The term ‘self-care’ may conjure up images of someone at a spa, having a massage or pampering themselves in some way. However, self-care isn’t a luxury or something we do to reward ourselves after a very busy week or when we’re so exhausted that we need to take desperate measures to feel normal again. Self-care should be something which we incorporate into our daily lives, as a conscious effort to take care of our physical and emotional wellbeing. Doing so can have important benefits, including better physical health, improved mental health, healthier relationships, better focus and productivity, increased self-worth and enhanced resilience.

We can divide self-care into 6 main areas:

Personal Self-Care

This involves a number of factors, one of which is to cultivate and take care of your relationships. If you don’t put time and energy into relationships with friends and family, you miss out on meeting your own social needs and your relationships cannot flourish. It’s also important that you make time for personal interests and hobbies, allowing yourself to relax and simply ‘be’, as well as nurturing any talents or skills you may have. Whilst spending time with others is important, carving out some alone time can also be a great way to recoup your energy and take care of yourself. The amount of time each person needs alone, and what one can afford, is individual. Try to understand how much time you need and what you’d like to do in this time, whether it be reading, going for a walk, or engaging in a creative hobby.

Professional Self-Care

We spend a considerable amount of time in the workplace. Therefore, it’s important to ensure that we develop healthy work habits in, and outside, the workplace. Failure to do so could lead to stress, burnout and decreased wellbeing, which would then impact our health and relationships. Many employers are now trying to implement policies to allow increased flexibility, family-friendly measures and work from home policies, which is great and can enhance wellbeing. Such measures often blur the boundaries between where work starts and ends, however, so it’s important that we maintain boundaries on how and when we work, ensuring we take regular breaks, know when to stop working and placing limits around if and when we answer work messages and emails after working hours.

Physical Self-Care

Owing to the direct link between the body and the mind, we know that if we take care of our bodies, we’re also taking care of our emotional and mental wellbeing. Sadly, our busy lifestyles have resulted in many people feeling completely disconnected from their bodies, neglecting basic needs such as our need to eat, drink water or go to the bathroom. We eat lunch at our desks, shovel food in our mouths mindlessly and take little care as to how nutritious the food we’re eating actually is.

An easy way to start re-connecting with your body is to regularly stop for a minute or two and notice how your body feels. Are your shoulders stiff? Is your back sore? Are you clenching your jaw? When you start to notice how your body is feeling, you can start taking action to relax your body, move around and ease any tension. It’s also important to ensure you exercise regularly and get at least 7-8 hours of sleep.

Emotional Self-Care

Taking care of our emotions is essential for our wellbeing. Therefore, rather than just ignoring, denying or pushing down your feelings, it’s important to find ways to process and express them in a healthy way. There are numerous ways we can do this, the most obvious involving speaking to someone you trust about whatever you’re going through. Not only does talking help you process your thoughts and feelings, but it can help you feel supported, give you a different perspective and reduce feelings of aloneness. If you’re feeling particularly overwhelmed or distressed, speaking to a mental health professional would be wise, helping you to feel more in control of your wellbeing.

A number of activities can also support your emotional health, including physical exercise, which is proven to improve mood, reduce anxiety and stress, and ease depressive symptoms. Try relaxing activities such as yoga, tai chi, swimming or walking or more vigorous exercise such as running, boxing, cross fit, etc, since these exercises can help you release powerful emotions such as anger.

Creative activities such as drawing, painting and writing can also help process and express your emotions, whilst journalling can be highly therapeutic since it allows the healthy and safe expression of thoughts and feelings.

Psychological Self-Care

This includes all the ways we take care of our mental wellbeing, including how we talk to ourselves, how we process our experiences, and what we choose to feed our mind with daily. Start to pay attention to what you tell yourself in response to situations. When something ‘bad’ happens, do you think ‘This is a disaster’, ‘Things always go wrong for me’, ‘My day is ruined’? If so, try to take a more balanced or neutral response – ‘That was really upsetting but my day needn’t be ruined’ or ‘It’s okay, I’ll get through this’. Notice also your critical voice when you make a mistake or things go wrong. Be kind and understanding with yourself.

Our diet does not just include the food we eat, but the media and news we take in daily through social media and news channels. Everything we read, watch and expose ourselves to has an impact on our thoughts and feelings, which in turn impacts our wellbeing. There is such a thing as media overload, with a confirmed link between the constant absorption of negative news with anxiety, depression and tiredness. Therefore, place limits around the time of day you spend absorbing information and the amount of time spent doing so.

Spiritual Self-Care

Spirituality is about developing a deeper sense of meaning, understanding or connection with the universe. This may involve following a specific faith but needn’t involve religion at all. Research has found that people who engage in spiritual practices or follow a particular faith experience greater overall wellbeing. This may be because being spiritual may support you to make sense of difficult life experiences and instil of a sense of hope and solace in challenging times.

Spending time in nature is an important way to feel a sense of meaning and connection, as it reminds us that we are part of something bigger than our immediate environment. It has also been linked to greater physical and emotional wellbeing, reduced stress and anxiety, and improved mood. You may also find activities such as yoga, meditation and prayer have calming effects, as well as supporting you to feel more connected to yourself, community members or a ‘higher power’. How you choose to explore and express your spirituality is very personal and it may take some time to find what’s right for you.

For anyone wishing to find more balance and improve self-care in different areas of their lives, it may be useful to have a look at the self-care wheel, which you may find online. This is a useful visual tool to reflect on current self-care strategies and continue to build on these. Your efforts and work in this area will have long-lasting benefits.