How To Take Care of Yourself
Table of Contents
Disclaimert: Always seek professional help with any questions you may have regarding your overall wellness.
Do your days sometimes pass just by working and doing nothing else? Unfortunately, many people today end their day like this. Yet, you need to take good care of yourself. Especially at this intense pace, it’s much more important for people to take good care of themselves.
We guess that from time to time you promise to take care of yourself, but you don’t do it enough or you give up after a while.
You’re too hard on yourself, you don’t just have to go far and take a yoga retreat to take care of yourself. Even if you do this, it doesn’t end here. Sometimes just doing something good for you also means being kind to yourself. For example, going after work and reading the new issue of a favorite magazine at your favorite coffee shop.
We know that you want to get rid of the feeling of being overwhelmed so we’ve prepared this article for you. Come on, start reading our article on how to take care of yourself.
This article covers:
Why Is Self Care Important?
Before we move on to our tips for taking care of yourself, it’s important to talk about why it’s important to take care of yourself. Moreover, once you realize how important it is, you’ll want to take care of yourself more and take it more seriously.
Taking care of yourself is very good for both your emotional health and overall health. It's a route to well-being. For example, your relationship with your co-workers will noticeably change positively. You’ll feel in a better position to support your loved ones. Your attrition rate in your relationship will decrease.
Your mind will become much clearer. It’ll also affect your success in your job in a good way. It’s wrong to think of it as selfishness, it’s not selfish to take care of yourself, to seek peace. It’s something everyone should do.
If you don’t feel good, you can’t be good to the people around you. When you don’t take good care of yourself, you run into many risks, unfortunately, including heart disease.
When you take good care of yourself, you have a better sense of self as well as be able to manage stress better. These include physical and mental health. So, everything is interconnected. As long as you take care of yourself, then you’ll be a healthy person.
For all these reasons, self-care is very important. Taking care of yourself is not selfish or self-indulgent. You may feel guilty for doing things that are good for you. On the other hand, when you’re well, it’ll reflect on the people around you and you’ll be a ball of happiness! But, remember, it’s important to have everything in moderation.
Seven Pillars of Self Care
We can divide self-care into seven pillars. Thanks to these seven pillars, you’ll discover what you need instead of trying to do everything at once. In this way, you’ll see what kind of care you need right now.
These seven basic principles of self-care that we’ll talk about include a theme of integrity. So, what are they?
The Seven Pillars of Self-Care are:
- Mental
- Emotional
- Physical
- Environmental
- Spiritual
- Recreational
- Social
When you see the list, no worries that it’s too much! All of these are in balance and contain a whole. You don’t have to call them all at once. You can make this a process and focus on the right areas at the right time. What matters is which one you feel ready to focus on.
Let’s take a closer look at these seven pillars to better explore and show you what you can do.
Mental Self Care
Mental self-care is also known as intellectual self-care. The goal of mental self-care is to develop a mindset. Improving your mental skills is important in reducing stress levels.
So, what can you do to provide mental self-care? Meditation is very good as it relaxes the mind. Apart from that, you can write a diary. Putting your feelings on paper is good for mental self-care. It’s good to have your brain busy with something else. Moreover, another important thing to do is to try to stay away from technology consciously from time to time. In this way, your mind will rest and your stress level will decrease. When you come back, you’ll find yourself much more relaxed.
Emotional Self Care
Emotional self-care targets situations such as coping with situations and returning to one’s heart. When you have emotional self-care, you’ll be more at peace with yourself, you’ll cope with difficulties more easily and you’ll react more balanced to events.
So, what can you do to improve emotional self-care? Art is extremely good at it. It’s good to watch a movie or listen to the songs you like to get you thinking. Also, as always, putting feelings on paper helps with emotional well being. But your thoughts on paper should be positive as you strive for emotional self-care. Another thing that may seem easy for emotional self-care but can take some getting used to is not shying away when you need help. And, to set boundaries for yourself and to have a balance in life.
Physical Self Care
Let’s move on to physical self-care. Being physically healthy is also very important to have a healthy mentality. Therefore, good care of your body is important, and physical self-care aims for that too. It provides conditions such as physical self-care, exercise, healthy eating, hygiene, and good sleep. When you provide physical self-care, you’ll feel much better because your energy will be high and you’ll have more self-respect.
So, what can you do for physical self-care? In addition to eating your meals healthy, your eating routine is also important. For this reason, it’s important to eat your meals at regular times. Drinking lots of water and taking daily vitamins are good for physical self-care. One of the most important things is getting enough sleep. Getting at least 7 or 8 hours of sleep a night is good for physical self-care. And of course, exercising regularly!
Environmental Self Care
Environmental self-care aims to take care of your surroundings. It’s not to be forgotten that one of the goals of self-care is to be more attentive to the environment. The more attentive you’re to your immediate surroundings, the more peaceful and comfortable you’ll feel there.
Let’s look at what you need to do for environmental self-care. For this, you can first make the area where you work during the day more comfortable. It’s very good to try to discover new places. This new place doesn’t necessarily have to be another country, even in your surroundings, you can see that there’s a lot to discover when you’re a little more careful. Paying attention to your senses is also one of the goals of environmental self-care. Things that’ll stimulate your senses may be burning incense, wearing comfortable clothes, or eating something delicious.
Spiritual Self Care
When it comes to self-care, it’s imperative to feed your soul. What we call spiritual self-care aims at just that. With spiritual self-care, you learn to spend more time with yourself, find more meaning in your life, and feel calmer.
For this, spending time in nature is a very good method. Another method is to sit down and write down what is valuable to you in a notebook. In this way, you’ll see better what your life means to you and how valuable it is. Also, taking part in a social responsibility project is very good for spiritual self-care. In this way, you can also feel good by helping others. And, whatever you believe in, try to hold on to it.
Recreational Self Care
We can describe recreational self-care as discovering your inner child. This includes hobbies, fun activities, and experiencing new things every moment. It’s not right to underestimate this stage of self-care because it involves doing things that’ll be good for you. Every once in a while you should get rid of responsibilities and try to enjoy life.
For this reason, it’s good to devote time to your hobbies. It’s good for you to do something on your own, too. Sometimes it’s good to do nothing. Apart from these, you can play games alone or with your friends. The most important method of recreational self-care is to step outside of what you do every day once in a while.
Social Self Care
Yes, what we call self-care is about you in general, but you cannot think of yourself independently from your social life. Having healthy relationships with people is essential for self-care. The purpose of social self-care is to have positive relationships with the environment and to create a sense of acceptance.
What can you do? Try to spend more time with your friends. This includes your family. Do you have relatives whom you’ve not seen for a long time, but whom you love very much? Call them. If you don’t want these, you can contact social support groups. Perhaps it would be better for you to meet people you’ve never met. These can be face-to-face or online.
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Tips for Self Care
1. Get out of the House
We’re aware that the house is very comfortable for you and there are some days when you don’t want to go out at all, especially on busy days. Yet, have you ever noticed that you’re so used to this comfort? Yes, the house is a great comfort zone, but it needs to be removed from time to time. Getting out of the house heals you sometimes! You may even realize that the problem is always staying at home.
It’s good to spend time outside. It’s very important for mental and physical health. It’s almost like meditation. You don’t even have to take a walk, if you’re not in a good mood, go out for fresh air. Watch nature. You don’t have to be living in the wild! But, if you have the opportunity, it’s best to live in a place surrounded by nature.
2. Check Yourself
Set a certain part of the day to control yourself. It’ll be good for you to know what you did that day. This doesn’t have to be too hard, especially for those who like to keep a diary or a list! All it takes is a few minutes of your time. Write down these things on paper, what made you happy and sad during that day?
You might ask yourself what are the best things in your life. For example, have you postponed any work today? If you had a little more time today, would you like to do something else? Have you faced something that you think should not be in your life today? Answer them. You can even consider creating a life plan.
3. Be Good to Your Environment
One of the best ways to take care of yourself is to also look around you. It makes you feel important.
Helping others is very good. Because while doing these aids, people help themselves with the beauty of this feeling. You’ll feel so good when you see how you improve the lives of others. It’ll be very good for your mental health. It has too many benefits to count. Reducing stress levels is very important for human health, and it may seem interesting but helping people does just that!
4. Bring Joy to Your Life
Adding joy to your life is essential for self-care. One of the most important things you need to do for this is to put aside what you don’t have and start enjoying what you have. Try to think of good things. You can even write down the things that are good for you. Name this list whatever you want, and there’ll be things that cheer you up.
What comes to your mind when you think of joy? Whatever comes, do it! It could be listening to a song, dancing, or playing sports. Be aware of what brings you joy so take the time to do it. Include it in the routine of your life. Remember, laughing makes people happy! It may sound funny, but try to laugh a lot. It could be spending time with your cheerful friends or watching funny movies. Just, smile!
5. Enjoy the Fragrance
Yes, proper breathing is very important for stress management. However, there’s another little-known thing. What we smell when we breathe!
Smells are also part of self-care. Researchers also draw attention to this. For this reason, citrus scents, known as anxiety-reducing scents, can be very good for you on your stressful days. Each scent has a different effect. Use whatever mood you want that day. For this, you can use candle holders, teapots, and oil bottles.
6. Set Your Limits
One of the most important parts of taking care of yourself is that you have limits in life. Identify them. These boundaries can be between you and people, or they can be business boundaries.
If you ask what I can do, for example, instead of getting instant notifications, you can turn off your email notifications. You can set times a day and only look at your emails at those moments. We recommend turning off your phone while spending time with the people you love, so you can focus on the moment. Or, is there someone in your life that you don’t want to have? If there is, try to distance yourself from that person. For this, you can warn your surroundings and try not to go to the places where s/he is.
7. Gain Awareness
This is perhaps the most difficult thing we struggle with during the day. We can’t focus on the moment. For this reason, we have no idea how we feel or what we think at certain moments. Yet, it’s very important to focus on the moment, to be in the moment we live. If you’re having trouble acquiring this skill, you can see a therapist because it’s a very common practice among them.
When you gain awareness, your self-respect increases and you get to know yourself better. Since you’re in the moment you’re living, your mind will also be clearer because you’re only in the moment, the next day’s work isn’t going on in your head.
8. If You Don’t Want, Say No
Your time is precious. And to be a self-care person, it’s necessary to appreciate this time. So, learn to say no if you think it’s a waste of time.
You don’t have to say yes when someone asks you for something. Think about it, is it beneficial for you to do this job? No? Then, you don’t have to help the person next to you. At this point, you need to trust your instincts. Don’t think of it as being rude either, it’s quite possible to politely reject the other person.
Conclusion
Here we come to the end of the article we’ve prepared for you…So, how to take care of yourself…We know, unfortunately, life doesn’t always go the way we want. Sometimes we feel that we no longer enjoy anything. But that doesn’t mean we can’t have fun anymore. With some steps we’ll take, the list in the article, can start to change little by little. The most important step is to realize what went wrong in our lives and start striving to fix them.
You deserve to be happy, it’s wrong to burden yourself and try to implement all of these suggestions at once. Think of it as a process. Self-care is like that. We hope your journey goes well. Take care of yourselves!
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How To Take Care of Yourself – FAQ
What is the meaning of self-care?
Self-care is the mental and physical health of individuals. One doesn’t have to do this alone. Self-care is a process that includes getting help from professionals when necessary.
What are examples of self-care?
Self-care activities are many and what can be done varies according to the person. But in general, we can separate the examples of self-care as physical and mental. Physically, exercising and eating healthy can be an example; mentally, we can give examples of activities such as reading a book, taking time to watch movies, and going out to dinner with friends by staying away from technology.
How can I take care of myself every day?
Self-care elements that everyone needs are changing person by person.. However, you can do something for your self-care by following some steps every day, except for the specific ones. For example:
Eat healthy meals, have a clear schedule of your meals
Exercise
Not drinking too much alcohol
Get at least 7 or 8 hours of sleep a night
Be hygienic
Try not to neglect to socialize, and spend time with the people you love
Try to make time for something you enjoy every day, even for a few minutes
What are the three rules of self-care?
We can count three basic rules for self-care:
Risk of limiting yourself: Everyone’s self-care needs are different. Don’t worry about not feeling well after applying general information, maybe your needs are different, research them.
Plan: Planning is essential to being a self-care person. Plan what you need to do.
Keep your mind clear: A conscious mind is always good. It makes you more aware. That’s why it’s always good to do it with a clear mind when planning your self-care phases.
How to take care of yourself emotionally?
Here are the basic things you can do for emotional self-care:
Be aware of the reactions you give in the moments you live, and the emotions you experience.
Choose your ways of expressing your feelings carefully.
Before you do anything, give yourself time to think it through.
Try to apply stress management methods.
Have a work-life balance in your life.
Try to exercise, physical health is also very important for emotional health and mental health.
Try not to neglect to socialize, and be in contact with other people as much as possible (with people who’re good for you!)
Be aware of your life’s purpose.