How You Can Start Practicing Self-Care

If you scroll through social media today, you’re bound to come across at least two or three articles with new self-care tips. But self-care is far more than any of the material goods or indulgent habits the media tends to promote. Real self-care requires investing in your wellness, making tough calls that benefit you in the long run and overcoming obstacles day by day.

Below are three ways you can begin to define self-care for yourself and implement it into your life.

Your Physical Health

Health does not look the same for everyone. Some of us are disabled, live with chronic illness or have other medical conditions that prevent us from ever fitting the traditional standard of a “healthy” person. Rather than assume you can never achieve true health, it’s important to look inward and define your best version of physical well-being. Once you have that figured out, you should make a self-care plan so that you can be the best physical version of yourself, no matter what that looks like. Three areas of health everyone should pay especially close attention to are diet, exercise, and sleep. Everyone needs to eat healthily, stay active to the best of their ability and maintain a regular sleep schedule in order to be the most physically healthy.

Your Mental Health

We often pay close attention to our physical well-being, but we tend to push aside our mental health until it’s debilitating. Treating psychological disorders is not the only form of mental health care. Learning how to cope with loss, process trauma and deal with everyday stress is an important part of self-care. There are many grounding techniques you can use in order to overcome stress and anxiety. One of the easiest is the “5-4-3-2-1” method. When you find it hard to break free from your thoughts, look around you. Find five things you can see, four things you can touch, three things you can hear, two things you can smell and one thing you can taste.

Your Lifestyle Choices

How you live impacts every aspect of your health. A good lifestyle means finding a sense of purpose in your daily life, maintaining healthy relationships and pursuing activities that help you grow. Personal development can be as simple as learning how to knit and as big as earning a master’s degree. What matters most is that you find a balance between gratitude and growth.

Self-care helps us find peace in the present while striving toward an exciting future. Not only does it allow you to improve your physical and emotional well-being, but it also helps you be a better caregiver.

Part of self-care is making sure your body is nourished properly so you can have energy for each day. If you’re low on energy, try these supplements!