Everyone in this world seeks to have a better life as we grow older. As time passes by, growing healthy became one of our priorities in life though we are surrounded by several things that cause stress every day. What we can do to promote healthy functioning while growing healthy is to enhance our well-being by learning and practicing self-care.
Maybe you are trying to ask yourself what it means to take care of yourself. Sometimes, self-care means choosing yourself over the things that exhaust you, whether it is the job you have been trying to quit for months or years now or the relationship you have been trying to end since it no longer makes you happy. But to be honest, self-care is more than managing and ending your stress before you can live your best life ever.
According to a 2017 journal article titled, “Development of a Self-Care Assessment for Psychologists,” self-care is defined as, “a multidimensional, multifaceted process of purposeful engagement in strategies that promote healthy functioning and enhance well-being.”
It means that there are several self-care routines and self-care tips you can follow to exercise and take care of yourself while growing healthy. At some point, self-care means stepping back when you feel like the things around you are not going according to your plan. So instead of losing them all, you should take a break and develop self-care routines to help yourself get back on track. That way, you will also be preventing the possibility of burnout.
However, most of the time, some people are getting too desperate to experience the best in life that they fail to notice how not everything that feels go is self-care. One should be aware that over-eating, alcohol and drug abuse and risk-taking are some of the things that will never do something good in them. These, obviously, are not self-care activities but rather a set of self-destructive tasks. Though the aforementioned activities can somehow make your challenging emotions a little bearable, the relief they can bring is temporary and they can even cause long-term problems.
As the name implies, self-care is a personal matter, and people’s approaches to it will always be different. In this article, we will let you know about some of the benefits once you follow your own self-care routines.
You can read our article, “Stressful Life? Why It Is Important To Take A Break” to know the connection between taking a break and learning self-care. Once you understand all its aspects, you will surely no longer have to waste your time getting stressed always.
- Benefits of Self Care
- You can be more productive.
- You will be growing healthy and resistant to diseases.
- You will boost your self-esteem.
- You will learn more about yourself.
- What You Can Do To Practice Self Care
- Prioritize Sleep As Part Of Your Self Care Routine
- Exercise Daily
- Eat Right, Live Right
- Take a Self-Care Break
Benefits of Self Care
There are a lot of self-care activities that you can do to enjoy the benefits afterward. According to Living Self Care, this tends to improve people’s way of living — physically, emotionally, socially, and mentally. To understand more about these benefits, here are some of it which you can experience once you follow self-care tips.
You can be more productive.
To make your body run actively and efficiently, you should know that there is a massive connection between your physical and mental aspects. That means that when you take care of your mind, you will do better, too. Growing healthy and doing some physical care means that you are into fueling your body by giving yourself a proper rest every day. When you care for your physical needs, you should be checking whether you are getting enough sleep if you are eating healthy foods in the most ideal way, and if you are doing enough exercise, to name a few.
You will be growing healthy and resistant to diseases.
Chronic diseases are now the leading cause of death and disabilities all over the globe. The World Health Organization has been actively promoting self-care tips and self-care routines that are related to one’s health. It includes health promotion, disease prevention, and self-medication.
Self-care is truly important especially if you want to manage your chronic illness or prevent one from occurring. Instead of depending on your attending physician all the time, everyone should learn how to take care of themselves by following these physical-related self-care tips. One, to avoid disease and to continue growing healthy, you should avoid smoking and at least consume alcohol moderately. It would be best to wholly remove alcohol from your system, but you can get rid of it slowly. You should also opt to consume healthy food and check for the most ideal healthy diet for your body. Lastly, managing stress must be achieved while engaging yourself in regular exercise.
You will boost your self-esteem.
When you put yourself first and begin to prioritize yourself, it will be the beginning of you boosting your self-esteem since you will feel happier, more balanced, and more satisfied. You will also start developing a relationship with yourself which you have been ignoring for years now since you are too busy with something else. There are a lot of people who suffer from low esteem and it eventually leads to mental health issues like depression, anxiety, and even simple sadness.
Having a self-care routine that will help you avoid the things that can make you feel mentally and physically exhausted can also boost your self-worth. Once you made it there, you will continuously have higher self-love, self-confidence, and self-esteem.
You will learn more about yourself.
You will surely know more about your self-worth due to the numerous self-care activities you have been doing for years, and it is a good start before you can try learning about your loved ones, too. Learning about yourself while growing healthy means you must understand what makes you a different person. It is a must to explore what your heart really wants since it is a great step to build a connection with your soul. And let me assure you, you will not ever regret getting familiar with the person inside you.
Learning about yourself is beyond discovering what your favorites are, it is a process of understanding what you really want to do while going more in-depth to make a stronger connection with yourself. It is about knowing about your insecurities and flaws and accepting them all instead of feeling shy about them. That is why you will be sure that you are growing healthy and living your life the way you want to.
In order to continuously practice self-care, here are some self-care routines and tips you can add to your self-care activities.
Prioritize Sleep As Part Of Your Self Care Routine
According to the University Health Services of the University of California, though researchers do not know exactly how much sleep adults need, some data suggest that 7-8 hours per 24-hour period is the most satisfactory amount. Generally, the amount of sleep required is an individual matter. Some people feel rested after 5 to 6 hours of sleep; others sleep 9-10 hours. Most adults sleep about 7-8 hours in 24 hours. Children sleep more than adults, and, in most cases, the elderly sleep less than they did as younger adults.
Prioritizing sleep and adding it to your self-care activities does not only make you energetic every time you wake up in the morning. Allowing yourself to rest will bring you a long-term effect of making your body strong enough to defend yourself in a lot of diseases. But you should also take note that you should practice good night’s sleep healthily. Some people take sleeping pills as an answer. However, they might cause more harm since it changes your body’s normal sleeping period by attacking your nervous system. You can just resolve this by observing your behavior patterns and refusing to do some insomnia-causing behaviors:
- Getting up and falling asleep at different times every day
- Taking too much nap
- Sleeping inside an unideal environment
- Too much caffeine intake before going to bed
- Stirring your strong emotions before your sleeping schedule.
Growing healthy and practicing self-care is only possible if you follow self-care tips correctly and healthily.
Exercise Daily
As part of your self-care routines, doing exercises every day, just like what we have mentioned, is the ultimate form of self-care. It is solely because physical activities do affect not only our physical aspect but also our mental and emotionally healthy.
By engaging yourself at least in low to moderate activities, you are also improving your overall mood by reducing stress. As you do those workouts, you are also releasing your body’s exhaustion which triggers abnormal heart rate, difficulty in breathing, and more. This activity can actually send signals to your brain to increase its capacity to handle stress. This can also help you achieve the first one, which is to give yourself better sleep since exercising reduces your anxiety and stress, which can help you to have a better sleep.
Eat Right, Live Right
One of the self-care tips you should always follow is to eat right since giving yourself proper nutrition since it is the core component of your well-being.
According to Rachel Kelly, a mental health advocate and the author of The Happiness Diet, “Our digestive health and nutritional health affect our brain health. So for us to follow the self-care activities we have created for ourselves, we must have nutrition strategies as well since there is a “wonder” that food can do to make us live a healthier and healthy life. For example, you should follow a certain diet wherein you consume a lot of fruits and vegetables to continuously promote positivity in your health.
If possible, you should avoid restricting yourself from getting the right nourishment. You should not think of how your jeans can still fit in since it is your nutrition and health that are currently on the line. To help you realize the importance of making yourself feel satisfied, imagine this: you are on a diet and you get the ideal body that you want. But after a few days, your body fat comes back. Now the question is, is the dieting you are doing making you happy? Promoting self-care in terms of food and nutrition means cleansing and detoxifying your body as dieting too much can only cause more stress. Proper fueling is the correct answer here.
Take a Self-Care Break
Giving yourself a break while growing healthy can definitely contribute to more effective self-care routines. If you think that you are getting too hard on yourself since you are not the best at something, then you are just putting more guilt and adding more stress to your body. This time, you need to stop for a while and prioritize yourself. You cannot always say “yes” and then discover afterward that that particular favor is not actually in line with your self-care activities.
You can pause and be mindful of taking care of yourself throughout the day since you truly deserve a decompression after a long tiring day. Sometimes, instead of focusing too much on your professional life or school, you need to practice breathing exercises instead and give yourself some time to accomplish everything that is written on your vacation and leisure list. You should try adding your hobbies and interests to your self-care routines, so in the end, you will have a better life compared to the one you had before.
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