This post may contain affiliate links. If you click through and make a purchase, I may earn a small commission at no extra cost to you.
Self-care-tips usually include walks, journaling, bubble baths, and getting time alone. Alone time is a great way to take care of yourself but it’s a small fraction of what a whole human needs to feel loved, supported, fulfilled.
There are different types of self cafe for different areas of your life. Every area requires attention to maintain and check-ins to ensure your participation aligns with your needs.
Physical self-care is important but if HIIT doesn’t align with your interests, the habit will be hard to maintain. Exploring physical self-care in different areas gives you an opportunity to find what works. Checking back in let’s you gain familiarities with your own ebbs and flows. Sometimes in your life will include daily walks, other times you’ll attend a weekly yoga class.
Welcoming the change makes adjustments easier to incorporate.
Different types of self-care:
- Physical
- Intellectual
- Emotional
- Spiritual
- Home
- Environmental
- Social
Self-Care Definitions
Understanding the various types of self-care can help you plan how you want to address each area. Give yourself time to uncover how you operate in each are of your life so you can see where you will naturally feel best supported.
Self-reflection helps offer insight so you can identify patterns in your life. Journaling is a great way to self-reflect, especially on your patterns, behaviors, wants, and needs. It’s a private practice where you can really observe how you think, process events, and speak to and about yourself.
Physical
Physical care includes care for your physical body. This doesn’t mean exercising and eating right, although those things matter. Physical health is about preventative maintenance, understanding what you’re at-risk for, caring for hair, skin, and nails. It’s scheduling regular doctor and dentist appointments, having eye exams and doing the basic and general things necessary to upkeep a human body.
SELF-CARE TIPS: Start small with basic care. Schedule necessary appointments and stick to them.
Intellectual
Our minds are always working. When you provide it with something to be working on, you can enrich your life. When you leave your mind to look for things to work on, it will create scenarios of survival. People begin to seek out triggering content, overthinking scenarios and interactions, and other means of keeping the mind busy.
Intellectual self-care is intentionally keeping your mind occupied and focused on goal-achieving behaviors. Examples include using language-learning apps, a reading goal (certain number of books per month or just having a list to get through), taking a class, or otherwise acquiring a new skill.
SELF-CARE TIPS: Choose one goal per quarter, at the end of the quarter evaluate your interest & motivation to determine if you should keep going or switch it up.
Emotional
Emotional self-care is about self-awareness and how you manage your emotions. Emotions are not the same as feelings. Your feelings are sensations in your body. Emotions are the intellectual processing of the sensations.
Asking yourself what a specific feeling means is how your emotions manifest. People can develop unhealthy ways of responding to feelings and processing emotions. Most of the time, it will feel normal to process your feelings and emotions. Not having a clear internal signal doesn’t mean the ways we’re addressing feelings is healthy. Checking in with self-awareness sets you up to be open to emotional evolution.
SELF-CARE TIPS: Create a self-reflection practice like journaling or meditating, monitor and categorize your responses to certain events.
Spiritual
Spirituality is a very personal subject. Every person has the right to determine the inner workings of their own universe and makes sense of their path. Religion is not the focus of spiritual health, but rather it’s about the way you process your existence.
Taking a position of not being spiritual is a denial of a piece of the human whole. Because we know there is existence and non-existence, and there is consciousness and non-consciousness, we know there is some part of us that requires care. You can let that part be full of questions and still take care of the questions.
SELF-CARE TIPS: Start by asking yourself where people came from and why? Sit with the questions, you already have all the answers.
Home
Home health is about the area you live in. Whether you rent, live with other people, live in someone else’s home, or own a home, there are ways to care for your space. Keeping an organized and well-maintained home space frees up space in your mind.
Clutter creates chaos. Knowing where all of your items are, knowing what items you own, having quick and easy access to your things, and cycling through wear and tear, are all acts of self-love. Your pillows should be replaced on a schedule, as well as your toothbrush, hairbrush, and any items used regularly.
SELF-CARE TIPS: Keep a schedule of when you clean, clear out, and replace items in each room. Plan to replace things on a rotation.
Environmental
Environmental self-care takes some thought and self-compassion. Don’t create areas of guilt and shame for yourself. Who you are as an individual and what society makes available to you impacts the options available for environmental care.
You have control over parts of your environment, you have the ability to maintain certain habits and replace others. As with all self-care habits, environmental self-care takes time and curiosity about what you have the capacity for.
SELF-CARE TIPS: Choose one thing that helps you feel connected to your environment, like participating in community clean up day or switching to reusable coffee cups.
Social
Every person has different social and relational needs. Whether you like to be single, coupled, or married, will only discovered through personal exploration. To find your needs and meet them, you must offer yourself compassion, respect, and openness. Relationships aren’t stagnant because people aren’t.
As you grow and learn new things, you will develop needs for new relationships or growth in existing relationships. As you uncover areas of your life that are not working the way you want or areas that are flourishing, you may need to set new boundaries or reduce time spent with certain people.
Evaluating your social health leads to building a supportive and aligned community.
SELF-CARE TIPS: Practice self-forgiveness. Build empathy toward yourself so you can set the foundation for choosing the right relationships.
Why You Stop Self-Care
People stop self-care for a variety of reasons. And you will continue some areas of self-care while abandoning others. This is perfectly normal and to be expected. Knowing why you stop your self-care routines at various points throughout your life allows you to prepare in advance for how you’ll respond and get back on track.
Reasons why you’ve stopped self-care:
- A tumultuous event
- Trauma
- Boredom
- Financial change
- Choice was unaligned
- Relationship change
- Interest change
- Realizations
- Loss of community
- Gained community
- New discovery
- Unexpected success
Disruptions to self-care routines do not always revolve around negative situations. Success can be a disrupter as well, people stop taking care of themselves when they become too excited or distracted.
Whole human self-care requires balance in all areas. Following a routine through excitement can be as difficult as following a routine through depression. Getting to know yourself is the best way for you to identify where you fall off track and why. Plan ways to respond to your own activations.
How to Accept the Ebbs & Flows
You are human. Humans were not meant to be robotic creatures so you unfortunately will not be able to set a routine and forget it. Taking care of your whole human self including the experiences you have through time and space takes a lot of attention.
Being one hundred percent consistent in anything is an unrealistic goal.
Embracing the ebbs and flow of the human experience lead you to have more compassion to make self-discoveries. Judgment holds us back from the truth. People who feel judged want to manage perception, this includes the way we feel about ourselves.
When you judge yourself harshly, your self is going to hide parts from you that you will not be able to access and care for. If these parts of hidden from you, they will be hidden from you care community, existing entirely unloved.
Self-Care Tips to Restart Your Routine
Set a plan in advance to restart your self-care routine. You know you will have disruptions because the human experience includes disruptions.
A plan to restart your self-care routine looks like having a checklist of all the areas you need to care for, a schedule to review when you forgot your appointments and commitments.
Talking with friends, family, or a counselor about accountability is a great way to enlist support that will keep you on track. Letting someone know you’re serious about taking care of your whole self gives your an added layer of support.
After beginning a routine, monitor how long you’re able to stick to it. Keep track of the amount of time you can easily give to new tasks. The next time you’re beginning a routine, set a reminder in your phone that you know you lost motivation around this time. Include an affirmation to keep you going, write in words of support directly from the self who set the goal to the self who struggles to keep it. Be respectful and compassionate.
Self-Care Tips for Mental Health
Mental health is one of the biggest factors to maintaining care. Having the motivation to look at a list is required for you to execute any of the tasks on it.
Handling the mental health blockages can feel impossible. The most important part in helping yourself through mental health struggles is having a support system setup in advance.
A support system can include yourself setting future reminders. It can also include a therapist, friend, or neighbor.
- Set periodic reminders in your phone, these may need to be daily at first; ask yourself how you are and what you need. Include some suggestions of things that you know help you through.
- Tell a family member, friend, neighbor, or therapist that you have struggles and ask them to check-in with you each month.
- Create a list of regular daily tasks like brush teeth, shower, walk outside, and refer to this list when you’re feeling down.
- Find a trinket that reminds you of how things change over time, like a river stone.
- Let yourself feel bad, validate the feelings. When you want to move through your feelings, gently encourage yourself to give it a try, reassure yourself if you prefer the bad feelings.
Caring for a human is hard work. You’re doing it every day by taking care of yourself. Be kind, be encouraging, and validate your feelings. You know what you need and your self deserves to be listened to. Take care.
