Rule #2 from Jordan Peterson’s 12 Rules for Life:

Treat yourself as someone you are responsible for helping

The basic idea is that if you’re high in agreeableness, ie you strongly exhibit the “mothering” instinct of taking care of others, then one of the most effective ways to take care of yourself is to pretend that you, yourself, are one of those other people.

Also, my own recommendation is to do a lot of therapy and spiritual work. Uncover and resolve any childhood trauma you absorbed around “being selfish”.

Kids are naturally selfish. When parents don’t know how to make good boundaries, they tend to silently stew then explode at the kid, giving the kid a basic equation forged into their subconscious that goes like:

“If I focus on my needs it hurts Mommy and she stops loving me”

There’s a great book on this topic called Home Coming: Reclaiming and Championing Your Inner Child

Doing the exercises in that book helped me transform — over the course of about 5 minutes of ugly crying — into someone who has a much easier time serving myself in balance with serving others.