Welcome to Self-Care Sundays. Self-Care Sunday feature posts will appear each Sunday and will explore the importance of mental, physical, and emotional self-care and focus on how self-care not only benefits us, but also others in addition to ourselves.
Image Credit: Hertforshire
What is Self-Care?
Self-care can be any act or effort you take to take care of yourself. These acts are as far reaching as taking care of your personal hygiene, to setting personal boundaries and practicing the ability to say ‘no’ to requests from others that drain your energy, to making time to engage in a hobby you enjoy doing. Though they all may be seemingly different and unrelated acts, what they all have in common is that they are steps you can take toward your emotional wellbeing.
Beneficial or Bogus?
Most of us have heard the term self-care at this point. It is possible you often hear or read about it multiple times a day. The term has become a huge buzzword in our current culture. The more cynical among us, myself included at times, may even say it has been wielded by many corporate marketing firms as a vehicle to increase sales for a wide array of products and services by tapping into our need to fill an emotional wellbeing-void.
Is your emotional wellbeing a bit on the low side at the moment? Buy this new $100 moisturizer in the name of self-care. Feeling a little stressed from your work or from your kid’s busy school and sports schedule? You deserve to indulge in this nice bottle of wine to take the edge off…in the name of self-care.
That being said, self-care can be a legitimate practice which can greatly increase the quality of our lives and fill our cups, so to speak, and to increase our capacity to care for and show up for others.
Even the World Health Organization has recently officially weighed in on the importance of healthcare workers’ ability to support people’s self-care efforts. Everywhere around the world, supporting self-care can help people have more control over their own health and wellbeing.
Research suggests benefits of engaging in a self-care routine include:
· more positive health outcomes
· increased personal resilience· possibility of living longer· becoming better equipped at managing stress
I know personally, when I am consistent with my self-care routine, including exercising daily and preparing healthful meals for myself, it is reflected in my mood, my feeling of wellbeing, and my capacity to care for others.
Some Self-Care Routine IdeasIn my own self-care practice, I try to focus on acts or things that I can achieve fairly quickly, things that cost little to no additional money investment needed, and have noticeable immediate payoffs. A few aspects of my regular self-care routine include:
· Meal planning. Meal planning doesn’t have to be a drawn out, time consuming chore in which you plan out every single meal for the week, do a gigantic grocery haul, then prepare and store it all at once. This type of meal prep can be very handy of course (after the fact), but this time investment and often large money expenditure up front doesn’t fit in many of our schedules or financial situations. Instead, try focusing on having one healthy frozen meal option in your freezer at all times. In a pinch, you will have a quick, but still healthful, food option that saves you from resorting to fast food yet again and will help keep you on your budget.
· Budgeting. People often think of budgeting as a form of restricting or even punishing themselves, but once you buy in to your budget and commit to it, that is so far from the truth. A budget can give you peace of mind, the freedom to afford the things you truly want, and even the ability to give to others. I personally cannot recommend You Need a Budget highly enough. AND they have a 1-year free trial for students.
Image Credit: Money Control
· Exercising. Exercising is important - we all know that - but we often instead treat exercise and physical movement as optional or even somehow a luxury that just cannot fit in our lives. As someone who lives with a chronic illness and has also experienced depression and anxiety, I feel a huge noticeable difference, physically and mentally, when I regularly exercise compared to when I have let my daily workout routine fall by the wayside.
I personally like rowing but there are other great, completely free options like practicing yoga. If you have access to YouTube, then you have access to a plethora of free guided yoga videos such as Yoga with Adriene. Adriene is delightful, her videos range for all abilities, plus you can often get to see her dog Benji.
These tips are just a few of the more basic, but possibly life changing daily habits encompassed in self-care. They do not necessarily have to involve a huge time or money investment but reap huge returns on investment.
The self-care genre is vast so next Sunday we will delve into more aspects to increase our wellbeing. In the meantime if you would like to learn more about facets and tips to explore in the self-care realm you can also check out National Institute of Mental Health.
Another great source of self-care tips and ideas is the blog The Blissful Mind. There are many great ideas and techniques for focusing your self-care efforts on calming your mind through journaling and other mindful acts.
Join our Community Conversation
How do you self-care? I would love to hear your thoughts about self-care and how it affects your life and relationships. If you have any self-care tips of your own to share please drop them also in the comments below. I would love to read them and I am sure others would like to read them as well.
