about this, I've invited my friend and my chiropractor, Dr. Sarah Gardner, on. She and I have been shooting the breeze for nearly two years. I found this amazing woman while recovering from hip surgery. Dr. Sarah gets it. She provides care with compassion and understanding in our many hours together, we've laughed at how ridiculous fad diets are.

 

01:01:46 :13 - 01:02:00 :22

Erin Croyle

We commiserate on how impossible it is to juggle it all as parents. We praise the Almighty Oatmilk latte and we swear way too much.

 

01:02:00 :24 - 01:02:25 :02

Erin Croyle

Sarah, thank you for spending some of your precious free time with me. For our listeners, I just want to paint a picture here. You're a mother of two, a business owner and ultra marathoner who's married to a CrossFit instructor. You're all about body positivity and health at any size. You stressed the importance of rest and having fun. The times when I've come in and admitted to you that I haven't done any of the things I should have.

 

01:02:25 :03 - 01:02:49 :07

Erin Croyle

You validated how hard it is and encouraged me to just try to do one or two things. I always leave our appointments feeling heard, understood, and more hopeful. The business, by the way, is Flex Athlete Retreat, located in the Finger Lakes, Ithaca, New York, to be precise. It's this little haven where you have chiropractic services. Your colleagues do massage therapy and acupuncture.

 

01:02:49 :09 - 01:02:56 :01

Erin Croyle

The space is this oasis with an amazing green velvet couch. Did I sum it up correctly?

 

01:02:56 :03 - 01:03:16 :16

Dr. Sarah Gardner

Yeah, I think you summed it up. Thank you for the introduction. I think the first time I met Arlo was on the green couch, so some good memories there. And yeah, absolutely. The almighty book Milk Latte is what powers me through my day most of the time. Yeah, I'm pretty in it in terms of trying to figure out that work life balance.

 

01:03:16 :17 - 01:03:26 :11

Dr. Sarah Gardner

My kids are two and seven and this business basically eats up my entire life. So I think I think you got it all correct there.

 

01:03:26 :13 - 01:03:38 :05

Erin Croyle

I always love hearing people's origin stories. So what drew you to this kind of work? And then also, I'm really curious how your perspective has changed over the years, seeing so many different people.

 

01:03:38 :07 - 01:03:59 :06

Dr. Sarah Gardner

Yeah, so I was a collegiate track and field athlete. I read Cross Country as well, and then I had an injury my freshman year and I was just really kind of underwhelmed with the way my Western med practitioners handled it. They weren't making contact with the problem area, vaguely listening, but kind of just throwing and NZ at it.

 

01:03:59 :06 - 01:04:36 :15

Dr. Sarah Gardner

And I just felt like we could have managed that a lot better as a team. So I became kind of disenchanted with Western medicine. My undergraduate studies were an exercise physiology, which is just pretty broad spectrum. Learning a lot about human movement and biomechanics and just general health and biology. And we actually had a chiropractor come and speak to one of my survey classes and described what he did, and it was one of those moments for me where it was like, I can take everything I learned and have loved about biomechanics from being an athlete and really combine it with health care and caring for people and sort of contribute to the world

 

01:04:36 :15 - 01:05:05 :23

Dr. Sarah Gardner

of sport for years after when I'm able to be a competitive athlete myself, I think my my goal when I started out was to just kind of create a space where people felt safe and listened to just because that hadn't been my experience, the whole other podcast. But yeah, and I think breaking down that doctor patient boundary and fostering trust and open communication with my patients with the goal of creating better outcomes and I do think that that's worked over the years.

 

01:05:06 :03 - 01:05:36 :08

Dr. Sarah Gardner

And then as far as my perspectives changing, it really has I started off marketing specifically to athletes just because that's the world I came from. But I get to talk to, let's say 6 to 14 people a day, one on one for 30 to 60 minutes. And so my understanding of how we define athlete has definitely evolved over the past ten years, just because I've learned and appreciate so much differently the physical, emotional and mental demands of everybody's day to day.

 

01:05:36 :09 - 01:05:55 :23

Dr. Sarah Gardner

So when my business is called athlete retreat, but really we  treat everybody. I mean, we have people in the perimenopausal stage, we have people giving birth, we have teenagers, we have older adults, we have people recovering from surgery like yourself. So, yeah, it's we get to see a pretty diverse patient population. So yeah.

 

01:05:55 :24 - 01:06:18 :02

Erin Croyle

Yeah, you must see caregivers that some of us have a lot of strain on our body just because we care for another person so intensely. It's really a lot of effort. In some ways, I know that some of my friends, some of the lifting that they do and some of the work that they do is is on par with heavy lifting and athletics.

 

01:06:18 :02 - 01:06:19 :03

Erin Croyle

Yeah.

 

01:06:19 :05 - 01:06:41 :08

Dr. Sarah Gardner

my God. I think that I mean, reall