Self-Care Ideas for Christian Women in Hard Seasons (A Letter to the Depleted)
Dear one,
I’m writing this to you because somewhere this morning you opened a browser and typed christian self-care hard season into it, and what most of the internet gave back to you was a list of nice ideas designed for women who are tired in the ordinary way — tired from a long week, tired from the kids’ schedules, tired from a season of busyness that will pass when the school holidays start.
That isn’t the kind of tired you are.
You are tired in the way grief makes a person tired. Or the way a long illness does. Or a divorce that you didn’t choose. Or a child who is in trouble. Or a marriage that has become a project of holding together. Or a year of loss that has stacked on top of another year of loss. Or a depression that has gone on so long you can no longer tell where the depression ends and your personality begins.
So this letter is not the bubble-bath list and it is not the wellness-aesthetic list. It is what I would say to you if we were sitting across from each other and you had just put your cup down and admitted that you don’t actually know how to keep going.
First, you don’t have to perform any optimism for me
Christian self-care content has a quiet pressure inside it — find the silver lining, count the blessings, trust the plan, lean into joy. All of those instructions have their place, and none of them is what you need today.
Today you need permission to be where you are. The grief is honest. The depletion is honest. The not-knowing-how-to-keep-going is honest. You are not required to spin any of it into a testimony before you are allowed to rest.
The Christian tradition that produced the Psalms has a category for what you’re in. It’s called lament. Psalm 88 ends without resolution. Psalm 13 begins how long, O Lord. The Bible is not embarrassed by your season. Your church might be. Your friends might quietly be. God is not.
Second, Christian self-care in a hard season is smaller than you think
When a Christian woman is in an ordinary season, self-care looks like a 5am quiet time and a 10K run and a meal plan. Christian self-care hard season practice looks different. When she is in a hard season, Christian self-care looks like drinking a glass of water before noon. Eating one piece of toast. Going outside for three minutes. Sitting in a chair with the Bible open to Psalm 23, not reading, just looking at the page. (When you are stronger again, the twenty Christian self-care ideas list will be there; for now, the bar is lower on purpose.)
The bar is low because you are not at your normal strength. Lowering the bar is not failure. It is wisdom.
Some of the smallest practices that actually carry weight in a depleted season:
A glass of water, on the bedside table, the night before — so it’s the first thing you reach for in the morning.
A psalm read out loud, however unevenly. Psalm 23. Psalm 27. Psalm 42. Psalm 88 if today is a Psalm 88 kind of day. Out loud because the body needs to hear a voice praying, and your voice will do.
A meal that someone else made. The friend who asked how she could help — say yes. Specifically, this week. Bring me dinner Tuesday. Nothing fancy. Receiving is a spiritual discipline; you are practising it.
Sleep, more than you think you need. The body in grief or chronic stress needs more sleep, not less. Go to bed at nine if nine is when you can. The household will not collapse.
A short walk to the end of the road. Not a workout. The end of the road and back. Outside air. Created sky. Created body. Five minutes.
Third, you don’t have to feel God to be held by God
This is the part most Christian self-care content avoids, because it does not market well: in hard seasons, the felt sense of God’s presence often thins. The prayer that used to land doesn’t land. The verses that used to comfort feel like words on a page. The worship songs you used to weep through pass over you like furniture.
That thinning is not a failure of your faith. The mystics had a name for it, the long Christian tradition has language for it, and the absence-feeling is not the same as actual absence.
You are held in seasons when you cannot feel the holding. You are loved in seasons when the love feels theoretical. The faith is the practice of returning to the chair anyway — the page anyway, the small prayer anyway, the half-meal anyway — even on the days when the holding cannot be felt.
Anselm, writing nearly a thousand years ago in his own hard season, gave the depleted soul language for what it cannot find words for:
“My heart’s voice is to Thee, my Lord and eternal King, Christ Jesus. The work of Thy hand dares to address Thee with loving boldness, for it yearns after Thy beauty and longs to hear Thy voice. O Thou, my heart’s desired One, how long must I bear Thy absence; how long must I sigh after Thee, and my eyes drop tears?”
— Anselm, Meditations and Prayers
The prayer that asks how long must I bear Thy absence is a prayer the Christian tradition has prayed across centuries of hard seasons. You are not the first to pray it. You will not be the last. The longing in the prayer is itself the evidence that the relationship continues, even when the felt sense of it has gone quiet.
Fourth, there are people you should not be talking to about this season
The friend who, when you tell her how hard it is, asks if you have been getting your quiet time in. The relative who reminds you that some people have it worse. The well-meaning church member who gives you a verse without first sitting with you. The Christian podcast that uses the language of victory in ways that make you feel further from God, not closer.
You can love these people and still not bring them this season. The honest conversations belong with the women who can hear the truth without trying to fix it, the women who let lament be lament, the women who have themselves been through a year they didn’t expect to survive. Those women — sometimes just one of them — are the ones to bring this to. The others can love you in other ways. (If writing the hard things down feels possible, the Christian journal prompts for women healing after a hard year was made for exactly this slot.)
Pause. Notice where the heaviness sits in the body — chest, throat, behind the eyes. Don’t try to move it. Let it be where it is.
The hard season has a location. It is not abstract. It is a tightness in the chest at certain times of day. A pressure behind the eyes that doesn’t quite become tears. A held breath that has been held so long you’ve stopped noticing.
You do not have to dispel the location to begin. You begin with the location. The Christ who came into a body knows what a body in a hard season feels like. The praying happens with the heaviness, not after it has been resolved.
Fifth, you are allowed to subtract
The hard season is the season to subtract — from the calendar, from the commitments, from the volunteer roles, from the standing meetings, from the social obligations that have become heavy. Christian self-care hard season practice is, in large part, a practice of subtraction. I can’t make it this season — let’s reconnect in a few months. That sentence is permitted to you.
Some Christian women will tell you that withdrawing from community is dangerous in a hard season. They are partly right. What they often mean is stay performatively connected, which is a different thing. What you need is one or two close people you can be honest with, and permission to subtract the rest until you have more to give.
The woman who keeps every commitment in a hard season ends the season with no margin to recover. The woman who subtracts what she can subtract ends the season tired but intact. The subtracting is stewardship of the only nervous system God gave you to walk through this season with. (For the slow rhythmic version of subtraction once the season is past, the daily / weekly / monthly self-care checklist builds the margin back in.)
Sixth, the season will end, and you do not have to know when
This is the hardest sentence and also the truest one.
You are not in this season permanently. The grief will not feel the way it feels today in two years. The depletion will not be the depletion of forever. The marriage may not be the marriage of always. The diagnosis may not be the only chapter of your story. The depression may lift, or may shift, or may become something you have a different relationship with than the relationship you have today.
You do not have to know when. You do not have to manage it into ending sooner. You have to be in it the way it is, today, with one glass of water and one psalm and one walk to the end of the road, and you have to trust that the God who is holding you in the season you cannot feel Him in is the same God who will be holding you on the other side of it, even if you cannot yet imagine what the other side looks like.
What to do today, specifically
Close this letter. Put the kettle on. Make a cup of tea. Drink it slowly, sitting down. Then do one of these things — only one:
Read Psalm 23 out loud.
Go outside for three minutes.
Text the one friend who can hear the truth and tell her you are not okay this week.
Take a nap.
Eat something with protein.
Sit in a chair with the Bible open on your lap, not reading it. Just holding it.
That is the entire day’s self-care assignment. You can do more if more comes; you do not have to. The bar is low because christian self-care hard season practice has to be small enough to keep when keeping is most of what you can do, and the lowering is not failure.
You are not alone in this
I know it feels like you are. The hard season is isolating in a way ordinary tiredness is not, because most people in your life are not in it with you and cannot quite imagine what you are walking through. Christian self-care hard season practice is also, quietly, a practice of remembering you are not the first woman to walk this.
But the Christian tradition that produced the Psalms of lament, the women across centuries who have walked through grief and depletion and the long dark season, the church that gathered weekly through every kind of human suffering — that long company is with you. The God who held them is holding you. The small daily practices that carried them are available to you. The prayers they prayed when they had no other words are yours to pray now.
You are not alone. You are not failing. You are in a season. The season is hard, and the practices for it are small, and the One who made you is tender with you in it.
With love,
the editors at Everspring
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A journal made for the hard seasons specifically
The Everspring Christian Healing Journal walks 140 days of restoration through grief, depletion, illness, and the long worn-out seasons — with scripture chosen for the days when the usual verses feel theoretical, gentle prompts that do not require optimism, and language that has been shaped by women who have walked through their own hard years.
It was made because there was no journal we could find that didn’t require the woman in a hard season to perform a wellness she did not feel. This one doesn’t. It meets you where you actually are.
The Everspring Christian Healing Journal walks 140 days of slow restoration with scripture for the days the usual verses feel theoretical, and prompts that do not require you to spin grief into testimony before you are allowed to rest.