Mental Health

Self-care is an oft overused term to describe how we care for ourselves, pretty self-explanatory right? Sometimes, but often we tend to confuse self-care with distraction. The best way that I found to describe this difference, is to compare our inner selves to our bedroom. If, inevitably, our room becomes messy, we tend to get stressed out. No one likes living in a messy environment. We could feel that stress of a dirty room, and say…watch Netflix or something. We might be distracted from the mess because we are watching a great show on Netflix (Great British Baking Show anyone??), but afterwards the mess is still there…and what’s worse is we often times feel more stressed, and beat ourselves up for not cleaning up the mess in the first place.

Self-care…is cleaning up the mess. Self-care becomes doing the things that help to remove the stress from our lives, and recharge ourselves. Another way to tell the difference between self-care and distraction, is after distracting we tend to feel the same or worse, after we engage in self-care we tend to feel better and more energized.

It has always been difficult to find the things that charge our batteries, to find the things that fall under our umbrella’s of self-care. The main ones that everyone needs are: eating regularly, getting some physical activity, and sleeping. Those are the big three, whatever else that might fall under our umbrella could be unique to ourselves.

The challenge is to find those things! I challenge each of you who is reading this article, to find at least 3-5 things that you can do on a regular basis that charge your battery. Things perhaps that you have neglected doing, or perhaps even things that you always wanted to do but never had the opportunity to do.