For women who are burning the candle at both ends, Cynthia Turner-Graham, M.D., has something she wants them to think about: Can you expect to do the best for loved ones if you haven’t first done the best for yourself?

Turner-Graham said the answer is no and that the question is at the heart of helping women understand that making themselves a priority is vital for achieving a healthy balance in their busy lives.

“If we do not take time to invest in ourselves, we cannot really love others and be fully loving and fully present,” Turner-Graham said. “In that way it’s a gift to those you love.”

Turner-Graham is a board-certified psychiatrist and psychotherapist in private practice in Gaithersburg, Md. She serves as a consultant and health educator with ForSoundMind Enterprises, which provides workshops and one-on-one counseling to “help individuals achieve mental fitness for themselves and those they love.”

“Living a life that preserves our best self,” according to Turner-Graham, should be the goal of recalibrating one’s life so that the many facets of one’s life are appropriately prioritized. Paying attention to one’s health and wellness should be a woman’s first step and is much more important than people realize, she said.

Exercise, good nutrition and monitoring one’s health through routine health check-ups and screenings (mammograms, pap smears, etc.) are vital, but so is sleep. In fact, she said getting less than seven hours of sleep each night can be detrimental to one’s overall health and has been shown to lead to weight gain.

One of the greatest challenges women face, according to Turner-Graham, is choosing to make the time to focus on their emotional, physical, intellectual and spiritual health. She said too often women are more comfortable serving others and feel selfish when they focus on themselves.

Taking a weekend to kick back, turning childcare over to someone else, scheduling time to work out or have lunch with friends, spending time shopping or going to the spa is “really OK, it’s a loving thing.”

Assessing one’s self, prioritizing and reprioritizing what’s important are constants.

“It’s dynamic but ever-changing,” Turner-Graham said, adding that along the way women should be “making choices toward a more deeply meaningful existence.”

Turner-Graham’s insight into the challenges women face come as much from the knowledge she’s gained from her practice and a lifetime working in health care as from personal experience.

A graduate of the University of Kansas School of Medicine who completed her psychiatric residency at Vanderbilt University, Turner-Graham married while she was in medical school. She’s the mother of three adult children and now the grandmother of seven.

“It’s been a journey,” she shared.

She recalled a time when her children were young and she held an “amazing” position as a vice president in health care yet she was miserable. In addition to ethical challenges the job presented, Turner-Graham characterized herself as “exhausted beyond what I ever should have allowed.”

In time she walked away from that position, but not before she established a physician wellness program to aid other doctors who were under incredible stress.

At that time in her life, Turner-Graham didn’t work professionally for a year and a half but focused her attention on her daughter who was a senior in high school.

“‘I don’t know if I can survive your undivided attention,’” Turner-Graham recalls her teenage daughter telling her. She said her children became accustomed to her busy schedule and understand that mom would always make it to their big events.

In hindsight, Turner-Graham said she realizes that due to her professional commitments she “did not spend as much face-to-face time with them as I wish I could have. That’s one regret I have. They were very well loved and attended to. But I was not as present as I needed to have been.”

Now 59, Turner-Graham said she’s paying it forward—educating others about the steps they can take to “unleash the power of a sound mind.”

Turner-Graham offers the following suggestions for not just for surviving but thriving:

• Take the time to be healthy
• Connect to a higher power
• Cultivate relationships
• Invest wisely in priorities
• Give voice to feelings
• Act purposefully
• Listen, love and laugh often

  “My calling in life includes motivating others to invest in creating the lives they want,” Turner-Graham states on her website ForSoundMind.com. “If healthy lifestyle principles can be successfully woven into our daily lives, what a difference it would make. After all, our families and communities work best when empowered, healthy individuals inhabit them.”