The Underrated Self-Care Activities

 

They will improve your life…

Self-care usually refers to drinking enough water, getting in your nutrition and getting enough sleep.

There are, however, more underrated and undervalued self-care activities that, if you integrate them into your everyday life, will improve your life.

High-quality connection time. Earlier in my life, I thought that connecting was a waste of time. Seeing people was great but it was also a distraction to doing things — like an interruption. Over time, I’ve had a radical shift in thinking on this subject. Now, I think that spending time with friends and family is one of the most important self-care activities that you can integrate into your life.

At some point in my life, I started paying attention to what lifted me up and what brought me down. I started connecting my feelings with the activity that I was doing and the people that I was spending time with in my day. Consistently, I found out that spending high quality time with a good friend, having a good conversation would uplift me so much.

High quality connection allows me to talk about my feelings and not be judged. Connection, to me, is as essential a self-care activity as exercise and eating well.

Research says a lack of social connection is a greater detriment to health than obesity, smoking and high blood pressure. Connection can strengthen your immune system, help you recover from sickness faster and lengthen your life. Feeling low in social connection makes you more vulnerable to anxiety, depression and anti-social behavior.

Connection doesn’t necessarily mean having lots of conversations throughout the week. You can have 100 friends and still feel very disconnected. Connection is more about how you feel internally. Whether you feel you are understood; whether you feel like you are part of something.

“Sustained proximity is the best route to the soul of someone” Frank Bruni

Difficult conversations are necessary for a good life and they are an essential self-care activity. If you’re not having difficult conversations with your friends, your family or your partner about things like your boundaries and your needs and your relationship, your life will be worse off for it. With difficult conversations, sometimes you get what you want and sometimes you don’t get what you want- despite how delicately you approach it, you get a poor reaction.

Regardless of the outcome, difficult conversations are necessary because of how they make you feel and how they set you up to have more difficult conversations in the future. If you’re not raising your problems, they will come out in other ways. You’ll be more reserved when you speak to a person. You might have more passive/aggressive tendencies. You might make little remarks just as jabs because of the underlying issues that you haven’t addressed in a conversation. This is a self-care activity that is definitely not comparable to a bubble bath but they are an essential self-care activity in our life.

If you are always avoiding thinking about your problems, your struggles and your decision, it will lead to procrastinating and losing out on important opportunities. Big decisions will be made for you because you didn’t make a decision at all and words that you should’ve said will be left unsaid.

This is where thinking time comes in. The next time that you come across a decision to make, schedule time just to be thinking on that subject. Thinking about things can feel like a waste of time but it can also be life-changing.

If your mind is always overwhelmed by the tasks that you need to do, the projects you have unfinished and all the little “to-do’s” , you are not going to be a functioning, healthy, happy human being. The best way to remove that overwhelm is to get into the practice of regularly organizing your mind. Just like cleaning and tidying your house is a self-care activity, so is organizing your mind.

A brain dump as a form of psychological self care is a good starting point when it comes to organizing your mind. This could be done in the form of journaling, bullet journaling, or a well-kept “to do” app.

Getting life admin done is important as well. I see life admin as getting the small things done — setting appointments, cleaning out your pantry, etc.

Self-care motivates us to take better care of ourselves, make better choices, practice forgiveness and acceptance, and be compassionate with ourselves. All things that make us better partners, parents, friends, co-workers, and just better all-around people.