
Life throws a lot at us! Over time I've found myself looking for ways to help myself cope with challenges, and improve myself. This led me to learn different aspect of self-care - which I want to share with you. Please note that this course is not intended to replace professional help - so seek out a counselor, therapist, doctor, etc. if you need help.
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Self care is an incredibly important part of being human, and something we can all do better at. Get an overview of what self care is before we dive into specifics!
Self-care isn't something that we only do during special events or at specific times, it's something we can incorporate into our daily lives. Doing this helps us build a habit, and eventually self-care is just something we do vs. something that requires a lot of effort and focus.
Something as simple as taking a walk can help us feel better about ourselves! Try it right now - stand up and walk around the space your in, or get outside and walk around the block.
Taking care of our bodies is an important aspect of self care. Not only can this help give us more energy for the day, it gives us time to relax and recover. Get an overview of the topic here before we dig into more.
Our bodies need sleep and rest to recover from the day. Getting enough sleep lets our bodies health and minds relax, and scheduling rest breaks lets us get through the day with more energy. Learn some great tips on resting more effectively here.
Ensuring our bodies have good fuel to keep us going is an important part of self care. Here we'll learn about nutrition and food.
Our bodies are built to move, so ensuring we get sufficient movement and exercise is critical to self care. Fortunately, there's many ways to do this.
Taking care of our mental state is an important part of self care. Here we'll get a good overview of what that includes.
Digital devices are everywhere! They're also a bit addictive, which unfortunately means they can creep into our lives and disrupt our ability to do things or be happy. Learn more about it, and how to handle it, here.
Visualizing our success, or happiness, or other positive things in our lives, can help us feel better about things. This involved picturing something in our mind that helps calm us down, see us succeeding in our goals and other positive things.
Looking for things we are grateful helps improve our mood, and be more positive overall. By taking time to think about what we are grateful for (or tell others) we become better at finding the good around us.
If you find yourself working from home, not having a commute can make it hard to differentiate "Work" from "home". Making up a "commute" (even just walking outside and back in) can give you a good mental transition to work.
There's a lot going on in our lives. Practicing mindfulness - or focusing on what's happening in the moment - and meditation - learning to relax our minds - helps us focus on the present and relax.
This breathing patterns helps support meditation, and helps calm you down.
Taking care of our emotions is a crucial aspect of self care. Here we'll get an overview of what that looks like.
Be compassionate with ourselves - accepting and understanding we have flaws - is an important part of being emotionally healthy. Everyone experiences set backs and makes mistakes, so learning how to be gentle with ourselves is important!
Taking time to write down how we feel can help improve our emotional self help. Learn about journaling here.
Stress is part of our daily lives, so learning how to effectively manage it is critical to our self care. Stress-management isn't about making stress disappear, but rather how to adapt and adjust to it being our lives.
Understanding our own emotions, and emotions of others, is important to our self care. Emotional intelligence helps us be aware of our own (and others!) emotions, which helps us better understand them.
Humans are social creatures, so understand how to take care of ourselves in social scenarios is critical to self care. Get an overview of this here.
Feeling like we belong to a group or community is important. Not only does it give us a sense of belonging, it helps us interact with others who are interested in the same things we are. Learn how to build a sense of belonging here.
Building, and maintaining, relationships is critical to social self care. Not only does it help us meet new people, it also helps us improve our existing relationships.
Saving "no" can be hard - but it is an important skill to setting boundaries and building relationships. Learn some tips on how to do it here.
Boundaries in our relationships help keep us safe. These include emotional, physical, material and intellectual boundaries. We also need to learn what others boundaries are and respect them. Learn about their importance, and how to set them, here.
A self care plan is something we put together to support our self care. By thinking through how we'll perform self care, we make it much easier to actually do it.
Here we'll review a self care plan I created. Check out the template in the resources for your copy. You don't have to use all of it - feel free to remove the pieces you don't want to use.
Wrap up everything we've learned about self care.
Between work, family and our personal lives we all have a lot going on with many demands on our time and energy. While these things are incredibly important there is one person we need to always remember take care of - ourselves
This course is your designed to help you support your physical, mental, and emotional well-being. This includes things like:
Learning stress-management techniques like meditation
Improving social relationships with emotional intelligence
Getting better sleep by practicing better sleep hygiene
Living in the moment with mindfulness
The course includes a lot of great information on these topics - as well as practice tips that you can begin applying immediately (even during the course!). You'll learn practical tools like:
Creating a "commute" when you work from home
Box breathing
Taking walking breaks
And more!
We'll also dig into a self-care plan that you can use to set goals and plan out how you'll improve your self-care habits. This is a customized plan that you'll use to incorporate self-care routines into your life so you'll be better bale to handle stressful situations, build relationships and more.
Even better - you don't need anything special to learn from this course - just a desire to learn.
I really hope you find it useful, and I look forward to seeing you in the first lecture soon.
Please note - This course is not intended to replace help from a professional counselor, therapist or doctor. If you feel like you need help please reach out to a professional!