3 Ways to Take Care of Yourself

Taking care of oneself has always been concerned with many essentials, and many tips have been provided for self-care, especially in light of the Corona pandemic. We are told, for example, to meditate, take long baths to relax, or buy new and expensive skin care products.

Note: This article is adapted from blogger Alyssa F. Westring, who shares her experience with self-care.

Despite these tips' validity and benefits, they rarely convince a person to take mental and physical health care seriously. Ample research has shown that nourishing our minds and souls and building our bodies will help us be more effective in everything we do, which is the concept of self-care.

I have studied this issue for nearly two decades as a researcher, a teacher, and a professional coach, and every day, I hear from people about their strong desire to take care of themselves better. Still, they do not find the right time.

We often note that ending their social and professional responsibilities towards their bosses, colleagues, families, and friends is at the top of the list of missions, while self-care comes at the end of the list, and it becomes more difficult with students and young professionals.

As the priority is in the interest of study, work, and daily duties, it is not surprising to find that many people, by the end of the day, have exhausted their energy and no longer have any desire to take care of themselves.

The irony here is that spending time taking care of oneself is the key to success and good performance at all our life levels. On the one hand, our mental and physical health is essential for our education and career. On the other hand, our education and work drain the time and energy we need for our mental and physical health.

So, how can one reconcile this apparent contradiction? The solution is not to do a new study, do regular exercise, get enough sleep, or even download an online meditation app to convince us of the benefit of taking care of ourselves, but to change how we think.

In my research with organizational psychologist Stew Friedman, we found that most people work with a trade-off mentality: “If you want to do better at work, you need to take some time away from something else.”

This mindset is rooted in our subconscious mind, and we always look at all the things in our lives in comparison and wonder. Which can be sacrificed at the expense of the other? Even the concept of work-life “balance” is frequently represented on a scale that focuses on work on one side and the rest of life on the other.

Although our time is quite limited to distract with several things, the preference mindset besieges us and prevents any positive change.

To make this positive change, we need to reconsider the interconnectedness between different parts of our lives. By reviewing your old assumptions about self-care, you can find an approach that suits you.

Important self-care tips

Here are three tips that can help you:

1. Formulate your own concept of self-care

Due to a large number of self-care advocates, each of us follows a different set of steps that they think is the ideal way to enjoy good health. In fact, you are the only one who can determine what your mind, body, and soul need to grow and develop for the better.

You may be the type for whom the television provides a state of relaxation at the end of the day, or the presence of a therapist or psychiatrist may provide adequate support for you, or perhaps what comforts you is to mute social media notifications that make you feel anxious and away from your phone. To find out exactly what you need, only start noticing.

Find repetitive patterns in your life, discover activities that make you feel motivated, things that make you feel comfortable, and others that make you feel drained and stressed. Start forming your own concept of self-care now.

2. Don't self-destruct with an all-or-nothing approach

You may be surprised by the number of people I work with who think they need to shift from someone who suffers from sleep deprivation and complete depletion of energy to someone healthy and physically fit overnight.

The idea of doing anything less than completely changing life is unacceptable to them, so they avoid making any changes at all, knowing this is not new after the wave of marketing focused on the concept of "you are a new person" which of course frustrated many for their inability to change themselves radically.

So, watch how you think when you decide to devote some time to yourself. Do you assume that you need to reform your life completely?

Observing your adoption of an all-or-nothing approach is the first step to creating a more realistic mindset. From this perspective, you can begin exploring small, actionable changes to work on and generalize them to your whole life.

You will learn what works for you and what does not, explore how to satisfy your curiosity with new activities that give your mind and body comfort and action and learn how to empathize with yourself when you do not achieve the desired results. All these small changes are great alternatives to the all-or-nothing approach and tend to achieve long-term change.

3. Look for opportunities to integrate aspects of your life

Another way to be convinced of the importance of self-care is by changing presuppositions that prioritizing mental and physical health is something we should do in isolation from other parts of our lives. My research has shown that more sustainable self-care stems from combining different aspects of our lives.

For example, think about how you can use the physical self-care time to advance your career. Holding your meetings on foot will be more vital than a Zoom call, and supporting your community by collecting trash around the neighborhood will help build your body and setting a time to stream yoga videos with a distant friend or family member that promotes social relationships.

By changing the way you think about self-care, you can make gradual and meaningful transformations that bring you more peace, energy, and joy so that the research's validity will be demonstrated. Investing in your own safety can enhance your professional success by creating harmony between different parts of your life and leaving out old perceptions and impossible ideals.