7 Ways to make Every Day a Self Care Day
7 Ways to make Every Day a Self Care Day
‘Caring for Yourself’ is one of our most popular programmes; because it’s needed, and because it works. So do we know how to practise self care? Yes! Are we really good at doing it all the time ourselves… No! Like everything you want to master, it takes conscious effort and deliberate practice.
What springs to mind when you think of self care? I think about those little foam toe seperators for home pedicures and a gloopy face mask. These things can indeed be self care, but so can saying ‘no’. So can saying ‘yes’. So can treating your brain by slowing down, or treating your heart and lungs by speeding up.
The most impactful and lasting kind of self care involves approaching the basics of life in the right way to keep our nervous systems in balance.
Here are 7 ways to make every day Self Care Day:
Being active. Indeed this might look like a circuit of HIIT training at the gym before work, or it could be simply introducing a little more movement into your day – for example, by walking about whilst you’re on the phone.
Read more: Introducing Movement into your Working Day
Everything is Fine! Get used to having conversations about mental health and emotional wellbeing. This means recognising what’s going on with your emotional wellbeing and being open and honest with yourself and others about how you feel – especially when everything is not, in fact, fine.
Read more: The best ever mental health tips, backed by research
Gratitude and Joy. Gratitude is taking the time to notice and be grateful for the good things in each day. Looking for them, writing them down, describing them aloud to ourselves can significantly improve our happiness. Science says.
Read more: The Power of “Thank you”
Dial back your inner critic. Not engaging with that crippling inner dialogue that tells you you’re not enough, is an act of self care.
Read more: “Would you say that out loud to anybody else?”
Be Properly Selfish: This is what we might think of as traditional ‘self care’. Seeking out renewal activities – big and small – throughout the day , can keep up out of the ‘red zone’ when our cortisol levels spike and we start operating in stress mode. Think more ‘five deep breaths’ than ‘a shot of tequila’.
Read more: Understanding why we get stressed and what we can do about it.
Take notice. We feel like life is passing us by because we’re not always experiencing it as it happens. We live in the future, or the past, and our feelings don’t relate to the moment we are in. If we allow ourselves to just be as we are, check in on ourselves, notice our breathing and our surroundings, then our nervous system is not constantly repsonding to imaginary future threats, or past turmoil.
Read more: “What has Mindfulness got to do with broccoli?”
Find Vocation and Purpose. Finding what matters to us, doing what aligns with our values and discovering meaning in the world can bring a deep sense of content.
Read more: “Is this the formula for happiness?”
Each of these 7 things is exploring in depth in our Caring for Yourself programme. Find out more about that, here.
Amy x
