Self Care During Stressful Times

Life gets stressful. And when it does, the first thing most people drop is the small set of habits that were holding them steady in the first place.

So what do we mean by self care? Most of us are fairly invested in taking care of other people. Self care just means also investing in yourself — making sure your whole self, mind and body, is taken into consideration, and making choices each day that work towards that. Where to start?

Turn the news off for a few hours

It is remarkably easy to lose an entire day to coverage of something you cannot do anything about. Set it down for a while. The internet is also full of free museum tours, book readings and recorded performances if you want something to put in its place.

Look for the helpers

Rather than dwelling on the negative, find the positive stories and pay attention to those instead. Better still, be one — support a local business, buy a gift certificate, invest in your community in whatever small way you can.

Do not abandon the healthy routine

Comfort food and a long queue of episodes are perfectly reasonable some of the time. Every day is harder to recover from. Try to hold on to the routine you normally live by, and treat the cheat days as cheat days.

Go for a walk

Get out of the house, get some fresh air, and move. A walk, a bike ride or a run is good exercise, and it tends to do more for your mood than the same amount of time spent indoors.

Get inside your head on purpose

Meditate or pray, whichever fits. Get in touch with your higher power, the universe, or just the voice inside your own head. Give yourself some grace.

Make something

Draw, cook, build, write. Creative work is one of the few things that reliably occupies the part of your mind that would otherwise be worrying.

And book yourself an hour of quiet

We are, admittedly, biased about this last one. But an hour in a float suite is an hour where nothing can reach you and nothing is asking for a response — and that is quite a difficult thing to arrange anywhere else.