What a 10-Minute Shower Taught Me About Self-Care

The shower has always been my favourite room in the house. I have fond memories of long Sunday-morning soaks at my mother's place in Adelaide, where the bathroom was warm and steamy and the rest of the world seemed very far away. Now, with three kids, a perpetually barking kelpie named Basil, and a husband who once again left his boots by the back door, my showers have been reduced to roughly ten minutes — sometimes less if someone is yelling about a missing swimming cap. Somewhere in that small, hurried window of warm water, I accidentally stumbled onto a self-care practice that has changed the way I move through my whole day.

I think most Australian mums I know would laugh at the idea of a luxurious morning ritual. We are a nation of rushers, juggling school drop-offs in Brisbane traffic, after-school cricket pickups in Melbourne's eastern suburbs, and weekend trips to Noosa or the Mornington Peninsula that somehow always need more preparation than a full-blown overseas holiday. My old friend over at Sassy Mahogany Wife once told me that the only "me-time" she gets is the three minutes between putting the pasta on and the kids finishing their homework. I felt that sentence in my bones.

So this is not a manifesto about spa retreats or imported bath salts. This is about ten minutes, a closed door, and the quiet revolution of treating a basic necessity like a small ceremony. If you have ever wondered whether motherhood has stolen your sense of self, I want to gently insist that the bathroom door is still yours, the lock still turns, and the water is still hot.

The Shower Used to Be Just a Shower

For most of my twenties I treated the shower as a hygiene checkpoint and nothing more. In and out, hair washed, conditioner combed through, out the door. I would have laughed at anyone who suggested I slow down, light a candle, or pay attention to the way the water felt on my shoulders. Even now, living in our weatherboard house in Hobart with views that would make a postcard jealous, the bathroom is small and the hot water has a personality of its own.

What changed was less about time and more about presence. I started paying attention to the temperature, to the steam fogging the mirror, to the sound of water drumming on tiles. Instead of mentally composing the to-do list, I let myself notice the warmth on the back of my neck. Sounds small, I know. But for a brain that has been running twelve tabs since 5.45am, that single moment of noticing is almost radical.

That is the first lesson the shower handed me: self-care does not need to be elaborate or expensive. It only needs a sliver of intention. You do not need to book a facial or spend forty-five minutes on a yoga mat. You need ten minutes, maybe less, of being a body in warm water instead of a brain scanning the next crisis.

Pressure Cooked: Why Mornings Felt Like a Free-For-All

Mornings in our house used to feel like a live news broadcast of something going vaguely wrong. Someone could not find the green library bag. Someone else was eating toast with one hand and tying a shoelace with the other. The dog wanted out, the kettle was screaming, and I was standing in the kitchen in my pyjamas trying to remember whether I had fed anyone since Tuesday. Add the Australian-specific comedy of hunting for the one clean school polo in a house with three kids and two opinions about laundry sorting, and you have a recipe for total cortisol overload.

What I had not realised was how much that morning chaos was leaking into the rest of my day. I would arrive at school pick-up with the same tight jaw, the same racing pulse, the same slightly glazed smile. A friend in Perth mentioned in passing that she had started "resetting" between getting the kids to school and starting her work-from-home block. I nodded along, then went home and did exactly nothing about it.

The ten-minute shower became that reset point. Not because it was long, but because it was a deliberate boundary. A line drawn between the version of me that does school lunches and the version that answers work emails, makes dinner, or simply breathes. Self-care, I learned that year, is often less about what you do and more about where you choose to pause.

Small Rituals Make Big Differences

Once I had the pause, I started gently curating what happened inside it. Nothing extravagant. I swapped my usual supermarket shampoo for a bottle from a local maker at the Queen Victoria Market when we last visited Melbourne, and the smell of eucalyptus instantly pulled me out of my head and into the room. I keep a single candle on the wide shelf above the bath — nothing fancy, just a soft vanilla one from the chemist — that I light on weekday mornings and let burn while I am in there.

There is a particular joy in having one ritual item that belongs only to you. My mother has a tin of rose cream from a small pharmacy in the Adelaide Hills that she has used since before I was born. I have a flannel that is, frankly, on its last legs but stays exactly where I put it every morning. These little anchors tell my nervous system that something gentle is happening, even if the rest of the day is going to include spilled milk and lost reading folders.

I am also a convert to writing one sentence down before I step out. Not a journal, not a meditation log, just a single thing: what I am asking of myself today. Sometimes it is "be patient at the school gate." Sometimes it is "drink the water." The shower gives me just enough quiet to choose that sentence deliberately, and that single act tends to ripple outward in ways I never expected. If you would like to know a bit more about why I write this sort of thing, you can head over to motleymama.com/about.

Scent and Memory: Building Sensory Anchors

Here is the part I did not expect. Once I had been doing this little shower ritual for a few weeks, I started noticing that certain smells were doing emotional work for me. The eucalyptus shampoo carried me back to a long weekend at a cabin in the Blue Mountains, where my sister and I sat on the verandah with cups of tea and did absolutely nothing useful. The vanilla candle reminded me of the bakery two streets behind our old rental in Fremantle, where I used to buy a custard scroll on Friday afternoons and pretend I had my life together.

Scent is a powerful memory key, especially when your brain is otherwise full of permission slips and grocery lists. By choosing what to wash with, what to light, what to breathe in, I was gently informing my nervous system that the next chunk of time was for me. The ten-minute window had become a kind of capsule. Self-care had turned into something the body actually recognised.

I now keep a small basket of three or four "shift" products on a shelf in our laundry — peppermint oil for tired mornings, lavender for sleepier ones, the rose cream for Sundays. Pulling the basket down, choosing a scent, placing it back on the shelf afterwards. Tiny muscle movements of care that no one else in the house will ever know about.

Letting Go of the Guilt Around Self-Care

The hardest part, honestly, was not the water or the candle. It was the voice in my head that said I was being indulgent. That a real mum should be downstairs packing lunches, not luxuriating with shower gel. That the house is dusty and the dog needs walking and the email from the teacher has been waiting since Tuesday. Australian culture is brisk about this stuff — we love a no-nonsense parent, we love a story about someone coping with the chaos, and we tend to quietly distrust anyone who admits to needing rest.

I want to gently push back on that. A ten-minute shower is not a personality flaw. It is not a confession of weakness. It is, in fact, the very least I can do to show up as the kind of mum, wife, friend, and colleague I actually want to be. The patience I have at 8.30am is directly linked to whether I took two minutes to breathe at 7.15am. The tone I use when my husband asks where the scissors are has everything to do with whether I have looked after myself first.

If the guilt still sits heavy, I tell myself this: ten minutes of quiet is not stealing time from my family. It is building the kind of adult they will remember as calm, as kind, as present. Granting myself a self-care moment is, weirdly, one of the most generous things I now do for everyone in this house.

Carrying the Habit Beyond the Bathroom

Once the shower became a touchstone, I started looking for other two-minute pauses I could sprinkle through the day. I park at the back of the carpark at Westfield when I do the big fortnightly shop and walk briskly to the entrance, pretending I am on a coastal walk. I stand at the back door with a cup of tea before school pickup and listen to the birds in the eucalyptus. I have even started driving past our local Bunnings on Saturday mornings without going in, just for the sausage-sizzle aromatherapy, although that one is borderline Pavlovian.

The point is not that any single one of these pauses is life-changing. The point is that they teach me to notice myself again, in a hundred tiny ways, all week long. Self-care stops being a Sunday treat and becomes a muscle. A habit. The sort of thing I hope my kids see, because I would love them to grow up understanding that the body deserves a few minutes of attention, every single day, no excuse required.

If your own shower tends to be a five-minute affair over a baby monitor or with a toddler hammering on the glass door, please hear me: ten minutes is the goal, but two is still something. Start small, choose one anchor — a scent, a candle, a single line written down — and let that be enough for now. The rest of your day will quietly rearrange itself around it. It really did for me, and it can for you too. You can read more of my work over at motleymama.com.