Prioritizing Self-Care in the New Year

Prioritizing Self-Care in the New Year

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.

Spiritual Self-Care in the New Year - Four Directions Wellness

Spiritual Self-Care in the New Year

Over the past two months I have covered all the various types of self-care, but one. And, that’s spiritual self-care. I guess I was saving it for last, because there are so many myths about the spirit and how one can perform self-care.

In this week’s post, I hope to shed some light on spiritual self-care, identify a few practices you can do today, and list some further resources available, to make your spiritual resolutions come to pass this year.

Spiritual Self-Care, an Overview

Spiritual self-care can be a wide variety of practices and unique to each person, because we’re dealing with our inner and outer world. Generally, the “spirit” is considered the part of you that cannot be defined by the body, mind and emotions. But, that sounds like a limiting belief in yourself and spirit. Spirit comes from the Latin word for breath, and can be understood as the spark that makes you alive. You can use the analogy of glue; it’s the substance that connects your body, mind and emotions together. You can’t sense it unless you bring your spiritual being into awareness as your whole self, not just the undefined parts of yourself.

At the same time, religion is often bound to our spiritual being because we are typically raised in a religion and culture based on our family and geography. And, our spiritual life isn’t always explicitly and exclusively exercised within our religious or cultural practices. So, I encourage you to think about practices that can be done in harmony with them.

For example, meditation is often considered when discussing spiritual self-care to help one connect with the spirit. The same can be translated to prayer for religions that practice prayer as a ritual.  Some beliefs are that prayers are you speaking to a higher power, while meditation is you listening to the higher power’s response.

Further, spiritual practices can be nonreligious in nature, and not conflict with your religion at all. While meditation again is a great example, so is yoga (founded on Ayurvedic Science but not mutually exclusive to other belief systems), doing a gut biome cleanse, going on a digital detox, and more. There are a vast array of practices, with some creativity, that can spur your spirit into the foreground of your consciousness.

While you usually contemplate your spirit solo, you can do it in community as well. You and your spouse/partner, you and your child(ren), and even you and a friend(s) can get together and embark on a spiritual hike together. You can read a spiritual book together, such as The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle; perhaps you can join a spiritual book club that reads a wide variety of literature connected to the divine. If there isn’t such a book club, talk to your local library about starting one!

I think one of the best strategies for spiritual self-care starts with defining time each week to sit down and journal about what you believe about your spiritual self. Give yourself 30, 60, even 90 minutes each week to do so, and fill up pages (digitally or on paper) with your thoughts. After a few weeks when you feel like you have exhausted this exercise, consider what you have learned about yourself. Consider where you might want to explore your spiritual being that might be yet uncovered. Then, from there, you can map out a plan for what types of practices and independent or group activities you will engage in in pursuit of your own spiritual journey. The spiritual self-care plan writes itself in that way.

Spiritual Self-Care Resources

Spiritual self-care is routinely written about as an offshoot of mental or emotional health, but life itself and its connection to the divine in you is a whole component of your being. You owe it to yourself to reach deeply within your being and learn to love your spirit as much as you give attention to, say, your skin. You wash it, moisturize it, protect it with clothing, etc. Your spirit needs the same care as the largest organ that covers your body. Here is a list of spiritual resources below that will get you moving in the direction of spiritual self-care.

Start your spiritual self-care journey with the wonderful message from Rev. Cynthia James on how self-care is a spiritual practice, flipping the paradigm to make self-care more fruitful for you.

The Chopra Center’s 10 Spiritual Self-Care Tips You Need to Know states, “Your spirituality may be found in the tenets of your religion or lay in the beauty of nature. Whatever fulfills and sustains you, your spirituality needs tending.” These 10 spiritual self-care tips, hinted at above, are good places to begin brainstorming your spiritual self-care routine. I especially like practicing gratitude and forgiveness; you can add random acts of kindness too!

Mental Health America provides a great set of practices no matter your religious beliefs on how to Take Care of Your Spirit.

These resources should get you started on your new year’s spiritual self-care practices.

Where to Start With Spiritual Self-Care

As always, if you need more spiritual self-care than you believe you can provide yourself, seek help. You can reach out to Four Directions Wellness for services.

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Is spiritual self-care the area of your life that you are focusing on this year, this month, or even this week? Let me know in the comments and how you plan to connect and nourish your spirit this year.

Sleep Self-Care

Sleep Self-Care in the New Year

In 1943, psychologist Abraham Maslow proposes a theory of psychology known as the hierarchy of needs. According Dr. Maslow’s hierarchy of needs (frequently portrayed as a pyramid, although Maslow didn’t theorize it as such), physiological needs were the primary needs of humans and as a human developed emotionally, the needs would gain more non-physiological attributes. The most basic needs are food, shelter, excretion, and of course, sleep. 

In this week’s post, I cover the importance of sleep to your whole being, and what you can do to make sleep self-care one of your achievable goals in 2020.

Sleep Self-Care, an Overview

Sleep is under assault, so it’s not a surprise that people don’t prioritize sleep self-care. Professionals today brag about how little sleep they get, how many hours they’re working on their side hustle into the wee hours. American culture prizes itself on the 24-hour nature of its lifestyle and entertainment, but I don’t think it’s too scientifically controversial to say that it’s doing more harm to us than good.

According to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Americans are experiencing a public health epidemic because of the magnitude of sleep disorders diagnosed on an annual basis (such as insomnia). As their website states, “A third of US adults report that they usually get less than the recommended amount of sleep…[which sleep deficits link to] many chronic diseases and conditions—such as type 2 diabetes, heart disease, obesity, and depression—that threaten our nation’s health.”

Sleep has many functions, which neuroscientists are finally able to see with advanced imaging technologies of the brain’s activities during sleep. The core activities of sleep are to give the brain an opportunity to wash itself. Yes, it literally self-cleans while you slumber! Also, it gives your mind the chance to consolidate memory and patterns, such as helping to commit to longer-term memory things that you experienced or learned today. Without certain sleep cycles during the night, your mind loses that data and it was as if you didn’t learn that day. And finally, your unconscious self can work through emotional and spiritual experiences while you sleep. Just as the adage sleep on it refers, your sleeping mind can connect to deeper parts of the self and deal with issues that your conscious self perhaps doesn’t want to deal with. You can wake with new insights into these emotional and spiritual parts of your self.

Sleep does much more than this, scientists are sure. But, these are the activities uncovered in research today. If you want to do sleep self-care well, and get those eight hours of uninterrupted ZZZ’s, you will need to arm yourself with some important assets to get that good night’s rest.

Sleep Self-Care Resources

This is a listing of sleep resources below that will get you slumbering in no time:

Good sleep starts with a good morning, afternoon and evening routine. Your body’s circadian rhythm (or, “body clock,” in partnership with your metabolism) manages your wakefulness and sleepfulness throughout each day. By managing your sleep-wake rhythm with a few of these paraphrased tips provided by WebMD:

  • Wake up and get to bed at similar times every day;
  • Don’t nap, if possible;
  • Beds are for sleeping and sex, nothing more;
  • Don’t do any high-intensity exercises less than four hours before going to sleep (and try a good walk midday or before dusk so that your eyes see the sun set!);
  • Use cigarettes, alcohol or caffeine as little as possible when trying to get good sleep;
  • No big meals or super-sized beverages right before slumbering; and,
  • Make your sleeping environment as pleasant and conducive for sleeping as possible.

The National Sleep Foundation recommends a range of sleep times with adults (26-64 years of age) getting seven to nine hours of sleep per night, and older adults (65+ years old) achieving seven to eight hours of sleep nightly. You can see what younger ages are also recommended to get in terms of sleep so that your whole family gets the right amounts.

On your phones, mobile devices and computers, you can install the free software, f.lux, to filter out the blue light (known to induce the production of melatonin-blocking chemical receptors in your brain) from the screens. These features may also be built into the operating systems of your devices, depending on their versions.

To help with your sleep environment, check out these 7 Essential Oils for Relaxation and Better Sleep. There’s nothing like a several drops of lavender essential oil into a diffuser that spreads relaxation and sleepy feelings into the bedroom!

While it may seem like a good idea to take melatonin tablets to induce sleep, it’s usually overdosed easily and actually blocks good sleep from happening. So, have a cup of hot herbal tea and let your body naturally produce melatonin.

And, last but not least, use your electronics to help you sleep better with apps like these:

  • Sleep Cycle (Android, iOS) – this handy app uses many different sensors on your smartphone or mobile device to analyze your sleep throughout the night (including snore monitor and sleep quality).
  • Headspace and Calm (Android, iOS) – Both of these apps have guided meditations designed for helping you slow down and relax into sleep.
  • Sleepzy (Android, iOS) – in addition to tracking your sleep, it calculates your sleep rhythm over time to intelligently set the alarm to wake you at just the right time so you don’t wake up groggy. 
  • Sleep as Android (Android) – This does the same job as Sleep Cycle and Sleepzy above, but it also contains a handy bedtime alarm that tells you to put down that iPad and start brushing your teeth so you can get to bed on time. Of course, you can set an alarm on your phone too to alert you when it’s time to wind down and start getting ready for bed.

These resources should get you started on your new year’s sleep self-care practices.

Where to Start With Sleep Self-Care

As always, if you need more sleep self-care than you believe you can provide yourself, seek help. You can reach out to Four Directions Wellness for services and always talk through any serious issues with a medical professional.

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Is sleep self-care the area of your life that you are focusing on this year, this month, or even this week? Let me know in the comments and how you plan to better your sleep hygiene in 2020.

Physical Self-Care in the New Year - Four Directions Wellness

Physical Self-Care in the New Year

As I say in Prioritizing Self-Care in the New Year, 

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.

In this week’s post, I hope to convince you to make moving an act of restorative, physical self-care, and outline some resources available, to make your physical wellness resolutions a reality in 2020.

Physical Self-Care, an Overview

Exercise is one form of self-care, but it’s not the type of self-care that I want to focus on. That’s not to say that if you’re a fitness enthusiast you’re doing anything wrong; you’re doing great and enjoy! But, don’t forget that recuperation for our body is also necessary and the most commonly overlooked aspect when it comes to physical self-care. 

If exercise is not the primary form of physical self-care, what is? I argue that movement is by itself, in three forms: touch, moving around spaces, and flexibility. 

Touch

One of the most satisfying forms of physical self-care is getting a massage, or self-massage. As humans, we are hardwired for experiencing the world through touch, such as with reiki, yet so often we can go days, weeks or even months sometimes without purposeful, mindful touch.

You may get up in the morning, shower and dress, and go about your days, yet you may not touch yourself with love and care. Now is the time to connect with yourself. It can be as simple as massaging your hands together. How have your hands changed over the past year, five years? Do you notice anything different about your skin? Recognize discomfort but don’t try to fix anything; just be with the sensations.

Of course, you can take touch to the next level by asking a spouse/partner or a trusted family member or friend to give you a hand or shoulder massage after a long day. You can offer to give each other massages regularly as a commitment to your physical self-care this year.

Finally, you can hire a licensed massage therapist for a wide variety of styles of massage. No matter how you decide to start, some form of touch is a great way to kick off your physical self-care in the new year.

Moving Around Spaces

Next, think about how you can get your organs that same level of love. This is usually through getting your heart rate up, but it doesn’t mean trips to the gym or even breaking a sweat. Your heart rate elevates when you walk briskly for just a few minutes at a time several times a day. According to the American Heart Association, they recommend 150 minutes of something like brisk walking per week.

Choose walking up the stairs instead of taking the elevator at work. Park at the far end of the parking lot at the grocery store or mall and power (safely) walk to the front door. Take public transit the next time you want to explore the city. Every time you choose to increase your heart rate, your body will thank you with a healthy heart and that’s excellent physical self-care.

Flexibility

Physical self-care wouldn’t be complete if you didn’t feel the satisfaction of a good stretch. Endurance and stretch are equally measured in fitness by flexibility. And, you can’t function without being able to move your body comfortably the way you need and want it to.

Simple stretching exercises will do here. Nothing fancy is needed. Reach for the sky, reach for your toes. Do what you are comfortably able to do and then stretch to see if you can go a little further without hurting yourself.

If you want to really focus on your flexibility this year, you might consider taking a yoga class. Buy a yoga package at your local yoga studio and commit to showing up as you are to class once per week. With the right mindset, yoga can be not only a form of physical self-care but also mentally, emotionally, socially and spiritually enriching.

Physical Self-Care Resources

You can look at fitness and exercise websites all day long. Much of it is going to talk about workouts and feeling the burn, but not many are going to speak to fitness as self-care. This is a listing of resources below that will get you moving in the direction of physical self-care and not just another exercise regimen:

Check out the Zeel or Soothe apps to schedule a local professional, at-home massage on your next personal, or telework, day. 

In Daily Self Massage – How To Love Yourself after a day of work, dancer Alessia Lugoboni shows you how to do a lovely self-massage using some simple tools (Lush massage bar and a tennis ball!). Be creative with how you do self-massage and enjoy the experience. 

You can learn more about how you’re moving by using apps on your phone to earn those Heart Points and motivate you to move more, including Google Fit, Apple Health, Exist, Gyroscope, and Instant. Once you start to see what you’re doing every day, you can make small behavior changes to your routine to incorporate more walking.

If you can’t get to yoga classes, check out the Down Dog app. But, if you are able, I highly recommend visiting your local yoga studios and find a yoga community that suits you.

These resources should get you started on your new year’s physical self-care practices.

Where to Start With Physical Self-Care

As always, if you need more physical self-care than you believe you can provide yourself, seek help. You can reach out to Four Directions Wellness for services and always talk through any serious issues with a medical professional.

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Is physical self-care the area of your life that you are focusing on this year, this month, or even this week? Let me know in the comments and how you plan to better your physical health in 2020.

Nutrition Self-Care in the New Year

Nutrition Self-Care in the New Year

You remember the adage growing up that you are what you eat. In so many ways today that has been proven true by science. And, even with this insight, we all struggle to some extent today with the mountain of food and beverage options that nutrition self-care can be challenging.

In this week’s edition, I cover the basics of nutritional self-care and resources available to make nutrition resolutions more achievable in 2020.

Nutrition Self-Care, an Overview

Nourishing our body with good food in the right amounts (as I discussed before in Getting Back to Nutrition Basics) is a radical act of self-love. It’s important to remember that we are taught from young ages that taking care of ourselves first is somehow doing something wrong. I believe a Golden Rule corollary for food applies here: eat as well as you would feed others. So often, we don’t eat as well as we would if we had colleagues or friends visiting our homes for lunch or dinner. Let’s start a radical nutrition self-care movement right here, right now. And, it starts with you!

Eating is one of the strongest, most basic human drivers. We must eat to survive. Before the dawn of the previous century, food scarcity in the Western World was common. Only in the last century to past half-century has the abundance of food you and I experience existed. Because of this marked uptick in food stability and surplus our minds and bodies don’t know what to do with all the food available all the time. We need to learn moderation in abundance today.

That’s it. That’s the simple truth. Nutrition self-care isn’t about losing weight (as that’s a different challenge altogether), but it is finding a healthy relationship with what you eat and drink. That’s usually find the best food for you; that means the highest quality, healthiest food for your budget.

Over the next week or two, carry around a piece of paper or a small notebook and track what you eat and drink. Try to capture everything you’re eating, but don’t worry if you miss a few meals. At the end of the week, ask yourself, is what you’re eating/drinking serving your body and your goals?

You know you need change if the answer is maybe and/or no. From there, look to the resources below to see about making small, consistent adjustments to your nutrition plans to start down a self-care routine that will work for you.

Nutrition Self-Care Resources

You can look at nutrition self-care websites all day long. Much of it is going to talk about “diet” and exercise, but not much about truly whole-health nourishment. This is a listing of resources below that will get you eating for nutritional self-care and not just another “diet”:

These resources should get you started on your new year’s nutrition self-care practices.

Where to Start With Nutrition Self-Care

As always, if you need more nutrition health self-care than you believe you can provide yourself, seek help. You can reach out to Four Directions Wellness for services and always talk through any serious issues with a medical professional.

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Is nutrition self-care the area of your life that you are focusing on this year, this month, or even this week? Let me know in the comments and how you plan to better your nutrition health in 2020.

Mental Self-Care in the New Year - Four Directions Wellness

Mental Self-Care in the New Year

While emotional self-care, as discussed in my last post, looks similar to mental self-care, it is unique and distinct. This is especially the case regarding how you approach your own mental health, since we are all so different in our experiences, brain chemistry and genes.

In this week’s edition, I cover the basics of mental self-care and resources available to further your mental self-care resolution for 2020.

Mental Self-Care, an Overview

It’s important to remember that the mind, body, emotions, and spirit work in concert to promote your overall health. Any one aspect lacking may produce dis-ease, disorder and/or illness. And, the strongest connection to body-based disease is that of the mind.

Poor skills related to mental processing can increase stress and therefore suppress our immune system functions. This combination raises the likelihood of getting mentally and physically sick. Therefore, identifying good thinking and mental models to support our mental health is extremely important. Good mental self-care supports all other aspects of your whole-being health.

Mental self-care is the combination of practices we institute in our daily lives and help us institute good, critical thinking skills. These include overcoming cognitive biases, logical fallacies, catastrophic thinking, inattention, and negative self-speak, among others. By identifying where you can grow in these areas you can then start training. It’s similar to learning self-defense; you need to learn a bit of theory, then start conditioning your muscle to remember punching, kicking and blocking attacks. It’s tough and you may land on your rear (metaphorically speaking) on occasion when you aim wrong or don’t pay attention at the right moment, but it’s worth dusting off and getting back up. From there, you can advance into higher levels of your self-defense training. With mental self-care, your work will start in small bits and work your way up to more advanced skills.

Mental Self-Care Resources

With gratitude, we can find plenty of mental self-self-care information online. This is a listing of resources below that will get you thinking in the right ways:

  1. The first step is determining opportunities for growth when it comes to your mental health. A critical thinking test is a good place to start. Also, you may look into taking the Big Five Personality test to see where you fit into that mental framework to see where you might want to focus your mental self-care training energies.
  2. Inattention is an affliction for all living generations with the proliferation of more technology and marketing than our minds have had a chance to learn to cope. Learning to focus through meditation is powerful. And, if you’re able to, join one of our upcoming Mindfulness Mondays Meetup in Alexandria, Virginia!
  3. Next, you may want to learn about common logical fallacies and conduct daily check-ins with yourself to see if you are using any of these logical fallacies in your everyday conversations. While you may start to notice other people using logical fallacies, use this time introspectively to improve yourself and not point them out to others.
  4. Following logical fallacies, a good step forward is handling negative self-speak. Also, consider reading Taming Your Outer Child: A Revolutionary Program to Overcome Self-Defeating Patterns by therapist and author Susan Anderson, to learn how to balance out the inner critic, protection of the inner child and the impulsive, self-sabotaging outer child.
  5. Finally, you can then move on to managing catastrophic and other negative thinking patterns, as well as better reflection skills, with some of the latest technology. Woebot, Wysa, and Youper are all mental health assistance mobile apps that provide help in managing these destructive thinking patterns and skills and helps you to replace them with positive, reflective thinking skills.

These resources should get you started on your new year’s resolution toward productive, positive mental self-care practices.

Where to Start With Mental Self-Care

As always, if you need more mental health self-care than you believe you can provide yourself, seek help. You can reach out to Four Directions Wellness for services and always talk through any serious issues with a mental health professional.

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Is mental self-care the area of your life that you are focusing on this year, this month, or even this week? Let me know in the comments and how you plan to better your mental health self-care.

Emotional Care

Emotional Care in the New Year

Having discussed the importance and ways prioritizing self-care in the new year, I outlined the various areas of your life you can focus on one at a time. Over the next couple months, I will dive a bit deeper into resources available to you for each of these areas of self-care, starting with emotional self-care.

Long after new year’s resolutions collect mental cobwebs, if your emotional well-being is the first thing you’d like to attend to in this new decade, let’s get into the transformative power of good emotional care and various resources available to you.

Emotional Care, an Overview

Emotional self-care are often mistaken for mental self-care (which I’ll tackle in the next edition of the blog). The distinction between the two is best given by WebMD as,

Mental health refers to your ability to process information. Emotional health, on the other hand, refers to your ability to express feelings which are based upon the information you have processed. So, if your cognitive function is hindered by depression or anxiety, for example, you may struggle with accurately identifying a situation. This can then trigger inappropriate responses because those responses are based upon inaccurate thoughts.

You must consider how your feelings and behaviors are connected to one another (and to your thoughts and mental processing of actions and situations) when considering the best emotional self-care practices.

It’s good for you to feel a wide range of positive and negative emotions from time-to-time. For example, you may feel sad when mourning the loss of a loved one or a companion pet. This is normative and everyone’s grieving period differs. 

However, if that mourning extends beyond what should be normal for you to function in your world, that’s when you know the feelings have taken over the ship. Good emotional self-care can help to buffer these emotional peaks and valleys so that these types of extremes don’t happen in the first place.

With emotional self-care, you can feel however you want, but you can’t act out however you feel. Setting those behavioral boundaries so that you can stay on track in life and work and in right relationship with others is the goal of good emotional self-care.

Emotional Care Resources

As noted emotional self-care is how you regulate your emotions in your interior world (self-speak and feelings) and your behaviors (actions and interactions with others). Thankfully, the Web is a treasure trove of positive emotional self-care information, but some of it can be more less useful. So, I am listing resources below that should steer you in the right direction:

  1. Carley Schweet, author of Boundaries with Soul, provides ten easy emotional self-care practices and along with some of her favorite books for emotional care: Easy Ways to Practice Emotional Self-Care.
  2. The Habits for Wellbeing site has provided 22 ways to practice emotional self-care and letting go. Letting go is such a recurring theme in emotional self-care, that it’s worth considering if you need to let go of some things emotionally in your life.
  3. Abigail Brenner MD, author of Transitions: How Women Embrace Change and Celebrate Life and SHIFT: How to Deal When Life Changes, on Psychology Today provides a psychiatrist’s perspective on emotional self-care. I especially like her suggestions #4 and #5.
  4. Radical Transformation Project provides an Emotional Self-Care Guide that provides not just a list of practices but some guidance on how to approach each suggestion, plus other resources on the site.

These resources should certainly whet your appetite with plentiful options for starting your new year with productive emotional self-care practices.

Where to Start With Emotional Care

When dealing with a practice as multifaceted as emotional care, I think that journaling daily is a good place to start. It’s simple. It requires no prior skills. You have all that you need inside you to make it happen.

Journaling can be difficult for those who set too high a standard for expressing their emotions outside themselves, especially on paper (whether physical or digital). You can say whatever you’d like in your journal, and write for a specific amount of time (say, five minutes on a timer). 

As well, you can focus on a single emotion or concept daily. Monday can be gratitude; Tuesday, solitude; Wednesday, frustrations/anger/sadness; Thursday, joy/contentment; Friday, anticipation; Saturday, trust/acceptance; and, Sunday, surprise. Of course, you can change these around and pick different emotions on different days. But, it gives you a starting point that can be cathartic and start to give you a sense of the emotions you are feeling throughout your days and weeks.

As always, if you need more emotional care than you believe you can provide yourself, seek help. You can reach out to Four Directions Wellness for services and always talk any serious issues through with a mental health professional.

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Is emotional care the area of your life that you are focusing on this year, this month, or even this week? Let me know in the comments and how you plan to better your emotional care.

New Year, New Decade, New You!

New Year, New Decade, New You!

As 2019 rolls into 2020, this marks not only a new year but also a new decade. We mark new decades based on our birth years but also communely when a new decade happens. And, new decades only happen about eight or nine times in our lifetimes, so they’re a little more important than 11:59 PM ticking over to 12:00 AM any given December 31st. When these new years’ celebrations are turning over a new decade, it’s an opportunity to take stock in what has happened in the past decade, and what you may want to be different in the coming decade.

Reflecting on the Past Decade

As Victor Yocco, PhD, writes in his second article in his Dwelling On The Past series for Smashing Magazine, “Personal reflection enables us to process and make meaning of all of the great (and not so great) learning and working experiences we’ve had. Everyone stands to gain from engaging in some type of reflection.”

While it’s rather easy to consider one year, one month or one week to the next, it’s a bit more challenging to remember the past decades worth of accomplishments, challenges, memories, gains and losses. As we make our way into the next decade, where have you been in all four directions: mentally, emotionally, spiritually, and physically?

There are many ways to exercise your reflection muscles in this regard. You can outline all ten years past and right down what happened, what stood out and more. You can look at your calendars, diaries or agendas, if you have them going back that time period. And, you can ask family, friends and colleagues to share their memories of you and interactions with you over the past 10 years to see what they remembered. 

If you need more structure, look at this resource of 87 self-reflection exercises. One of those is bound to speak to your mind, emotions, body and spirit over the past decade! What did you like? What didn’t you like?

Where Are You Now? 

From the past decade to the current may seem like a long-distance jump. Amidst heartache and dis-ease, and jubilation and crossing finish lines and opening new chapters, life’s trajectory needs the big picture.  It also needs the focus on the present to help make it all make sense.

So, where are you now? To answer that question, it’s helpful to break your life in unequal parts: your roles, responsibilities, categories of focus, improvement and accountability. For example, you might list your life areas as simple as:

  • Health
  • Home
  • Work

Or, you can expand and detail it more so that you have 10 or 15 areas with subcategories. Give yourself 30 minutes or less to outline this for yourself. 

Then, what have you experienced recently in each of those life areas? What was the bad? What was the (potentially) ugly? What was the good? What was the great? What brought you pain, frustration, or boredom lately? What brought you joy, contentment and excitement lately?

Now, you have reflected on the long-term past and the recent past. You can journal about how you feel about having done these exercises and see what opportunities surface in your mind.

Where Do You Want to Go? This Year? This Decade?

And, reflection is only important as the practical and usefulness it provides your present and near-future experience. So, where do you want to go? In the next year, or in the next decade, write out your goals and aspirations for what you want to happen (and what you don’t want to happen) in that time.

Sometimes it’s more helpful to draw the background than the foreground, so that might mean writing more about what you don’t want than what you want, or painting your picture in broad strokes (qualities you want to experience) instead of specific metrics you want to achieve. Remember to touch on each of your life areas and make sure they encompass your four directions. 

You might decide to write down on goal for each life area for 2020 and the coming decade. And, from there, write down the very next step needed to move forward on that goal. Do you need to research information? Do you need to talk to your spouse or partner? Do you need to buy something?

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Once you have determined those next steps for the coming year and decade, you can write those on stickies and post them in prominent locations around your home or work. When you have a chance to take action, you’ll have a reminder of what your past self gifted your present self to do!

Are you seeking more assistance with the planning?  Then join Mara at Four Directions Wellness in Alexandria for her upcoming “Exploring Personal Implications for 2020.”  One day only on Monday, January 20 from 12:30 to 4:00. Register today at Four Directions Wellness | Classes. 

What do you plan to do in the coming year, or decade, to improve your life, work and health? Let me know in the comments!

Buying Healthy Household Cleaning Products

Buying Healthy Household Cleaning Products

As we discussed in last week’s post, you can make your own household cleaning products for a variety of cleaning needs. But, if you’re busy and don’t have time to do that, there must be solutions that are healthier and less harmful than those bought generally, right? Buying healthy household cleaning products doesn’t have to be difficult to help you with having a safer home.

This week, I cover some cleaning (and personal care) products you can buy locally (and online) that are safer, healthier for you to clean your home, and body.

Household Cleaning Products

The path to major department stores is well-worn and they are becoming aware of the need and want by consumers for eco-friendly, fair trade and sustainable home goods and cleaning products. So, you can find several lines of products to clean your home today that are mass-produced and readily available at stores like Target, The Vitamin Shoppe, and Bed Bath & Beyond.

Of those brands, you can find Method, Seventh Generation, Mrs. Meyers, and Dr. Bronner’s products on the store shelves.

Beyond the major eco-friendly brands above, you can find healthy household cleaning products at Amazon-owned Whole Foods, MOM’s Organic Market and other local grocery chains, too. Make sure to review the ingredients of any brand/product claiming to be “green,” “eco-friendly” or “sustainable” by referencing last week’s blog post with the list of chemical toxins.

If you can’t find what you need at one of those stores, then look to Web for purchasing what you need. Of the brands above, you can find those and more on Google Shopping (which will find a store nearby hopefully carrying the product you’re looking for in-stock), Green Pages, Sun & Earth, Truce and Molly’s Suds.

Personal Care Cleaning Products

In the personal care produce space, your local options are also pretty good at the afore-mentioned brands such as Method and Dr. Bronner’s. But, there are plenty of local options geared toward hair, skin and body cleaning products too.

When you want to truly support local small business, look no further than Truly-Life. Owner Mellenie Runion produces all of the ingredients on her property for the luxurious deodorants, soaps, lip balms and lotions sold on her website with local delivery. Many of these products are geared toward gift-giving but can be used as your day-to-day personal care products for bathroom and kitchen hand soap and Truly-Life’s lotion is solid so it can be carried in your purse or bag without concern for leaks.

If you’re looking for more everyday personal care products, stores, such as Fair Trade Winds, have a local presence and are well-stocked with body and skin care lines that are not only fair trade but also many times are also eco-friendly and sustainably produced.

For the men out there who are trying to buy greener personal care products (or for those trying to help them do so), check out Dr. Squatch products. Also, their commercials are hilarious!

Another way to find quality personal skin and body care products is by visiting your nearest eco-friendly salon. They carry a variety of different skin, hair and body care products that might suit your needs.

Wherever you choose to shop, your goal is to find a balance in quality, convenience, cost and care for the planet.

Green Cleaning Done for You

And for those who are really time-strapped and have the means, there is a new sub-industry that has developed of eco-conscious home cleaners in the Metropolitan Washington DC area.

One that stands out is Mister Kleen’s Green Kleening residential home cleaning services. This company is not simply marketing hype, they are Green Seal (GS 42) certified, which is one of the environmentally-friendly industries’ most rigorous set of standards. There are also green carpet cleaning services

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Finding the right and available eco-friendly household and personal care cleaning products takes some time and research. But, if you can’t make your own, these products and services are certainly the next best solutions to helping to keep your home, yourself and your family safer and healthier.

Let me know in the comments what brands you’re buying healthy household cleaning products and personal care products you use, and where you find them!

Making Your Own Healthy Household Cleaning Products

Cleaning is a chore, but a clean home is a healthy home to live in. And, one of the first way to start to eliminate toxins in your home is making your own healthy household cleaning products.

In this two-part series, I’m covering why healthy household cleaning products help to make your home healthier, how to make your own household cleaning solutions, and in the following article, how to find and buy all-natural cleaning products locally in Metropolitan Washington DC area.

So, let’s begin with the harmful stuff in your household cleaners before we move along to making your own homemade versions.

Problems With Cleaning Products, Generally

Most cleaning products are tested for safety and toxicity levels. So, we all imagine that they’re good to use at home. Until you think about, these tests only show them used separately and how they affect the general population. Once you start combining these cleaning products in your home and, say, catch a cold/flu, how do you know those cleaning agents are not at toxic levels for you and your family? This is where a knowledge of what chemicals are in normal household cleaning products, and why making your own healthy household cleaning products can prove beneficial to your health and wellness.

Starting in the living room, you can typically find the chemical agents ammonium hydroxide, napthalene and perchloroethylene (a dry cleaning agent). When used, the fumes from these cleaners are known to cause disorientation, dizziness, nausea, among other symptoms, and they can cause cancer and liver damage. You should never breathe in such fumes and make sure to ventilate your home when they cleaners have been used until the toxins in the air dissipate.

Then there are wood furniture polishes, many of which contain petroleum distillates, along with ammonia, naphtha, nitrobenzene and phenol. Together, this chemical cocktail may irritate eyes, skin, throat and lungs, and can cause you to be nauseous and induce vomiting.

Air fresheners can do the same things as furniture polishes when used in closed spaces because of the chemicals such as aerosol propellants, formaldehyde, more of those petroleum distillates and p-dichlorobenzenes. Sadly, these can cause cancer and neurological damage, in addition to being highly flammable.

We continue on to the kitchen, where cleaning is most important because the surfaces and tools you use touch your food. Dishwashing detergents contain phosphates that can burn your skin or even worse if swallowed. If you, a family member or pet do swallow any such detergents, immediately call your poison control hotline.

Antibacterial surface cleaners in the kitchen usually contain surfactants and pesticides. Window and glass cleaners contain ammonia and isopropanol. All of these can cause irritation to the eyes, breathing (nose, throat, windpipe and lunges), and skin. Make sure to wear gloves and well-ventilate any areas where you might be using them.

Next, we visit the bathroom where we need to keep it clean from regular use, but also where we clean our bodies. Lurking in toilet cleaners are sodium hypoclhlorite, hydrochloric acid and/or bleach. These can all irritate eyes, skin and throat. When these chemical cleaning agents are mixed with other cleaners, they produce toxic gas that can harm your breathing severely, so beware never to combine them.

Beyond the toilet are the bathtub and vanity/sink surface cleaners, usually designed to kill mold and mildew. These contain fungicides, which again can seriously irritate eyes, skin, throat, and should never ben swallowed. Make sure to wear gloves and vent the area after each use.

Finally, we enter the laundry room, where you clean the clothes that sit on your and your family’s skin, day in and day out. Laundry detergents contain enzyme-based ingredients (usually called anionic, cationic and non-ionic on labels), which help to break up dirts and stains. Be careful to avoid ingesting any of these products as they can cause mild irritation to the eyes and skin all the way up to nausea, vomiting, convulsions and even induce a coma. It’s documented that high exposure levels of these detergents causes asthma.

Bleach is a category of cleaners by themselves and as you can imagine all types of bleach are very toxic to breathe in and should certainly never be ingested, and never mixed with other cleaning agents.

So, even in this brief overview of just some of the chemicals in household cleaning products, they can be extremely unsafe for the general population. And, that doesn’t include those with allergies or other sensitivities, along with pet companions in the home that may be more affected by the chemicals.

As you can see, perhaps making your own healthy household cleaning products can do your home and body good!

Cleaning Products That You Can Make From Natural Ingredients

Several bloggers have put together fantastic and thorough resources on making your own healthy household cleaning products, so here is a roundup of those posts and videos.

“Make Your Own Cleaning Products”

After extensive research, The Green Parent blogger Leanne Patrick assembled recipes for dishwashing liquid, surface cleaner, toilet cleaner, window cleaner and multipurpose cleaner.

“11 Homemade Natural Cleaning Products”

DIY Recipes & Uses blogger Ellen Gans put together a list of household cleaning products by task, which is really helpful. Where she mentions using dish soap, you can swap that out for all-natural liquid dish soap.

“The Ultimate Guide to Homemade All-Natural Cleaning Recipes”

Keeper of the Home is last on this list of resources, but probably the best and most comprehensive list of recipes for making your own healthy household cleaning products. The guide is structured by areas of the home and are all all-natural ingredients.

Now that you know how toxic household cleaning products can be, I hope you’ll consider adding some all-natural cleaning products to your home’s cleaning toolkit. And, you can quickly glance through this list of resources to get the ingredients needed in making your own healthy household cleaning products. In the next article, we’ll discuss where you can buy some household and other all-natural, healthy products in and around the Washington DC area.

Let me know in the comments if you’ve made your healthy household cleaning products and how they’re working for you!