What is self care?
Self-care is the practice of taking responsibility of one’s mental and physical health during the time of both strength and weakness. Self-care is simply preserving and storing our well-being by taking care of ourselves. We should be able to care for ourselves without waiting for any particular event to occur. Self care includes a wide range of activities that can be done by engaging individuals to exercise their mental, emotional and physical health.
Key-aspects of self care:
- Physical self-care
Physical self care includes, moving your body(yoga, gym, exercises, walk, run, etc.), Having a balanced diet, Proper sleep, Cleanliness, etc. - Mental self-care
Mental self care includes Mindfulness meditation, Learning new skills, Reading a new book, and stress management yoga’s. The mentioned things helps you to calm your mind and take control of your actions. - Spiritual self-care
Spiritual self-care is related to connecting with one’s higher self. We can do meditation and perform prayer, chant holy scripts(mantras) and reflect on ourselves to care our our soul spiritually. - Emotional self-care
Emotional self-care is when we allow ourselves to feel and express the suppressed emotions and taking time to work on ourselves. We can build happy and positive relationship, set boundaries, and learn self-compassion to care for our emotional self.
Role of Sleep in self-care:
We might not realize it, but every night when we close our eyes, our body and mind are busy working on the things to make us feel the best.
Our body knows the best for us, and it’s up to us to maintain our habit in such a way that it can function properly.
So we should give our body the rest it deserves.
Our liver takes 3 hours to detox. So when we go to sleep, nothing else should happen in the body.
When we get up with less sleep, our system liver can’t detox properly.
Hippocampus is where the learning, functioning, and focus happen. When we lose sleep, for every hours of reduction of 8 hour of sleep, you will loose about 40% of your focus.
The hippocampus in your body needs 8 hours of sleep to be ready for full functioning of the body.
Whenever I wakeup with a proper sleep at night, I feel so energetic, fresh and focused. But when I wake up with a limited and untimely sleep, my eyes starts paining from the very first hour.
Headache keeps continuing for the whole day, and thus, I can’t focus on my studies and work properly.
In my case sleep is the essential part of my well being. Sleep plays a vital role for making my day good/bad.
Maintain your constant sleep schedule and sleep regularly at that time. It will only have benefits.
When we maintain a proper time to sleep, then the next day we can do more things in less time with that all fresh mood and good energy.
If you have inconsistent sleeping habit and trying to get out of it then I got you.
Here are some tips that helped me to be in my consistent sleep schedule and might help you as well.
- Make your particular routine for sleeping and don’t compromise that time.
- Put away your smartphone and other gadgets from your bed before sleeping.
- Prep your bedtime, meditate before bed. Chant high vibration mantra such as “Om”.
- If you can’t sleep after going to bed then don’t come back to your phone.
- Just stay in your bed and focus or visualize the positive things.
- Be grateful for your day.
- Take a bath before bed (avoid hair you may get fever, if you are habitual then you won’t)
- Cold shower before bed helps you to soothe your mind and removes your stress that you gained throughout the day.
- Don’t sleep wearing tight clothes, wear comfortable clothes while sleeping.
- Turn off your light before sleeping. Light can disturb your sleep(for some)
- Sleep with positive energy and positive vibration
- People nowadays have a habit of drinking coffee and tea just before their bedtime. Try to avoid these habits because caffeine consumption before bed disturbs your sleep.
- Make sure you sleep for 8 hours.
Self-care Routine for night-shift workers:
- If you have inconsistent time in sleeping due to your work or anything, then you can do yourself a favor of maintaining a consistent sleep schedule for the daytime.
- Maintain the sleeping environment dark so that you can channel your body towards bed, indicating it’s a sleeping time.
- Limit screen time if you didn’t get time to sleep at night and make a chance for yourself to give the rest to your body that it needs.
- If you are a night shift person, then stay hydrated during that time.
- Take short naps if it’s possible for you.
Importance of self-care:
- Reduce stress and helps you to overcome burnout.
- Inspires you to connect with other peoples.
- Makes you confident to do any type of work.
- Adds self-compassion and happiness to your life.
- Increase your focus and productivity.
Challenges in practicing self-care:
- Lack of knowledge about self-care, it’s benefits and resources needed to practice self-care.
- Lack of motivation; some people stop doing self-care after practicing it for a day or a week due to lack of motivation.
- Guilt of focusing on own needs than of others; feel a duty and responsibility to care for others except for self.
- Lack of time and poor time management strategies thinking it will take a lot of time even before starting it.
- Due to misconceptions of self care like; it will be costly, it will consume time, it will make me different than others, how will other people start to see me if I started and so on.
7 Practical Tips for self-care:
- Make self-care a non-negotiable part of your daily routine.
- Writ down everything that bothers or inspires you.
- Start small and gradually challenge yourself to achieve one step at a time.
- Most importantly: Set boundaries with those people who doesn’t match your energy level.
- Listen to your body and mind; learn and pay attention to what they need.
Self-care Myths:
- Self-care is expensive, I cannot afford to do that.
- Self-care is only for women.
- Self-care is time consuming.
- Self-care is optional.
- Self-care is a quick fix to all problems.
- Self-care is about being selfish or self-centered.
- Self-care is about escaping difficulties in life.
- Taking time for oneself means neglecting responsibilities.
- Self-care is only needed in time of high stress or crisis.