How successful are you at doing effective self-care? Self-care that encourages, refreshes and energises you.
For many of us it can be a huge effort to just get motivated. Self-care can be more about adding to an already hectic routine, a help to make us feel good, keeping up with our friends, putting on a mask of ‘I’m fine, I can do this!’. Or maybe it’s covering up for what we can’t manage to do, maybe it’s an escape?
What is your motivation for doing self-care?
Does the ‘doing’ of self-care result in you feeling more tired and drained than if you had done nothing?
Is it really hitting the mark?
It is quite possible that how you think about self-care is in fact self-care avoidance. Brianna Weist (2020) writes: ’Self-care should not be something we resort to because we are so absolutely exhausted that we need some reprieve from our own relentless internal pressure.’
‘True self-care is not salt baths and chocolate cake,
it is making the choice to build a life
you don’t need to regularly escape from’
Brianna Weist
Further to my article on ‘Wreck-reation or Re-creation’ and the importance of taking time for recreating the self, I thought I would do a little investigation into what self-care is and the barriers to doing effective self-care: Self-care that isn’t superficial or short term, self- care that really helps. As self-care is to do with the ‘self’. I will be looking at four aspects of the ‘Self’:
1. “What is the ‘Self’”,
2. ‘Self-Understanding’,
3. ‘Self-Compassion’ and
4. ‘Effective Self-Care’.
Watch this space…
References:
Weist, B. (2020) retrieved from Thought Catalogue
https://quotecatalog.com/quote/brianna-wiest-true-self-care-81z5yea/
