Simplifying self care
How you can use self care to support your own wellbeing
When you hear the phrase ‘self-care’, and let’s face it, it’s a trendy phrase at the time of writing this so we hear it a lot, what images does it conjour up for you? Candlelit baths? A glass of wine? A spa trip? It can be all those things, but they all take either time, money or both… and that makes them inaccessible to some people. I believe self-care can be inserted into tiny moments in everyday life.
For me, it means closing my eyes when I apply my daily moisturiser, instead of looking in the mirror; it means using the two minutes when my toothbrush is on to listen fully to the buzzing and not my thoughts; it means enjoying the first sip of my hot drink even if the rest of it gets abandoned to go cold.
So why are they all good things to do? OK, take the moisturising. I could slap it on whilst thinking about my day’s to-do list, or calling to my children to hurry up for school, but I will have missed something. I will have missed 10-15 seconds of enjoying the sensation of touch on my skin. I can be grateful for healthy, soft skin, and I’m more likely to do it mindfully because I’m not looking in the mirror judging my skin or my features etc.
The toothbrush… this is mindfulness! Listening fully to the sound my buzzing toothbrush means I am not paying attention to my thoughts for 2 minutes. With practice, this will lead to a calmer, more content mind… and it can be done twice a day by attaching it to an existing habit.
I probably have 3 or 4 hot drinks a day. When I pay attention to the first sip of each of those, that is a few more seconds of joy I am experiencing each day (providing it’s not too hot that I burn my lip obviously, haha)… and there are plenty of other ways you can do this, whether it is with drink, food, or other activities.
When you start adding all of these snippets of time together, it amounts to an increase in feelings of self love, self care, joy and happiness and who doesn’t want more of that? To me, that is what life is; a series of moments and if we can control how we feel in some of those moments for the better, why wouldn’t we do that?