Daily self-care, you can start small

In this lecture, we're going to look back at ourselves and talk about the idea of long-term self-care and how it can help us take our lives back into our own hands.

Self-care is a long-term thing, which is its simplicity and its difficulty. The simplicity lies in the fact that it is not complicated and can be adapted randomly. There are no high standards and strict requirements, and no formulas and theorems to be effective. If you don't fix it today, you can do it tomorrow. The difficulty is that it requires persistence, and for most people, the words "persistence" and "persistence" probably immediately lead to headaches.

If we are asked to do a thing repeatedly, even if we think it is good and effective at the beginning, we will soon feel bored and rise burnout. Therefore, self-care also requires creativity and variety, and the intersection of various experiments makes it interesting, and having fun is the surest way to sustain an activity.

As we said before, the most basic form of self-care simply requires you to stop for a moment, spend time with yourself, and allow your mind and body to rest, rather than being busy in your dreams. You can be creative in how you stop yourself.

For example, how about taking a shower with the lights off? You will definitely slow down. If you're really afraid of falling, it's a good idea to take a shower with scented candles. Instead of going to the store for a massage, how about a five-minute shoulder and neck massage or foot massage? Because I'm a consultant and have a listening job, I have colleagues who simply run their palms over their ears a few times a day, and that's enough to stop them. If you're a really irritable person, sit on the side of a street in a downtown area for a while and watch the crowds of pedestrians. You might actually find yourself able to do some basic breathing exercises.

Sleep is also a very important part of self-care, and I highly recommend that you take 10 minutes before bed to relax, be aware of your body, do breathing exercises, listen to music, or even let your mind wander. If you fall asleep with your phone on, it's hard to avoid bringing stress to your dreams, and calming your mind before bed is one of the keys to quality sleep. If you can, you can go for a walk, take a bath, or even change the place you sleep. Sometimes the sofa is better than the bed, and sometimes the floor can be more reassuring. Making small changes every now and then is good for your subconscious mind. It makes you feel like you're never locked in a place that you can't change or escape from.

Doing something new outside of your normal routine can be a form of self-care, and if you don't know what you can do with yourself, isn't it great to do something new? At its simplest, you can look outside your normal line of sight. Look up at a 45-degree Angle, for example. What do you see? We're all creatures of direct sight, and if we're in a big city, it's easy to get bombarded with ads in direct view. Look up. What's above the traffic light? It might be enough to give you a different experience, to get you out of your rut, and you might find that there's a lot more to your daily routine that you're not familiar with.

There are many similar activities, and most of them cost nothing. For example, you can go out and take a picture of a microscopic scene, a flower, a leaf; Try to touch different bark and see how they make you feel. Many times things don't look exactly the same as they actually feel. You can also find a fragrance shop in the nearby mall and smell all the perfumes for free. You can even find a fruit stand and smell them for a feast of smell. Go to a nearby place where there is water, play a game of water drift; Even the most expensive, a weekend stay at a B&B in the suburbs, not every trip to the fanfare, give yourself a chance to spend time in a different way, this is a mini trip.

We talked about last time, the human self care is also very important, in addition to "from harm sex" and "seeking support sex" this big project, there are also many small way of human care can add fresh for you, and you can start tomorrow - when we are holding the friendly mood, at peace with others, and mood will naturally become soft, You don't have to push yourself.

For example, it's a good idea to share snacks with co-workers. You can also try smiling at strangers. In big cities, some people go a whole day without a single person smiling at them or even noticing them, so why not try it? Try not to worry about the fact that every kindness you show must be reciprocated. You obviously have to budget carefully for food, clothing and shelter, but a smile is not expensive; You can also reach out to a friend you haven't heard from in a long time, just to ask how things are going, or to give a specific compliment or thank someone close to you from the bottom of your heart. If all else fails, at least you can write a good review of your favorite restaurant. When we give someone a genuine compliment, it's a pleasure. If it's too hard to give them a direct compliment, write a 100-word review.

You can also try to donate some money, such as a cup of milk tea, so that you can help others, but also can lose weight. There are many platforms that have open, reliable programs asking for donations, and some large foundations have monthly giving programs to participate in. When you see that your cup of milk tea can bring clean drinking water, important medicine and learning opportunities to others, it will be much easier to be grateful for your life and to feel valued.

And I have a private self-care program to share with you. You can try to draw a really ugly picture, I didn't learn to draw, so I'm basically just painting blind, and if I try to draw anything, it's almost always going to be really ugly. But the point is, it has to be an ugly picture, at least in the general sense, a picture that people would find ugly. After painting, you can try to say to the picture, I see you, I accept you, I like you too. As for the effect of this activity, you are left to try to see.

If there are any of these activities that you find feasible and feel good about doing, try to make them part of your list of ways to self-care. Do them once in a while, and they may become a natural part of your life before you know it.

Long-term self-care can have at least a few major positive effects. First of all, your mood will be more stable, and your mood will be a little lighter, which is a given. When you take the time to develop your own sense of security and stability, and reduce the thought patterns and emotional habits that lead to negative experiences, your experience of life will naturally change. But long-term self-care can do more than that. You'll also find yourself becoming more proactive and in control of your life. This is not just because you have more mental energy through rest, but because self-care itself cultivates this quality.

I don't know if you've noticed, but self-care, for the most part, emphasizes that you take the initiative to do it, and requires you to constantly try and adjust according to your own situation. Self-care also requires you to make choices for yourself. What works for one person may be completely useless for another. Only you know what really works for you.

Self-care develops the ability to take care of your own life and take active responsibility for your own experiences, and helps you develop this skill through small exercises that teach you how to be cared for as a person, as a unique heart, and how to be harnessed.

And that ability means freedom.

It means that our inner selves are no longer helpless babies to be fed, but grow into independent adults, able to actively and skillfully meet their inner needs, and therefore no longer have to take anything from the outside world. It is by learning to be content, to take care of ourselves within ourselves, to be the initiative, the master of our own lives, that we gain the freedom to be independent of the outside world and exclusive to ourselves.

I often see people on the Internet asking, how can I make myself less influenced by my environment and others? Here's the answer: It depends on how much you care about yourself.

If all that your heart needs to rely on the outside, then you will be inevitably influenced by the outside world, and if your self-worth has nothing to do with the reaction of others, because you will be able to self-esteem and self-acceptance, self, you can be calm observation, on-demand reaction, in life and human nature also become more relaxed, comfortable.

Of course, I'm not suggesting here that you need to be 100% satisfied by self-help. It's neither necessary nor possible. Living in a modern society, we are all bound to depend to some extent on the labor, effort and goodwill of others. And I do see people who put so much emphasis on doing everything themselves and being self-sufficient that it tends to make them an island psychologically, which is also not a truly healthy state of being a society.

What self-care fosters and seeks is to take care of and satisfy one's own needs as effectively as possible within one's own capacity, to take responsibility for one's own life experience, and in the process, to develop a sense of inner peace, mastery of physical and mental experience, and empathy for oneself and others.

On that basis, no matter what it may be, you will always gain more mental space than before, even interpersonal and personal freedom, to enjoy life, make changes, and discover and pursue the things and experiences that you personally value.

I don't know what your ultimate goal will be, but I do know that if you haven't found it yet, self-care will give you more chances to find it. If you've already set a goal, self-care will give you more power to pursue it. And if one day you get there, self-care will give you a little more ability to really enjoy it.