Love Yourself with Self Care

Hello, hello beautiful human! I’m so glad you are here. Today we are going to get into the topic of self-care. I’ve written about self-care before as it relates to burnout for parents, but we all need to have ways of taking care of ourselves no matter what phase of life we are in.

I think we hit the self-care saturation point in 2018 and 2019. It felt like you couldn’t go anywhere or do anything without hearing something about self-care. Or maybe that’s just the bubble I’m in? I think it’s toned down a little bit lately but remains a very hot topic. Some of that is certainly due to the fact that companies think they can get us to buy things if those things are branded as being good for self-care. But is self-care really all face masks and bubble baths? My perspective is that it is much more than that and that you don’t need to buy anything to have good self-care practices.

So, if we go back to the very basics, self-care is really just listening to our needs and taking care of ourselves. That’s obvious, right? As soon as I flip the words around that way, they immediately lose their glossy, millennial-pink sheen and become something I hope we can all get behind. We know there are things we need to do to take care of ourselves every day. We sometimes don’t do this very well, though, and that’s where problems can arise.

Boring Self-Care

I’m a big advocate for what I call boring self-care. We need to feed ourselves well, hydrate, and put ourselves to bed. What I see often is that folks will skip over establishing good, loving practices in these areas in order to do things that are shinier and more fun or seem more urgent. I believe that we really need to get the basics right for any of the other stuff to work well. If you are chronically exhausted, are you really going to be getting the most out of any of the other things you try to do for yourself? I suggest that you take a moment to look at your life and see which of these areas are currently falling to the wayside and then make a plan for how to improve. Is it going to bed 15 minutes earlier? Taking a multivitamin? Drinking something other than soda? Small steps that you do every day can feed into powerful and loving habits. Don’t underestimate the boring stuff.

Mental, Emotional, and Spiritual Self-Care

Once you get into a good groove with meeting your basic physical needs, it’s time to look at whether you are taking good care of your brain, heart, and spirit. Let’s start with the brain. Whether you barely finished high school or have earned a PhD, there have been times in your life when your brain worked very hard learning new information. Once we are out of school and this is no longer a requirement, it becomes easy to not engage with the part of ourselves that enjoys learning. I believe we all have this part even if it has been metaphorically beaten out of us by formal education. So, I challenge you to think about what interests you and get into it! This could be learning about a hobby, a sport, a genre of book, a type of cuisine, or a period of history. Even becoming an expert on the Real Housewives or the British royal family can be an avenue for feeding your brain. Feeding our brains this way helps us feel more alive, interesting, and like more than just our job or family roles.

Next, are you taking care of yourself emotionally? This is another area that I often see being pushed to the back burner by my clients. The problem with this is that even things on the back burner can boil over if you ignore them long enough! It’s important to find ways to get in touch with your emotions in healthy ways such as establishing a regular journaling and/or meditation practice, getting in the habit of checking in on your feelings, and also going to therapy. Even if you aren’t having major mental health problems, having a few sessions with a therapist can be a great way to raise your level of self-awareness and find new ways to grow.

And lastly let’s look at spiritual self-care. For some of you, the things to do here will be very obvious because you have an already established religious tradition and practice that might include attending religious services, reading/studying religious texts, prayer, etc. For those who do not identify with any organized religion, it can be easy to overlook our spiritual side. Consider what you do to take care of your spirit, the part of you that yearns to connect with something bigger or deeper than yourself. You might spend time in meditation, contemplation, or in nature. You might spend time giving back to your community in some way. You might use tools such as tarot or crystals or see a spiritual advisor or healer. However you do it, finding ways to connect to something bigger than ourselves is important for self-care, I believe.

I hope this has given you some ideas of aspects of self-care you maybe hadn’t considered. If I could hammer one point home, though, it would be that we really must get the basics down first before we move on to the other ways we can care for ourselves and certainly before we can effectively care for anyone else in our lives. You’ve gotta sleep, eat, and drink like you love yourself, ok? Ok! Now go enjoy that bubble bath!

Meghan