Reward yourself by taking back your power with the transformative practice of self-care!
Ensuring self-care is an essential component of achieving clarity, personal empowerment and becoming a powerful being. The foundation of any healthy relationship starts with the one you have with yourself.
It’s crucial to dedicate time and attention to nurture this connection. If any of these concepts are unfamiliar to you, extra practice can help you get started on your journey towards self-care and empowerment.
Physical Self-Care
Taking care of our bodies is a significant component, but it doesn’t have to include a vigorous exercise routine.
The key to self-care is it should be something you enjoy and not feel like an obligation.
This improves your quality of life physical condition and helps prevent physical and mental illness.
Emotional Self-Care
Being more in tune with our emotions.
It’s about checking in with yourself, becoming more mindful of your triggers and thinking patterns, and finding ways to work through them rather than bottling them up inside.
Honour and respect your emotions but remember that they are not really you, and you choose to let them go.
Spiritual Self-care
This doesn’t necessarily have to relate to religion, although it can happen for some people.
When you practice spiritual self-care, you are nourishing your soul, striving for inner peace, and seeking to find purpose and meaning in life.
Intellectual Self-Care
Learning a new skill, reading a book, listening to a podcast, watching a documentary are activities you can do for this category.
This includes doing something you enjoy that nourishes and challenges your mind.
It expands your knowledge.
Social Self-Care
Humans, by nature, are social beings.
This may look different for introverts and extroverts – because our levels of comfort in social situations differ.
But, a connection is important to our loved ones, reconnecting with an old friend, striking up a conversation with someone at the coffee shop or supermarket when you see someone who may need some help.
Always make an effort to carve out time to see friends and family.
Sensory Self-Care
Nourish your five senses. Sight, smell, touch, and sound effects bring your mind to the present moment and lower your stress levels.
Sight, smell, touch, and sound effects bring your mind to the present moment and lower your stress levels.
Going into relaxed mode and finding a sense of inner peace is a way to engage your senses.
Another way of doing this is taking a hot bath, lighting a scented candle, listening to soothing sounds, or drinking some herbal tea.
Please remember that you don’t have to be done all these at once.
If you do, it will be too overwhelming.
Keep doing any of these in your everyday routine. If any of the others resonate or trigger an emotion, start with adding only one new self-care process at a time. You will know by the feeling of which one you to prioritise.
Start by writing yourself a few practical points or steps on how to go about it.
A couple of examples are: if you’re working on your emotions, when a particular feeling comes up, acknowledge it, let it pass by and when you can explore a little further, ask yourself: what triggered this emotion and what is the underlying fear of that emotion.
If you’re working on having more sleep, replace using the computer or watching tv with reading a book or just sitting outside, half an hour before going to bed.
Once you manage a new self-care and it’s part of your routine, then you can try another.
You are building your foundation of self-care and adding one level at a time, like building a house. Each layer makes the next one stronger, and so forth.
The benefits are: reduce or eliminate anxiety and depression, reduce stress, improve concentration, minimize frustration/anger, increase happiness, improve energy, and more.
How great is that! So, start your self-care today.
