Every day we eat, sleep, move, and interact with others. By default then, we are practicing self-care. A human can only survive for approximately 3 weeks without food and roughly 3-7 days without water. So by eating food and drinking liquid with some regularity you are keeping yourself alive.
However…
The World Health Organization defines self-care as:
…the activities individuals, families, and communities undertake with the intention of enhancing health, preventing disease, limiting illness, and restoring health.
This is where self-care gets tricky. Donuts for breakfast, burgers & fries for lunch, and ice cream for dinner may keep us from starving to death but will they enhance our health?
Why am I pointing this out? Because too often we reject self-care activities because
- we don’t have time
- we don’t have the money
- we don’t deserve special treatment
- we are too busy
when in reality, the simple practice of eating every day is in fact self-care.
To improve our self-care we don’t need to change what we are doing on a daily basis we simply need to improve the quality of what we are already doing.
To start your radical self-care journey, I encourage you to start small. Here are a few simple tweaks you can make in your daily self-care practice:
- improve the quality of one or more daily meals – fruit smoothie for breakfast, salad for lunch, more veggies at dinner
- increase the amount of sleep you get each night – aim for 7-8 hours
- pause and check your calendar before accepting the next project/invitation you receive. Do you really have the time?
- take a daily 10-minute brain break – meditate, take a walk, drive without the radio
What small tweak will you make this week?
Recommended reading: An Invitation to Self-Care: Why Learning to Nurture Yourself Is the Key to the Life You’ve Always Wanted, 7 Principles for Abundant Living
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Originally published at stretchwithgretch.com