Self-care!!!! What is self-care? And more importantly what is self-care to you?
Self-care can refer to the activities or things that we do to treat ourselves well, in an attempt to maintain our physical, emotional, and general mental health and wellbeing. Realistically it needs to be another commitment in a busy world to look after ourselves, utilising some helpful behaviours that we can have in place.
Have strategies on an ongoing basis before it even gets to the point where we might be going through a stressful situation. If we have self-care, as a habit, looking after our own wellbeing on a regular basis, then it's not the first thing that slips necessarily when we go through more of a busy or stressful or challenging time.
If you think about the first thing that happens when we begin to feel overwhelmed, take exercise for example, life gets a bit hectic, have a few extra challenges going on with family? Perhaps work got really busy, and then we might go, oh, well, I'll skip that exercise today. Obviously, exercise in itself comes with so many benefits around our physical and mental health. But if we miss it, then we think okay, maybe I'll catch up tomorrow.
The trick again with self-care is really to make sure that we do get back into the habit. Often, our brains trick us into thinking, well, I have failed. I may as well keep failing now for another month or another quarter, or whatever it might be. Perhaps that's an opportunity to take on some smaller self-care. That might be a little bit easier or simple. If it's 10 minutes here, 15 minutes there listening to music, meditating or reading.
Even our social connections may be considered self-care in this challenging time where we are still doing things typically remotely. Your way of catching up via social media or a video call with a friend reaching out, having a chat and enjoying a laugh. Laughter is right up there with the best medicine they say. So we certainly can enjoy that as a bit of self-care.
Circling back onto the concerns of covid and the challenges we face in the more remote lifestyles we are living this hopefully will not always be the way but certainly makes us think about how we can take those opportunities even at home. We may not be out and about socialising as much. But we can do self-care things at home.
Just because we're at home, we don't always have to be doing work or doing chores particularly when we've started working from home a lot more. We can still have that free time and enjoy ourselves in our own sanctuary of our home environment.
It may even be a matter that you need to actually start a plan around yourself-care if you don't have one or some of us really find the structure helps. If we have a bit of a goal around something work related, something family related, something self-care related, something home/life admin related. As simple as that, looking at maybe those four areas and how do we cover them off in a week or in a month?
Certain things we have to do every day or every week, certain things we let slip as we discussed earlier, but worthwhile popping them all in there and seeing what works for you. Don't be afraid if it doesn't work this time. There's plenty of other strategies out there and plenty of support in place. So have a look around, see what works for you.
Maybe like, leave a comment and even share some tips that you have that may be helpful for someone else in their self-care world!