What can self-care do for me?

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What if the power to discourage, dissuade, and even prevent disease and mental decline were within your grasp?
Is your mind gravitating to thoughts about good nutrition or even some top secret pharmaceutical? While good nutrition is a part of it, what we are really focusing on is self-care. The idea of self-care I’m referring to is much broader, encompassing body, mind, emotions, and spirit, being both preventative and proactive.
Self-care is developing the awareness of and then honoring the rituals and practices that ensure you’re looking after your total well-being every single day. It includes habits that make you healthier, happier, and help you to feel more connected.
The benefits of self-care are truly enormous and shouldn’t be ignored.
Regular self-care can:
  • Prevent disease and illness
  • Make you feel good
  • Help you be more productive, engaged, and connected
  • Help you to eat to satisfaction but not to stuffed
  • Make it easier to maintain your weight
  • Improve your longevity and quality of life
The importance of self-care cannot be underestimated. In fact, increasing research suggests self-nourishing practices can prevent or reduce the duration of colds and the flu, improve recovery from cancer treatments, promote focus and attention, and much, much more. The stronger the mind-body connection is, the more responsive and effective self-care practices will be. Next, it’s time to develop the practices that become habits.

Ideas for Self-Care Practice:

Because self-care is so individual, you must determine what best suits you.
Daily meditation– Research suggests that daily meditation can prevent chronic illness; improve mood, self-esteem, and concentration; and reduce stress, anxiety, pain and depression. It also increases compassion and builds a sense of connectedness.
Movement that feels good– The body is meant to move, and movement that feels good elevates hormones that lead to happiness and satisfaction and reduce inflammation. Plus, boost blood flow, which makes you feel more alert. This isn’t necessarily exercise; it could just be walking, dancing, some stretching, gardening, or whatever active movement is enjoyable for your body.
Self-massage– Giving yourself a massage helps you connect with your body, feel it, nourish it, love it. Just as any human being thrives on positive, loving touch, so, too does your own body. Adding oil can help nourish dry skin, aid in feeling grounded and present, and give your body extra nutrients through skin absorption.
Get proper sleep– 7-9 hours of quality sleep is fundamental to good self-care, and sleep is arguably the easiest thing on this list. Plus, sleep has a multitude of other benefits for your brain and body.
Personal time to connect with the body and breathe deeply – Our rush, rush world hardly seems to allow enough time to just be, to feel connected to our body and breathe deeply. Yet, countless studies have shown that focused breathing (belly breathing or alternate nostril breathing) can lower heart rate and blood pressure, improve cognitive abilities, and prevent disease. 
Fun– Adults should have fun too! Fun, laughter, and play brightens the mood, helps us connect to others, reduces stress, and enhances well-being.
Intuitive eating– Listening to and responding honestly to the body’s cues of hunger, satiety, a need for more nutrient-dense foods, or negative reactions to sugar, coffee, processed food, wheat or dairy has numerous benefits. It strengthens and reinforces the mind-body connection, it makes weight management easier, and frequently leads to eating healthier, which contributes to better brain function.
Benefiting from Self-Care:
By taking an active role in your own self-care, you will be rewarded:
  1. Self-care increases your awareness (and connection to) your body, to be able to notice changes earlier and take a proactive approach to preventing disease.
  2. It creates an attitude of gratitude for all your body and mind do for you.
  3. Self-care helps develop love for yourself and your body, because whenever you invest time and care into something you come to love it.
  4. When you love something, you want to treat it well and when you treat yourself well, it’s easier to maintain your health and to care more fully and deeply for those you love.
In order to reap these benefits, though you must start. Test it out, feel that experience fully, reflect on that practice, and adjust as necessary. Repeat.
Just like any regular practice, it can take a while to get started, but once the habit is formed, it becomes an automatic routine.  Self-care is one of the most overlooked fundamentals to well-being, including mental and emotional health. Yet it costs virtually nothing and can easily be cultivated one day at time. Are you ready to start today?

Comments

  1. UnknownOctober 24, 2018 at 9:58 AM

    It is so important to take care of yourself, sometimes we forget and do for others constantly, but we need to take the time and be kind to ourselves first.

    ReplyDelete

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