Self Care
You may have heard people around you or online talking about the importance of self care. While they may make recommendations that are helpful for some people, it can leave you with questions. You may wonder what exactly is self care or how do you know if your self care activities are really meeting your needs.
Self care is any activity or behavior that promotes or protects your health and wellbeing. While it may sound simple the reality for many people can often be pretty complicated. Our health and wellbeing doesn’t just refer to physical health or mental health, though those are two very important pillars. We also have to consider aspects like our emotional health, our social health, and for some our spiritual health. Ideally our self care plans will address these various aspects. That’s a lot to balance, especially for someone who already has other time consuming commitments like work, school, or caregiving.
Physical Health
There are ways to look after our physical health beyond diet and exercise such as going to our regular annual check ups, dental appointments, or optometry appointments. We will also want to take any medications as they’ve been prescribed by a healthcare professional. Another aspect of physical self care is respecting our limitations: do we let ourselves rest and seek appropriate care when ill or injured?
Mental Health
Self care here may also include attending appointments with a psychiatrist and/or therapist and engaging in the respective treatment plans. Our mental health asks us to practice compassion towards ourselves, and often towards others as well. We may want to question whether the first thought our brain provides is accurate. We might want to know if there are any unconscious beliefs we hold that are negatively affecting our lives.
Emotional Health
We are looking at how we feel and how we navigate our emotions. Examples of emotional self care might look like expanding our emotional vocabulary, validating our feelings, self soothing, and identifying when our emotions are trying to rule our behavior. Emotional self care requires us to balance knowing that it is ok to feel the way we feel but that acting out from our emotions isn’t always in our best interest.
Social Health
Many of us spend the majority of our socialization time with those that we live with or those we work with. These relationships can be a wonderful part of our social health, but for most people we also want to make sure we have healthy friendships, other family connections, and other community ties for a well balanced social life.
Spiritual Health
This could look like participating in spiritual practices or being part of a spiritual community. Spiritual health often involves a sense of peace, purpose, and connection. As each of us have unique purposes, connections, and senses of peace the activities that bring us closer to these are unique.
All of this asks that we are on our own priority list. So many of us are used to putting other responsibilities above our own needs. The largest part of self care is recognizing that our wellbeing is not optional. If we want to keep engaging in our lives and giving to the roles and relationships that we value, we have to make sure we are filling our own cup.
If you’re looking to add quick and easy self care opportunities into busy days here are some things to try.
3-5 rounds of box breathing exercises
Spend time in/near nature (walk near green space during lunch break, looking out window to lawn while eating breakfast)
1-3 minutes of gentle stretching (consult your doctor for any safety/injury concerns)
Expand your emotional vocabulary
Send a text to a friend or schedule a 5-10 min call
Dedicate 5-10 minutes to a hobby or leisure activity
Name one positive thing about each day
Name one thing to be grateful for each day
Repeat one positive affirmation three times
Thank you for joining us on this exploration of self-care. We hope you found some new tools or strategies to try. Check back over the next week to see our upcoming blog posts all about positive affirmations and reframing!
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