Me, Myself and Self-Care

Imagine it is a Sunday evening. As the sun sets, you light some vanilla-scented candles, dim the lights, and turn on your favorite relaxing music. You can feel the calmness in the air, reach your body, and relax your muscles. I bet you last did this activity a while ago.

Taking time for ourselves and engaging in a relaxing activity promotes well-being and quality of life, serving as a framework for managing stress, life challenges, and burnout. You may have been struggling to focus at work and experience fatigue, but you are not too sure what’s going on? Or maybe you are unsure how to incorporate self-care into your daily routine.

Having a lot on your plate, such as academic pressures, excessive workloads, and struggles with interpersonal relationships, can interfere with one’s energy. Self-care is an empowerment process that creates balance and equilibrium across our personal, social, and work lives.

Following the Seven domains of self-care, strive to bring wholeness into your life. Self-care integrates practices into daily routines that foster physical health, social support networks, emotional and mental health, and mindful awareness.

1. Intellectual and Mental

Self-Care

Mental Self-Care includes activities to declutter the mind and cultivate a healthy mindset. Some ideas of mental self-care include meditating, journaling, and puzzles.

Journaling is a self-reflection of experiences to understand oneself better and recognize if personal issues interfere with their life experiences. Journaling is a common technique in Cognitive-Behavioural Therapy (CBT) to promote self-awareness. Some CBT therapists include Gauri and Jovita that might be good fit to your journaling preferences.

Mindfulness practices facilitate self-awareness and improve perceived stress, coinciding with decreasing anxiety and depression (Newsome et al., 2006). Implementing mindfulness methods such as yoga and breathing techniques into a self-care plan can help to tune with our emotional state and be equipped to address demanding situations. Yoga has many perceived benefits, including relaxing and calming the mind, providing mental clarity, connecting us to our body, and increasing awareness (Newsome et al., 2006). Even taking an intentional break from technology can serve as a tool to reset the brain. If you are looking for a therapist that practices mindfulness Tara and Micaela might be a good fit.

2. Emotional Self-Care

Emotional self-care nourishes your feelings through self-compassion and acknowledgment to be more in tune with your body’s needs in developing adaptive coping strategies. As we connect deeply to our emotions, we also want to encourage ourselves to laugh it out, dance and sing to our favourite songs, journal, set boundaries to protect energy, and practice gratitude.

3. Physical Self-Care

Body and physical self-care practices include exercise, quality sleep, and a healthy diet. Physical health problems can interfere with personal and work commitments. Quality and quantity of sleep are compromised in the presence of stress. This persists in a cycle of inadequate sleep and the continuation of stress. Following a well-balanced diet and engaging in physical activity, such as going to the gym, contributes to self-esteem and self-efficacy, enhancing work performance (Irish et al., 2014). Other tips include drinking more water and going for walks outside.

4. Environmental Self-care

Personal environments can influence your mood, impact your behaviours and motivation, facilitate interactions, and create or reduce stress. To me, the physical environment includes my home, workplace, and outdoor spaces. A clean space cultivates productivity and reduces stress (Poslins & Gall, 2020). Seasonally decluttering your room and work office will help destress and gain a sense of control, contributing to self-care. Additionally, time spent outdoors boosts your mood by lowering stress, depression, and anxiety (Posluns & Gall, 2020). While also appealing to your senses, such as lighting that vanilla-scented candle in your home to exude a calm and warm atmosphere.

5. Spiritual Self-Care

Spiritual self-care nourishes our inner being. Activities are guided by a sense of purpose, such as being in nature to feel more grounded and identifying what is meaningful to you. Some soul-fulfilling activities include practicing silence and meditation to connect with yourself more profoundly, offering clarity and comfort.

6. Recreational Self-Care

Recreational self-care encourages engaging in activities and hobbies that interest you. Tapping into your inner child, such as playing board games or going on an adventure. The playfulness of this pillar motivates us not take life too seriously and try new experiences.

7. Social Self-Care

Social support and maintaining healthy relationships are essential aspects of self-care. Connections and interactions with other individuals can help cope with personal and professional stressors. Relationships with family members and friends lend a listening ear, create memories, provide laughter and joy, and support us. This gives the balance necessary for greater self-esteem, compassion satisfaction, and decreased stress (Posluns & Gall, 2020). While many of these pillars interconnect, drawing self-care activities from each domain is important. Which pillar do you connect with the most? And which do you feel you need to focus on?

References

Aeon, B., Faber, A., Panaccio, A. (2021). Does time management work? A meta-analysis. PLOS ONE, 16(1). https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0245066

Häfner, A., Stock, A. & Oberst, V. (2015). Decreasing students’ stress through time management training: an intervention study. European Journal of Psychology Education, 30, 81–94.

https://doi.org/10.1007/s10212-014-0229-2

Irish, L. A., Kline, C. E., Gunn, H. E., Buysse, D. J., & Hall, M. H. (2015). The role of sleep hygiene in promoting public health: A review of empirical evidence. Sleep medicine reviews, 22, 23–36. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.smrv.2014.10.001

Newsome, S., Christopher, J. C. Dahlen, P., & Christopher, S. (2006). Teaching counselors self-care through mindfulness practices. Teachers College Record, 108(9), 1881-1900.

https://www.tcrecord.org/Home.asp ID Number: 12686.

Posluns, K., & Gall, T. L. (2020). Dear Mental Health Practitioners, Take Care of Yourselves: a Literature Review on Self-Care. International journal for the advancement of counseling, 42(1), 1–20. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10447-019-09382-w