Most self-care advice assumes a good week. You get a list of pleasant activities and a promise that you will feel better for doing them. Then a deadline lands, or someone in the family gets ill, and the whole thing quietly stops. You conclude that you are bad at looking after yourself.

This book takes a different approach. It treats your care as maintenance: a small set of things you genuinely run on, attached to fixed points in the day you already have, protected by sentences you prepared in advance, and tiered so that something survives the worst week of the year.

You will log two weeks before changing anything. You will examine the last three times your routine collapsed and find the pattern in it. You will define a floor of three things you keep doing when everything else falls away, rearrange three parts of your home so the floor is easier than the alternative, and work out what to say to the manager, partner or parent who keeps taking the time back.

It ends with a single page you can keep, and a restart routine for after the next collapse. Where a situation needs a doctor, a lawyer or emergency help, the book says so plainly and stops.

This book was created with generative AI. The text was generated by an AI system and reviewed and edited before publication.