Why Do We Need, At The Very Least, A Very Basic Self-Care Routine?

Because it will be your foundation to help your mental and physical health. It will help you recenter when everything else goes astray in your life. If we can bring it all back to basics on our bad days, we can reset our ability to cope with whatever life has thrown at us.

Why We Don’t Have A Self-Care Routine?

When we look at why we don’t have a self-care routine we usually find that:

1. We were not taught to do so
2. Have low self-esteem
3. Don’t set healthy boundaries with others
4. Have forgotten that loving ourselves just that little bit more than we do another is important

When we have learnt to put into a place an ability to look after ourselves, it builds our self-confidence in our own abilities, reduces our stresses, anxiety etc. It also has the knock on affect of building our resilience to cope with the ever yday ups and downs of life.

10 Ways To Start Building Self-Care Into Your Routine

Set A Sleep Routine

It is vital that you get a good sleep routine in place. There may be a variety of issues why you are not sleeping and these need to be investigated. Most of us think that we can catch up on our sleep deprivation on weekends but this won’t work. It will not reverse the effects of sleep deprivation, in fact, it can introduce further problems for your body clock very quickly.

I can not stress enough that the lack of sleep can increase your risks of developing physical and mental health conditions. These risks include, but are not limited to, increased risks of stroke and heart attacks, type 2 diabetes, endocrine problems, stress levels increase as does anger, decrease in concentration.

If you feel you have a problem with sleep then it is important you seek help from your GP immediately. I talk more about sleep and sleep issues in my blog on the topic, it contains some tips to help you establish a better sleep routine, you can find it here.

Re-evaluate Your Priorities

If you are feeling stressed and off centre then I bet you are not setting healthy boundaries. I can also guarantee you are overwhelming yourself with a list of priorities (to do list) that just might also include other people’s responsibilities. Taking time to re-evaluate your priorities list on a regular basis is vital to our self-care.

1. What do you do every day, every week, every month?
2. For whom and where, in work, at home, for family or friends?
3. Are these helping or hindering you?
4. Are they someone else’s responsibility?Now is the time to stop and think about everything you do.
5. Do you really need to do these?
6. Can you let some go? If you can not, I ask you why not?

Be honest with yourself here and ask for help if you need it. I’ll discuss more about being realistic with scheduling below.

Learn To Say No

When setting new priorities we need to start thinking about what we would like in our life and what boundaries we need to start setting with others. We need to realise we can say no to things and people and that it doesn’t mean we are bad people as a result.

Speaking up and saying No is part of assertiveness training. Always remember you have the right to say no. And that No is a full sentence and a full statement, so it doesn’t require an explanation. I talk more about reviewing your priorities and what kind of questions we need to ask ourselves in this blog.

Eat In A Healthy Manner

This one might seem pretty obvious but eating well doesn’t mean we have to follow some strict fad diet and deny ourselves. Eating three good meals a day, having healthy snacks, cutting back on alcohol and sugary foods will help our physical and mental health.

You will crave more sugar if you are stressed and tired. So you might need to tackle these first before you try to reduce your sugary food intake. If you find that three meals are too much, then perhaps five/six smaller meals might suit you better.

Drinking eight glasses of water a day will also help you stay hydrated. Being dehydrated will affect your concentration levels and productivity.

As I am not a GP, Dietitian or Nutritionist I can not advise you on diet. So please speak to one of these professionals before embarking upon any healthy eating program.

Take Time To Relax

Allowing our stress levels to build is very irresponsible, as it impacts our physical and mental health in such a huge way. Stress is also more likely to lead to women to experience high levels of depression and anxiety disorders than men.

This may be because of how women process stress hormones. Understanding how and what stress is can go long way in helping you to reduce your stress levels. So do check out my blog on this subject where I discuss it in more detail.

Taking even 15 minutes outside for a walk everyday will help you relax. Getting some daylight every day is also essential to your physical and mental health. As is having some form of formal meditation practice. Find something that is relaxing for you and combine it with something else if time is a constraint for you.

What about combining some relaxation with doing something nice just for yourself such as:

1. Meeting with friends
2. Doing something fun (see below)
3. Getting a massage
4. Doing any forms of exercise you enjoy
5. Having a daily skin care routine or a weekly home spa day

The list is endless really and is entirely only limited by your own imagination.

Journal

Journaling has huge benefits for both mental and physical health. Research has shown it acts not only as a stress management, anxiety and depression support tool. But has been shown to benefit asthma, rheumatoid arthritis and other health conditions.

It improves cognitive functioning and it strengthens the immune system, and prevents a host of illnesses. Plus allows our right brain to create freely, while journaling occupies our left brain with some rational and analytical operations.

In effect, it removes mental blocks and allows you to use all of your brain power to better understand yourself, others and the world around you. So taking time each day to journal and get all your emotions out will have huge benefits not just for now but also into your future.

Try finishing by writing a gratitude list. Even just three things you are grateful for can impact your mental health extremely quickly. It boosts and maintains our self-esteem and happiness quicker than other things we can do in our self-care arsenal. I talk more about the benefits of gratitude here.

Have Some Fun

At heart we are social creature, we need laughter too. Connecting with friends and family is important to our mental and physical health. Making contact face to face with family and friends can release hormones that relieve stress. But you must feel comfortable and safe when doing this.

Negative vampires –people who bring you down and suck the life out of you – will never do that. Even just a quick chat and a kind word can help. So spend time with people who make you feel good and don’t allow your responsibilities to hold you back from making time for these kinds of relationships, they are too important.

Make it a priority to review your friendship list today.

1. What kind of people do you spend the most time with?
2. Can you eliminate negative vampires from your life?
3. If not, can you at least minimise contact with them?
4. Don’t you owe it to yourself to build good relationships with family and friends?

Exercise and getting ourselves moving can be a great form of fun too. Taking up even something as simple as a walk at lunchtime can help. A quick walk with a colleague or friend can be a great way to let off stream. Better yet make it into a hobby or new interest.

Hobbies and interests shouldn’t go on the back burner while we over commit ourselves. We need creative outlets to help balance both sides of our brain, reduce stress and up our productivity. I’ve created a few blogs on creativity and why it is important, you can check one of these out here.

Don’t Over Schedule Yourself

This suggestion for self-care is linked to my points on re-evaluating your priorities and the next one below. Over-scheduling yourself will leave you exhausted, overwhelmed and feeling like you never accomplish anything. It will damage your self-confidence very quickly and push your stress limits.

When we feel emotional overwhelmed it can feel all-consuming. People who face this feel completely overcome by an intense emotion to something in their life that is too challenging to manage and/or overcome. When we are emotionally overwhelmed it can become hard to think and act rationally. It may at times feel impossible to function in our day to day lives. It affects both our personal and professional life.

Always remember that you have to be realistic about what you schedule everyday. Use a planner (paper or online) and always schedule in time for yourself first. Pick a time management system that works for your lifestyle, but don’t be afraid to experiment with different ones until you find the one that suits you.

Incorporate a buddy system to help you stay on track with any goals you set.

Break all goals and projects down into the smallest steps possible to give yourself a quick win. This is so important in reducing your stress levels and boosting your self-confidence. Never schedule more than 3 top priorities a day. These are the smallest actionable steps you need to make a project (work or personal) or goal come to life. If you find that a step is too big then break it down into a smaller more manageable one. If you need further help with time management you can check out my blog here.

Make A To Do List Nightly

Making, and checking, your to do list once a day will help you keep on track. Yes you can have a master to do list for each month and week. But checking off what we have accomplished will, as I’ve said, boost our self-confidence as we see all those wins. It will also show us how much we are doing, and for whom, especially in the early days of reviewing our priorities.

This nightly review will keep us on track and we can tweak things more quickly if we are tracking them. We may have started off well but change can be hard and we can slip into old habits very easily. We need to understand that this happens but we can still get back, and stay, on track by using a nightly review, and writing, of our to do list.

Meditate

Meditation is a very helpful one for reducing stress, anxiety and even calming you when you feel angry, as it is a very effect anger management tool.

Deep breathing techniques work by stimulating what is known as the Parasympathetic Nervous System. Most of you may have heard of the ‘fight, fright or flight’ response, this is the Sympathetic Nervous System that gets you ready for action and helps us naturally react to stimulus that causes us fear, anger, or threatens us in some manner.

The Parasympathetic Nervous System is simply the opposite of that, it activates a natural bodily response that can be described as ‘rest and digest’. It stimulates our out-breaths to decrease our blood pressure, dilate our pupils and slows our heart rate, thus lowering emotional arousal in the process.

For most of us we only use the top half of our lungs, breathing in shallow breaths, which we do automatically when stressed, anxious or angry. The is an automatic process, but we can learn to consciously control our breathing. For relaxation, and to promote well being, we need to fill our whole lungs. This will help to change our mind/body state. Something as simple as the 7 – 11 technique is easy and quick to learn.

I have a podcast here that teaches this and another one on mindfulness plus one on the 3 minute breather which you can use on the go.

Love Yourself

Learning to love yourself can be a hard road for many, but a well worth it one. Doing any one of the above is a great starting point. But I’d recommend starting with getting your self-care basics in place first.

We may not have been taught this as children simply because our parents didn’t know how to love themselves either. We could have been taught that love would only come from a conditional love or from an outside source.

Conditional love tells us we must measure up and be found acceptable by others to be lovable. It was a love that had to be earned on the basis of unconscious or conscious conditions being met by you.

Starting to reclaim your life and love yourself could be the beginning of your life. We can now begin to look within to find out who we really are and ask ourselves what it is we actually want. I have a blog on how you can start this process here.

Work With Me.

Remember you are allowed to ask for support. No one is an island. If you need extra support then you can also work with me. We all struggle with stress and overwhelm from time to time. If you find this has become a problem for you and you’d like some support then schedule an appointment with me.