Self-Care Basics: A Beginner’s Guide

Get started with self-care basics with this beginner's guide.

What are the basics of Self-Care & how does it apply to you? Why do you Self-Care, what are the benefits & how should you start?? We will answer these questions and more in this Beginner’s Guide to Self Care.

Self-Care is a system of easy, specially targeted actions to take care of your body physically, mentally, emotionally & spiritually, which take awareness to recognize their need, and intention to perform regularly.

If you feel:

Overwhelmed
Stressed
Exhausted
Depleted

Please consider taking a bit of time for some basic Self Care, which you deserve and frankly need to get back to center.

First, assess where you stand with your health, happiness, life’s purpose & daily habits, and then explore small steps of taking better care of yourself that powerfully REFILL, & perhaps RE-fuel, your needs.

These easy ways to intensionally focus on your Mental, Emotional, Physical & Spiritual well-being are essential for a happy & healthy life, especially during our times of Super-Moms, Super Dads, Super-Employee and trying to smoosh WAY TOO MANY THINGS into one day.

What is Self-Care?
Who Needs Self-Care?
Where does a Beginner Start with Self Care?

After 25 years of massaging stressed, overwhelmed people, I have learned a few tips to share with you about some self-care basics. For example, there are different layers in your body that need your loving care and support, and I will share some methods to help your body that might surprise you. Find out more about our family here.

Read below to help you understand why you need to do them and how to get started with your own daily routine.

Disclaimer: Check with your doctor to see if you are in good enough health for these activities. Try these ideas at your own risk.

What Is Self-Care?

Self-care is simply the act of taking care of yourself physically, emotionally, mentally and spiritually. These acts create joy and rejuvenation and can very simple actions.

Self-Care Examples:

Eating a healthy meal
Getting good sleep
Hugging a loved one
Taking a relaxing trip
Getting a massage
Seeing a counselor

We can add these to our lives intuitively, like putting ice on a sprained ankle, or taking a walk when we are angry. Or, we can add them intentionally, perhaps after loosing the ability to “listen” to our intuitive voice.

When we have lost the ability to hear our body yelling for help, it’s like the memory to care for ourselves, or the DESIRE to CARE for our health just fades away. The inner voice is still requesting rest, or fresh air, or a good meal, yet the EMPATHY for ourselves gets pushed aside, and is now a mere whisper.

Self-Care is a solution for longevity of movement & pain-free, centered & joyful living.

Keeping ourselves grounded, rested and well taken care of is not possible EVERY DAY of our lives, but we can do our best to recognize its importance and intensionally add little waysto love ourselves here and there.

It sounds so intuitive and basic, yet many of us don’t take great care of ourselves and end up unhappy, in pain physically, emotionally or spiritually or worse.

Like any good habit, it’s effects are cumulative, and taking baby steps day by day can make a HUGE difference in just 1 week! Think of the effects in 1 year!

If you are not able to nail down what you need in your life to feel better, then just start with these basics.

5 Self-Care Basics:

Sit quietly, alone if you can
Take a deep breath, start with 1-3
Drink 1 glass of water
Eat one healthy meal
Get good sleep, or at least rest

Who Needs Self-Care?

You could benefit from self-care if you are feeling stress or anxiety, feel overwhelmed, rushed, exhausted, sad, depleted or down, to name a few reasons. So, Most of us could benefit from a little more loving attention

Do You Ask These Questions:

How can I help myself feel better?
What do I need to feel less overwhelmed & more productive?
How do I de-stress my life?
Why do I say yes to things I really don’t want to do?

Self-Care Can Help.

Can You Relate:

As a parent, do you put your child’s needs first?
Do you feed everyone in your home before eating yourself?
When you eat, do you sit down?
Are you exhausted during the day?
At work, when you have a deadline, do you get enough sleep?

Some times in our lives we need a bit more TLC from ourselves to ourselves, haha. Here are ONLY A FEW examples:

You Need Extra Self-Care When You Are:

Moving to a new home
Going through a divorce
Loss of a loved one or pet
Changing jobs
Helping a loved one with mental struggles or pain therapy

These are examples of the most stressful transitions in our lives, and we often don’t have the time to process the stress created which leaves us refreshed and rejuvenated. Instead, we hold things in and another layer of tension is added to our body.

What Are The Benefits Of Self-Care?

There are so many benefits of Self-Care, it would fill your entire gratitude journal. Even the smallest movement of your dial towards the positive can help, and remember, these effects build on one another. Be easy on yourself, and find the techniques that work best for you!!

Benefits Of Self-Care (Several Favorites):

Happiness
Better personal boundaries
Ease of movement
Awareness
Gratitude
Better self esteem
Increased productivity
Forgiveness (to name only a few)

Why Is Self-Care Important?

The reason Self-Care is so important is because it creates awareness of our own basic needs. It keeps us going physically strong, calms our mental illness, and at the core of our existence, Self-Care is about LOVE.

Self-Care is also important because it works. A deep breath can calm a single moment in time in your life. Or, a hand massage can affect way more than just your hand soreness. Each action we take has a re-action, and when we are more aware of these connections, then additional positive actions can have an incredible chain reaction on different levels.

How Many People Do You Know Who:

Are Ultra hard on themselves
Don’t allow people to help them
Get angry easily
Have a hard time with forgiveness in general, but self forgiveness even more so.
Often they hold their breath?

This entire “way of being” can change with a few intensional actions done for a positive outcome.

Can you imagine how much safer driving would be if there was more calm and less anxiety? If more people became aware of their actions, took a deep breath and chose a different way instead, many little things can make big changes.

We need to take care of ourselves a bit better than we are as a society right now, and Self-Care is a great place to start.

The Consequences Of Ignoring Self Care

At first, the consequences of ignoring self-care show up in our daily lives in ways we all recognize:

Examples Of Ignoring Self-Care:

Exhaustion
A short temper
Being Betty White (haha, love her!)
Forgetfulness
Lack of focus
Lack of FAITH

You can’t take care of others very well if you are yourself depleted.

When you notice that your mood is off or your patience is low, and you ignore it, the first 50-1000 times it’s ok, and your body deals with it by stuffing what you are ignoring. You won’t notice 1 peep of difference.

BUT, when you ignore it for months, years, decades, problems arise.

We are not taught to take care of our physical, mental, emotional & spiritual selves very well, instead stressing education, hard work, perseverance and determination as great traits. And they ARE great traits!!

Being “tough” and “pushing through” have their place in every persons life. These are important traits to know in order to make our dreams come true.

It’s The Next Piece That’s Missing Which Needs Our Attention:

How to recognize, stop and repair when we have gone too farand are causing harm to ourselves from over working, over worrying, over perfecting, etc.

The problems happens when we ignore the warning signs that our body gives us:

Being very tired, yet not resting or sleeping well
Feeling sad but not crying
Getting angry but not expressing
Being hungry, yet not eating, to name just a few…

Deeper consequences come from years of ignoring your body begging for your attention

The good news: You can start today to make things better!

The Different Layers Of The Body Which Need Self-Care

There are several layers to the Self-Care onion that need different types of support and attention, both in our body, in our home, our relationships and in our community. We will discuss just the body “layers” in this article:

* Physical Body
* Mental Body
* Emotional Body
* Spiritual Body
* For Balance in Life

Each layer of the body can be a powerhouse for you in your life, and each layer can get depleted & numb.

The body does its best for us when all parts, all layers, all levels of our “Temple” are working together.

Quite often, one or more of our temple, or “Team Body” are not working together, and in fact, can be working against one another for years at a time.

The best way to bring the communication together within our body–which allows one layer to recognize another layer and their need for teamwork–is SELF CARE!!!

And, they can’t be figured out overnight or in a weekend course.

Intentional Self-Care takes time, making mistakes, forgiveness, self-reflection, & patience.

Is Self-Care Selfish?

No one else can chew for you, swallow for you, sleep for you, meditate for you, etc.

Sleep, good nutrition, relaxation techniques, keeping your body moving, deep spiritual connections, all these things really matter & make a difference in the happiness & fulfillment of your life.

But, I can see where calling “Self-Care” selfish can show up.

If someone is using pampering techniques too much or using “alone time” as an excuse to get out of normal life, there could be a deeper issue.

In the mean time, if they are still complaining, feeling miserable and blaming things and events outside of their own body… this is not Self-Care.

The answers to these deeper questions are not in a massage alone, or getting your nails done, or running 10 miles a day. They take time to muttel through within the physical, mental, emotional and spiritual bodies.

And remember, that many have not been taught how to do this, and may see getting their hair done as the only layer of Self-Care they need to attend to. This is an example of the mental body taking over, as we discuss in a bit.

Self-Care For The Physical Body

Our physical body is the easiest of the self layers to recognize as needing help or support. At least at first it is.
We can see our body, touch our body, feel pain from an injury and know clearly what that pain represents. Easy peasy!

Consider physical pain your “barometer” of whether an area of your body needs your attention.

When your neck hurts, you recognize that pain, and you give it some “Intuitive Self-Care”: rub your neck, stretch your neck, take a shower, get some rest, and your neck pain will usually go away. Again, so easy. So simple.

What happens when you feel that neck pain and you DON’T give it any “Self-Care”?

When you ignore the pain, your physical body can numb the area with the muscles still tight, and eventually, the area becomes cool to the touch and takes several seconds up to minutes for the pulse to show up in those tissues!!

When we have a very painful injury, sometimes, the mind will turn off the pain to that area, and in doing so, saves us from much suffering. This is great in many instances. It is absolutely AMAZING how our brains can do that!

The deeper problems start when turning this area back on doesn’t go as planned.

Some Simple Self-Care For The Physical Body Are:

Take a hot bath or shower
Stretch your body gently, especially right before you get out of bed each morning
Rub your neck, head, feet or hands for general support of any pain in the entire body

Self-Care For The Mental Body

Our mental body is a tricky part to help, and likes to be in charge, but doesn’t like to wrong. Your own mental body will fight you tooth and nail to stay safe! What is Threatening you?? What is your mental body afraid of?? That’s for you to find out with Self-Care for the Mental Body!

Self-Care Ideas For The Mental Body:

Meditate for 1-5 minutes
Journal using Stream-of-Consciousness
Do something rhythmic, like jump rope or walking

Sometimes you can figure the mental weirdness out on your own with journalling, prayer, ways to give your ego a break. But, please, try counseling if you can’t figure it out in a decent amount of time.

Counselors and therapists have 1000’s of hours listening to the ego talk in circles to keep itself safe. They can nail the issue quickly if you let them.

If, like many of “us” (me included), where you know better than anyone what you need, and your stubbornness gets the best of you…. try getting a massage with a seasoned therapist as another plan of Self-Care.

You don’t have to talk at all, and a massage therapist can find and “talk to” with their hands, the areas of tissues in your body holding the emotions you have stuffed.

I have been honored to help some wonderful people gently open awareness to the fact that their mind is so scared, and once that opening is allowed, then REAL HEALING can happen.

You could also try Acupuncture, Ayurveda, Chiropractic care, or Life Coaching to name a few options.

Self-Care For The Emotional Body

Our emotional body is closely tied to the mental body, but I think can bridges the gap between the stubbornness of our ego and the willingness of the body. The emotional body is watching and observing things happen, and steps in with courage or disgust now and then.

Self-Care Ideas For The Emotional Body:

Tea time
Journal about your feelings
Nurture your younger self with a chocolate treat

This is very fascinating to watch in person, because the body is arguing with itself without words. The mind describes out-loud how “it feels” while the physical body feels something much different than the words coming out of the person’s mouth is describing.

For example, a man has been in a terrible roll-over car accident. He is beaten up with deep bruises but not broken. In a massage, weeks later, he describes himself as “Doing GREAT!” and “I feel no pain.” I have my eyebrows up, but I say nothing.

When I rub down his back with little pressure, he jumps with a yelp in pain from the slight touch.

“Wow, I wasn’t aware that I was sore there.”

This is another example of how the body and mind sometimes are not on the same page, not having the same conversation.

But, the emotional body is listening to the 2 conversations: “I don’t feel pain” from the mental body and “clearly in pain with movement, lack of movement and compensated movement to avoid pain” from the the physical body.

There are emotions attached to this scenario. How would you feel, if you heard these words about what you are going through? Maybe upset with the lack of truth? Wanting to make it better & fix it all? Trying to communicate the real pain to the mind?

Emotions Attached To Body-Mind Disagreements:

Fear & Worry (low back & tummy area)
Disbelief & Control “I’ll fix this” (upper back, neck)
Communication (neck & throat)

Can you see how intertwined and entangled our own little temple can become? And this is just one simple scenario!

Self-Care is like a time-out, a recess, a 15 minute break for all the conversations going on in our body.

Self-Care For The Spiritual Body

Our spiritual body is above all of it, but often left out. It’s like reasoning, logic & compassion watching everything and tapping on the glass between the bodies, waiting for a turn to say something. And, often that “turn” takes years to show up.

This is your highest self, the one closest to the higher power.

We tend to ignore this part of ourselves for years, only listening in during severe or dire times. But, this part of ourselves is very much involved, and gently and lovingly making changes.

When intense things happen though, this part of us can be shut out.

This is when the rest of the body gets effected, and healing slows, awareness is almost gone and forgiveness is a challenge. It’s in these times, with our loved ones can gently step in and offer Self-Care gifts to encourage healing.

Or, you can touch them gently, listen to them, encourage them to write, walk, or pray. You yourself need to take of your own needs as well & try to have healthy boundaries & remain as positive as possible.

Your energy can be severely depleted without spiritual and emotional boundaries set in place BEFORE you help them, so keep that in mind.

How Do I Know When My Spiritual Body Needs Healing?

Your “give a darn” is broken
A conversation with your higher power seems meaningless
Hope doesn’t seem possible
Your entire body feels pain, it feels like every single cell hurts

Self-Care for this time in your life is critical, yet tender & gradual. If you can be open to some other ideas, you can try some different Self-Care techniques, like visualization, grounding yourself, or crying.

Self-Care Ideas For The Spiritual Body:

Prayer & meditation
Crying!
Writing down your feelings & burning them (be safe!)
Walking & sitting in nature
Helping one person
Go to a special place (we go to Chimayo, NM)

We go through stages in life, and the downs can have incredible lessons wrapped into the terrible-ness of reality. If you are in this stage right now, I’m here if you need to contact me, and I can give you some ideas if you are stuck. You are not alone.

Beginner’s Guide: Starting A Self-Care Routine

Starting a new routine is always exciting, but be smart about it. Basically, you want to be mindful of your own physical, mental, emotional or spiritual needs, and put some things in place to focus on.

When Starting A Self-Care Routine, Remember These 3 Things:

Keep it Simple!
Add 1-3 New Activities At a Time!
Lead with Gentleness To Yourself

Treating yourself with tenderness is a challenge for many people. Maybe this can be one of your Self-Care activities.

Start small, so there are only a few steps to start your Self-Care routine!

Step 1: Get A Journal, Planner, Notebook Or Writing App

Choose a beautiful journal, notebook or planner in which to write your daily activity and progress! This book can double as the place to write anything you need to write about to help this process.

The act of writing, actual writing with a pen, not typing on a phone or computer, can be very healing. So, keep in all in one place and try to keep it with you.

Step 2: Choose ONE Self-Care Technique

Remember to keep it simple, so choose just one besides the journal. Maybe a breathing exercise each day?

Or, stretching, drinking water? Is meditation something you’d like to try?

For this first week, just choose one so you can really focus on it and try different forms of the same activity.

Step 3: Keep Track Of Your Progress

When people say, “keep track of your progress”, I hear that, but rarely actually do.

This time, keep track of how often you do your Self-Care activity.

Try your best to do it 1-3 times per day and write it down. Also, how did you feel about it? Was there resistance? Did your body get tight, painful, or stiff anywhere?

One of the best discoveries you could make is this:

When I think about ____________, my NECK______ gets tight/painful.

If you can figure out which part of your body tenses up when you are thinking or talking about a certain subject, you have jumped leaps & bounds ahead to help your body heal.

Now, when you recognize that your neck is tight, and you are thinking about the same subject, you can take a deep breath, relax your neck, and think about that tense subject without it causing chronic neck pain!! YAY!

Conclusion: Self-Care: A Beginner’s Guide

Self-care is the act of taking care of ourselves physically, emotionally, mentally and spiritually, and has an important role in our overall health and happiness.

We can use “intuitive Self-Care” when we know without reminding what our body needs in injury, sadness, anger, etc. Or, we can use “intentional Self-Care” which we can implement when we have lost the intuitive instincts to help ourselves.

Most people could take better care of themselves in order to decrease stress & anxiety, to improve flexibility & sleep, and in some cases reduce pain. All of us get busy, and we can forget to take care of our basic needs.

Self-care is important because it helps us nurture ourselves and keep us healthy.

The Benefits Of Self-Care Include:

Less anxiety
More productivity
Clear concentration & focus
Stronger self confidence
Gaining hope and so much more.

The consequences for ignoring our own basic needs include depression, pain, exhaustion, lack of focus, and many more.

In summary, Self-Care is important to utilize in our daily lives and simple to add and implement. We can loose the ability to listen to our internal instincts & intuition which is requesting core needs of daily life, and when this happens, the accumulation of tension and stress can harm our heath.

How do you like to take better care of yourself? I would love to hear your suggestions & ideas! Keep an eye out for our Self-Care Checklist FREE PRINTABLE!!

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