What is Self-Care?

by | Self Care, Wellness

self care

Start with your overall well-being

Often ignored but totally necessary, self-care is any action or behaviour that helps a persons well-being avoid health problems. Excessive stress may increase your risk for heart problems, for example. So, by definition, stress relief can help someone keep their ticker ticking.

Simply put, self-care is actions or plans implemented to help yourself avoid mental and physical health problems. By improving our overall health and well-being our self esteem, sense of self and stress management improve as well. 

Self-care is essential and central to our well-being. The world around us is becoming more and more chaotic, busy, stressful and not to mention polluted. We have to counterbalance the affects this has on our mind and body. We can achieve this by spending more time and energy looking after ourselves and treating ourselves to a healthier state of mind and body. 

Self-Care is simple, don’t over complicate it.

Unfortunately many of us have never really thought about self-care or attempted to look after our well-being. As a result when we are faced with a sense of being overwhelmed or under pressure, we panic. Quite often we then over plan and over indulge when we want to “reward” ourselves. This then leads to us being more more worn out. Needing a holiday to recover from a holiday for example, is a complete failure.

On the opposite end many people confuse self-care and well-being with quick temporal relief and self indulgent. These are fine occasionally, but if we keep repeating these short busts of enjoyment and reward they will soon become mundane and ineffective. We then begin the cycle of being lost and trying to find our way and an outlet, all over again.

The longer you repeat this cycle the greater will be the cost not only to yourself but also your friends and family. This could potentially estrange relations with them. Make sure to keep your self-care regime filled with good, nourishing food and healthy pass times. All these considerations make it imperative to take time out and check in with your mind and body. They are essential to your overall well-being. It is almost an essential part of being able to survive and progress in the fast paced life of our modern time. The pursuit of health and happiness is not selfish but a core aspect of our life.

Once you start taking care of yourself, there will be a flow of affect to other parts of your life, including your relationships and you will be a sense of  guidance and motivation for other people too, give you further sense of fulfilment.