After the Great Recession, workers around the world were shocked into a hyper state of productivity. While wage rates have stayed mostly the same for the past 20 years, each professional has had to prove their worthiness in the current economy with greater output and working overtime. The national stress levels have been impacted by the economic crisis since 2008 and those symptoms of stress-related issues don’t seem to be abating more than a decade later.
There are many reasons for the squeeze on our personal time, but the outcomes are greater stress and stress-related diseases and disorders. In the new year, it’s a good time to think about how prioritizing self-care can help to make you more productive and happier in the long-term.
Epidemic of Self-Neglect
Self-care isn’t simply the Instagrammable #selfcare posts (numbering more than 24.5 million posts currently) and products that promise happiness, health and prosperity to those who do it. Self-care are regular, deliberate practices that helps an individual to maintain physical, mental, emotional and spiritual homeostasis, however you define those areas of life. It’s important to recognize the importance of true healthcare when it comes to self-care.
Here in the United States, there is rampant self-neglect, which is the opposite of self-care. So, it’s not terrible for anyone to focus on any activities that make them feel better, even temporarily, as long as it’s not further damaging to your health (like abusing drugs, alcohol, food, etc.). The truth of the matter is that taking care of yourself is a partnership between you, your support system (of friends, family and community), and the healthcare system.
But, it’s important to recognize that if you or seeing people you care about presenting neglect for basic needs, such as personal hygiene, maintenance of physical, mental, emotional and/or spiritual health, or substandard living conditions, it may be self-neglect and it’s imperative to act positively and effectively to counteract it.
Prioritizing Self-Care Properly
The basics of self-care aren’t complicated, but they are profound when done properly. Prioritizing self-care means focus on seven distinct areas of life: emotional, mental, nutritional, physical, sleep, social, and spiritual care.
Emotional care is how you regulate your emotions in your interior world (self-speak and feelings). Engage in positive dialog with yourself.
Mental care is taking care of your mental health, which may becoming self-aware of limiting thoughts, feelings and behaviors that are holding you back. And, this may include seeking out mental health professionals that can help you through those thorny issues.
Nutritional care is eating a balance diet that maintains a healthy weight for your unique medical circumstances.
Physical care is about getting enough movement in your daily lifestyle. You don’t need to get a gym membership and run three to five miles per day, to have proper physical self-care. It’s important to remember that 30 Move Minutes five times per week is recommended by the American Heart Association.
Sleep is crucial if you are prioritizing self-care, and why wouldn’t you prioritize how you spend one-third of your life. Your body needs approximately eight hours of good sleep per day. Sleep contributes to cleaning your brain and body of toxins, repletion of good chemicals throughout the body, and consolidating memory along with possible problem-solving. A great start is reading The Power of When by sleep psychology Michael Breus, PhD.
Finally, there’s spiritual care and can be defined in many different ways. How do you feel your spirit? There are as varied ways as there are stars in the sky. Are you religious and attend church services to connect with your spirit? Or, are you more interested in curling up with a good book that brings you closer to your spiritual understanding of the world? Whatever it is, it’s time allotted to recharging that realm that is yours alone.
Together, these areas of your life come together to form your entire self-care. For most of us, we struggle with one or several of these areas, and that takes us to prioritizing self-care as we start this new year and decade.
Prioritizing Self-Care in the New Year
Prioritizing self-care doesn’t mean increasing our stress to make us sicker and more susceptible to dis-ease and disease. Instead, if you want to prioritize self-care today, pick one area of your life from the above seven categories as your Self-Care Priority for the present moment.
From there, start with a bit of research to see how you would like to approach deeply improving that area of your life. You can look to The First 20 Hours: How to Learn Anything…Fast by Josh Kaufman as a model for this approach to getting started. And, if you need help, seek out professional help. Now, instead of trying to improve everything all at once, focus on improving that one thing for as long as it takes to make you great at it.
You’ll find that in the pursuit of getting better at prioritizing self-care of that one area of your life, many other areas of your life will naturally get better. That doesn’t mean you stop maintaining other areas of your life, but that focusing on this area should have compound benefits to the rest of your personal and professional life.
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Once you have excelled at that one area of your life, you can take on the practice of getting the next area of your life into self-care excellence. You can do this over and over again throughout your life and leave self-neglect behind.
Is there an area of your life that you are neglecting and would like to make inroads to getting better? Let me know in the comments and how you plan to commit to focusing on that one area of this new year.