The Self-Care Expose

The Self-Care Exposé

For me, self-care isn’t meditation, candles, and yoga, although that does sound good and might be your thing. For me, it is control of the amount of negativity in my life, it’s bettering myself, and knowing my limits.

An important element of self-care is your surroundings or social aspects of your life. These could be things like other people and the media. Social media and apps like Instagram can be damaging to your mental health. It’s crucial to monitor your time on them, you don’t have to remove them from your devices, but if you feel like you need to, it might be best. The way I practice self-care with social media is noticing which accounts I follow for body image. For example, I noticed I was only following Dua Lipa to look at her body and compare it to mine; so, I immediately unfollowed. Instead, follow body positivity or body neutrality accounts like Jameela Jamil, or accounts that inspire you to better yourself.

Another aspect of self-care is the physical aspect, things like exercise; although exercise is great for your mental health forcing yourself to do it for the sake of self-care is not self-care. I often forced myself to do exercise because I thought it would better myself, as long as you are healthy that is all that matters.

When you set unobtainable goals for yourself, like gaining abs in a matter of weeks (when really it takes months) and you don’t achieve that goal it knocks your self-worth and just makes you feel worse. If you do exercise, it might be best for you to focus on the way you feel after rather than how you might look. It’s better to use physical activity for your mental health rather than just body image. Personally, I find I want to exercise when I am stressed, I get little pockets of energy and I just want to go on a run.

I’ve found that listening to a podcast rather than music helps me find my own running tempo so that I don’t wear myself out (my personal favourites are ‘I weigh with Jameela Jamil’ and ‘The Michelle Obama podcast’).

In conclusion, I found most important aspect of self-care is finding what works for you; trial and error. What works for other people may not work for you, try it and if it isn’t your thing then you don’t have to do it.  It has now become trendy to practice self-care and although this is good for raising an understanding about it, you shouldn’t feel pressured to try and practice other people’s methods of self-care.

“The most important aspect of self-care is finding what works for you”