Focus on Developing a Self-Care Mindset
If you’re not taking time to nurture yourself because you feel overloaded, the problem isn’t a lack of time. It’s actually because you don’t have a self-care mindset. You can’t spend all your emotional and physical energy taking care of others or pouring effort into your job unless you want to burn out.
You have to practice self-care and it’s a lot easier to do than you think. The key is to turn your mindset from one of putting your own needs on the backburner to putting yourself first, regardless of what’s going on around you.
Fortify Yourself Each Day
To fortify yourself means that you’re making sure that you develop your own strength. This relates to both the physical as well as the emotional self. There are several ways to accomplish this that will help lead you to a self-care mindset.
You can practice meditation for one. When you spend time in daily meditation, it can help calm and relax you. It doesn’t have to be something that takes hours. Even just a few minutes a day can make a difference.
The result of starting a meditation habit is that it’ll help you discover the value of self-care. It boosts self-awareness and you’ll notice that you’re less stressed and you’ll feel happier and better in body and in spirit.
Begin your meditation by finding somewhere as quiet as possible and practice breathing slowly in and out. Let your mind relax and focus only on the moment that you’re in. During meditation, you’ll find that things that irritate you - the stress behind the chaos that often drives your life - evaporates.
Guided visualization is another thing that you can use to fortify yourself. Using this technique can help you develop a self-care mindset. It’s the practice of having a guide or instruction that helps you focus.
The focus is on certain images. It might be the mental image of a beach or warm mountain cabin. It can be anything. The guidance is given through a teacher or recording that quietly describes the images which help you to imagine and put yourself in the scene.
It doesn’t take long to learn this technique and it offers many benefits, such as decreasing anxiety, boosting the body’s immune system and raising confidence.
Affirmations are another way to fortify yourself emotionally. These are mindset tools that are easy to make a part of your life. How you speak to yourself and what you think about yourself is how your brain identifies you. If your affirmations about yourself are positive, your brain will accept that.
If they’re negative, it accepts that, too. Your brain’s subconscious holds what it hears and sees as truth. And it doesn’t divide these truths according to what’s happened or what is current.
That’s why when you practice affirmations, these need to be in the present moment. You would use an affirmation in a way that makes it a true statement. You would say, “I am” in your affirmations rather than, “I hope or I want to be.”
When you use these present moment affirmations, your brain creates the believability so your mindset changes over time. To fortify yourself, you also have to make sure that you’re not berating yourself. When you berate yourself, you tear down the self-care efforts you’re trying to practice.
Develop Your Self-Care Mindset by Knowing Your Worth
Knowing your worth simply means that you value yourself as a person. When you don’t value yourself, it’s harder to have a self-care mindset because you don’t have a strong, positive self-esteem.
Knowing your worth means that you understand what you deserve. You are good enough. You’re talented enough. You’re wise enough and so on. It means that you can recognize that you’re not without fault, but the faults don’t define you.
You still deserve to appreciate life and to love who you are. You can discover your worth by understanding that the results of your life are in proportion to the self-care mindset you have.
When you know your worth, you don’t let opportunities pass you by. You don’t practice self-sabotage in any area of your life. You know your worth in your career and in your personal life.
You recognize that you’re not being selfish by practicing self-care. You know that you need time for yourself. You know that your needs, your wants and your dreams are important.
It means that you schedule things you enjoy. You take time for the life that you want - regardless of what anyone else thinks or says. When you schedule something that you want to do, you don’t give up that time to make someone else happy.
You treat yourself like you matter, because you do. You don’t put up with things that tear you down emotionally such as unconstructive criticism from other people. Y- ou don’t put up with things that tear you down physically such as skipping sleep to get a project finished. You nurture yourself faithfully.
When you know your worth, you work on taking care of yourself, on developing your strong points and forgiving yourself when you feel you’re weak. A self-care mindset grows and flourishes through optimism.
When you have optimism, you believe that the best is possible. You also see the good in the seemingly bad. You don’t spend time dwelling on what you didn’t get or what went wrong.
Instead, you choose to keep moving forward and looking toward a brighter future. Having this optimism doesn’t mean that you don’t recognize when something is wrong. It only means that you don’t internalize it and allow it to detract from your worth.
Your Goals and Self-Care
When you have a self-care plan, it will help lessen stress, boost your health and give you a sense of well-being that you didn’t have before. The goals that you have in self-care can range from physical to emotional to the achievement of your dreams.
But in order for you to accomplish your self-care goals, you need to develop a daily routine. Start by creating a simple plan. Don’t overcomplicate it and don’t create a plan that’s packed full of new tasks, especially things you can’t keep up with.
For example, don’t create a plan to change your way of eating, sleeping, exercising and dealing with situations all in the same week. Those are changes to work on that should be implemented in a way that gives you time to adjust.
That’s an important part of a healthy self-care mindset - making sure that you don’t get overwhelmed or overburdened by any changes that you might make. Remember that just because someone tells you that something is a good self-care tactic, it doesn’t mean you have to do it.
If you hate a particular self-care goal, such as going to bed at the same time - and you know that it’s only going to stress you out and put pressure on you, then don’t do it – at least not yet.
Your goal should always be to pay attention to how you feel. If it feels wrong or upsets you, then don’t practice it. Otherwise, it defeats the whole purpose. Don’t have an all or nothing mindset when it comes to self-care.
If you do what you feel is best for you the majority of time, that’s good enough and accept that. Remember that self-care goals are important, but how you get there might fluctuate, so don’t be too rigid.
Your daily self-care routine can be whatever you make of it. It can be as detailed and scheduled as you want or as flexible as you like. It should include the basics for taking care of yourself, such as eating healthy, getting the right amount of sleep, exercising, taking care of yourself mentally, and saying no to certain situations or people that aren’t good for you and drain your energy.
How to Handle a Situation Using a Self-Care Mindset
When you handle a situation using a self-care mindset, it means that you monitor how the situation affects or may affect you. It may not be a good situation, but that doesn’t mean it has to take control of your emotions.
You don’t let yourself stew in anger or remain mired in bitterness or sadness. When emotions have control, they can drive you to do things that are opposite of good self-care.
This might be things like not eating healthy, foregoing sleep or exercise or developing coping techniques such as pushing aside the situation and living in denial instead. Have a self-care plan for whatever the situation is.
If it’s a situation where you don’t have any ideas on how to change anything, then you look for someone else who can guide you through it or you get counseling to deal with it. Getting help is also a form of self-care.
It could be that the situation is causing you a great deal of fear. When you start to feel anxious and the worry begins, be aware of those thoughts. Immediately turn them from a negative “what if” into a positive outcome to calm yourself.
Sometimes situations you’ve been through or people you’ve encountered can leave you with baggage. It might be guilt. It stems from a place of judging yourself. Your baggage might be regret or shame. Sometimes baggage is anger or fear all related to the past.
In order to be able to move forward, you have to let go of it. Define it and deal with that discovery by figuring out who’s really to blame for what happened. Then forgive. This means you’re letting someone else or yourself off the hook.
It’s not a means of excusing bad behavior, but it means that you’re no longer going to mentally punish yourself or someone else for something that happened in the past. Sometimes people think that letting something go or forgiving someone is a one-time decision.
It’s not. It’s a process. You might have to do it daily for a while. You might have to seek counseling. But what you’ll discover is that when you do release the baggage, you feel free - and most people never even realized that they were in an emotional prison.