What Self Care Is and Is Not
Self-Care IS an Antidote to Chronic Stress
Many people suffer from a wide variety of stress factors today. It can come in so many different forms: internal, external, from school, from work, from relationships, and so on. With so many factors today that can contribute to stress, you might develop chronic stress, meaning that it’s constantly occurring.
This can cause both adverse mental and physical effects that can lead to many extra problems on top of the ones you’re already dealing with. In order to curb your stress, you need to adopt a self-care routine.
One source of stress that can be helped by self-care is your physical appearance. Your physical appearance can vary in many ways, so there can be a lot of different sources of stress within this category.
For example, you might be unhappy with your fitness progress up to this point. Whether you find yourself overweight or underweight, a significant part of self-help for you could be going to the gym and adjusting your diet.
Others might be more stressed out with their physical appearance for more surface-level reasons. This could be anything from skin complexion and quality to overall attractiveness.
Many people get stressed out when they feel as though they’re not looking their best, and by adapting an almost spa-like self-help routine, you can improve your confidence in this area.
You can also improve stress that you harbor in your mind. Mental health is an unforgettable part of self-care. If you want to help your mental health, you can utilize self-care in order to take more time to yourself if you need, improve your insecurities, and so on.
There are many different methods that you can use, so look around and see what works best. For some people, being alone is their best source of relaxation – especially if they get stressed out a lot being in social situations.
Taking time to yourself can allow you to recharge your batteries, and fully digest conversations or situations that you were in, allowing you to better reflect on what you were doing. It also gives you a chance to do some of the things you enjoy.
For others, mental self-care might be more about sitting down and talking through things with people, especially after something that angered, upset, or confused you. This is also really effective for getting rid of stress, because if you just let thoughts and emotions get bottled up, you’re more likely to get stressed out fast.
Self-Care Is NOT One Size Fits All
When it comes to self-care, it’s easy to assume that what might work for one person will work for you as well. We like to take advice from others on what to do to improve our quality of life, though this might not be the best path.
Everyone has unique experiences in life, and we all have different problems that we want to address – and even different ways of going about solving them. While you could follow someone else’s guide and feel a lot better, that doesn’t mean this will always be the case.
For example, if you’re having issues with your job and that’s stressing you out, you might start to look at some generic solutions for your self-care. Someone might recommend working out to relieve stress, which does in fact work for some people.
It can take your mind off of things for a little while, giving you a chance to relax. However, this doesn’t mean that it’ll work for everyone. Some people might get stressed out going to the gym, feeling like there are people judging them, and others might not be financially able to afford one.
If you want to effectively tackle your problems and take care of yourself properly, you need to be able to identify the specific problems you’re facing in life that you want to get repair.
This could be finances, health, relationships, or a number of other things. Your experiences and your problems will rarely be identical to someone else, and another thing that won’t be identical is what you prefer to do in order to handle the stress that accompanies these problems.
This doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t try solutions that other people have. If someone has a solution, it’s worth giving it a try. If it works for you, then that’s good, and you can continue to use it.
If it doesn’t work for you, though, you can’t get all worried and upset about not being able to find the right strategy or begin to lose hope. It just means that you need to keep looking.
In fact, you can even take other ideas of self-care and use it for inspiration for your own unique ways of taking care of yourself. If you try a method and like it, but think it could be tweaked slightly to better fit your needs, go for it. Don’t be afraid to customize your self-care plans.
Self-Care IS Affordable on a Budget
Sometimes, the source of a lot of our stress is money. So many people worry about how much they’re making, how much they’re spending, and so on. Naturally, when it comes to improving yourself both physically and mentally, you don’t want to go stressing yourself out about expensive options for them.
The good news is that you don’t actually have to spend a lot of money in order to get into a good self-care routine. First, physical fitness can appear to cost a lot on the surface.
You might be thinking about getting all new gym clothes, gym bags, water bottles, supplements, a membership, and so much more. Truthfully, though, that’s not really necessary.
All of those things can either be substituted for something cheaper, or gotten rid of altogether, helping you cut costs immensely. When it comes to gym accessories, the less you have the better.
You don’t need a ton of stuff, so you really don’t even need a bag unless you intend to change at the gym. As far as clothes go, anything vaguely comfortable and athletic is good enough, such as a t-shirt and shorts.
You don’t need to and buy top brands. For water bottles, you can find cheap reusable bottles – you don’t have to invest in trendy, top notch bottles. In terms of supplements, they’re not really necessary, as you can get the nutrients and vitamins you need from carefully picking out certain foods.
Finally, you don’t even need a gym membership in all honesty. Plenty of people have made gyms at home with readily available equipment to help them stay in shape. You can do bodyweight exercises without machines, too.
Mental health is very similar. People like to think of it as having to go out and get expensive massages and spa treatments or pay a ton of money with a therapist, but you can get really far in terms of mental health just by doing things at home, or really anywhere, all for free.
For example, meditation can help immensely and that is entirely free. If you don’t know how to do it, you don’t need to hire a coach, but just go online and learn about which methods work best.
You can also do some fairly cheap self-care spa days from home with some cheap ingredients from your local grocery store and some instructions from the internet. Talking out your problems with others is like a free form of therapy, and can even help create bonds.
Self-Care Is NOT always just Soothing
A common misconception about self-care is that it’s always just relaxing and soothing. That’s not necessarily the case. In fact, if you’re always just relaxing, you need to adjust your self-care strategies a bit.
Some parts of self-care are going to be uncomfortable and difficult, but it’ll never be destructive. Even if self-care can be hard, it’s only ever done with the intention of helping you improve yourself.
For example, if you’re used to a pretty sedentary lifestyle, you might think self-care is just relaxing a bit more. Possibly at worst eating some better foods, but never anything too strenuous.
In reality, self-care for you would be getting out of your comfort zone and exercising to become more active. It’s not going to be a comfortable or enjoyable transition, but it’s helping you improve, and would be your ideal form of self-care.
This same idea can be applied to those who work too often. Some people are just addicted to working and refuse to give themselves enough downtime to process things and relax.
For them, self-care would be more focused on relaxing and enjoying themselves. They’d want to go back to work, but they would have to stay at home and find something to do as a hobby, something enjoyable.
Mental health is another part of self-help that might not be as enjoyable as you’d think it will be. You might be imagining taking a mental health day and just not stressing out about things too much, but it can often go a bit deeper than that. You’ll probably have to sit down at some point and think hard about what it is in your life that’s stressing you out – what’s causing you to feel the way you do.
This can be an uncomfortable and deep look into your own mind, so it’s certainly not a cakewalk. Don’t go into self-care with the idea that you’re just going to get to relax. Of course relaxation is an important part of it, but that’s not all it is.
At the end of the day, it’s about bettering yourself, and you can’t expect to improve by just staying stagnant. You need to face up to some less than desirable realities and realize that you’re going to be confronted with some unnerving situations. As long as you can push through these, though, you’ll come out on the other side a better person all around.
Self Care is for Everyone – No matter your age.
A common excuse that you may use for just about any part of your life that you don’t feel like doing is that you’re out of the age range. Most often, people complain that they’re too old to start doing something, and therefore shouldn’t even try to start.
This has been applied to fitness, education, finding a certain job, and it’s definitely been applied to self-care. Some people run with the train of thought that tells them that since they’ve made it this far in life, why should they suddenly try to change things?
This is essentially the, “If it’s not broke, don’t fix it” mentality, and in the context of self-care, it’s incorrect. You are never too old to start a self-care routine, and in fact, that might be a better time to start one if you haven’t already.
As you get older, you’re probably being put under more and more stress and gaining more responsibilities, increasing the chances of you needing a routine like this as you go on in life.
Having all the stress of bills, work, family, and so on can impact you severely, so just because you didn’t need a self-care routine a few years ago, it doesn’t mean you won’t need one now.
People also like to think that since younger people have so few stress factors in their lives, they shouldn’t even concern themselves with it. In fact, young people suffer from many stress factors, especially when they have tunnel vision and all they know is school.
School itself is a major source of stress, but so are bullying, making friends, having relationships, and trying to balance all of their commitments. Younger people could easily benefit from learning how to take care of themselves, because often times, they just let their problems run amok since they don’t really think that they can do anything about it.
By teaching younger people self-care early on, they can start to build a foundation for it that can last them the rest of their lives. By getting an early start on self-care, younger people are likely to be more stable and more confident in their own abilities.
This can make such a world of difference to someone who thinks that they’re not good enough or someone who’s stressed out about all these random things. There’s no real harm in doing it, but there are all kinds of benefits if they need them.
Self-Care Should NOT be Physically Painful
Overdoing things is a common mistake that many people make whenever they’re tackling a new challenge in life. Doing too much self care right off the bat can cause you to burn out and not continue with your efforts, which ends up being more harmful and stressful to you later on.
Some people try too hard to get themselves where they want to be in terms of self care, and end up doing more harm than good. One example of this could be in terms of physical fitness and self-care.
While it’s certainly good to have a regular workout routine that caters to your health, you need to ease yourself into it. If you’ve hardly worked out in the last decade, and suddenly decide to work out almost every day of the week, your body is going to take to it poorly.
You can’t just suddenly go from sedentary to lifting weights almost every day. Your body will likely get more exhausted than you’d like, and you might even end up doing damage to certain tendons or nerves that you over-used too suddenly.
If you end up getting injured during a workout, chances are that you’re not going to go back any time soon, doing more long term damage than anything. This same idea applies to mental health, as well.
It’s good to take time to yourself for the sake of your emotional well being, but it’s not good to have too much free time. If you end up isolating yourself for longer periods of time, you’ll start to feel distant and will be more susceptible to things like depression.
You need to operate within reason, taking a day or two to yourself and then continuing as you normally would and socialize. You should also be wary of whose advice you choose to take in terms of your mental health.
If you try to listen to every person’s options for what to do to improve your mental health, you’ll probably be getting a lot of conflicting opinions and won’t make a whole lot of progress.
You need to be independent and think about what option sounds the best for you instead of trying so many different things and ending up frustrated. Additionally, you could come up with something yourself that you think would work well.
Don’t get caught up in trying to please everyone, or you may end up taking some bad advice and set yourself back even further. Don’t overdo it right out of the gate and cause yourself needless anxiety.
If all this talk about establishing a good self care routine has gotten you excited, you may want to check out our latest ebook, Self Care is Not Selfish. You can also visit our YouTube Channel where we recently posted some videos on Self Care and other mental health topics.
