Our bodies, minds and spirits are like complex high performance sports cars. They need regular care and maintenance in order to run smoothly and at their best.  But, too often, we take better care of our cars than we do of ourselves.  In the next few posts, I’m going to provide some information and inspiration to support and encourage you to make yourself a priority by making self-care a personal habit.
The list of self-care activities is endless and what works for you is based on  personal awareness and choice. You need to know what fuels you, what takes care of your mind, body and soul. For some, it is time alone, for others it is time with others.  Often for me, a 30 minute walk with my dog allows me to clear my head and resolve an issue that I might otherwise spend hours struggling with at my desk.  I have a client who swears by her weekly massage, others who couldn’t survive without regular exercise, still others who are devoted to their meditation practice.

There is no prescription for when or how often you should engage in self-care, but it is most useful when it is built in to your life as a regular practice, vs. an auxiliary event to be scheduled into your already over scheduled life.    Think of it as preventative medicine.  When you feel thirsty, you’ve already begun to be dehydrated… when you are feeling the need for self-care, you’ve already started down the path to stress and burn out.  Filling the tank before  you feel drained by  life’s challenges:  those difficult aspects of your job,  rocky moments in your relationships, hiccups in your daily routines,  makes you more resilient in these situations, much more able to handle the bumps in the road.

The cost of not taking good care of yourself can be high.  I know so many brilliant, successful
people who burn out.  They’ve been saying for years that they know they should take better care of themselves but they just don’t have time… then, they crash and burn and are no use to anyone.  Stress related diseases, short tempers, damaged relationships, poor work performance are all symptoms of lack of self-care.

What you do doesn’t matter…That you do something is what’s so important.

To identify effective self-care practices for yourself, think about things you’ve done or places
you’ve gone in your life that have renewed you, fed your body, mind and soul.  Listen to yourself when you say things like, if I only had time, I’d…  or I wish I could… and do that.  Experiment with different approaches until you find things that work for you.