5 Ways To Prioritize Self-Care in a World That Doesn't Seem to Care

This article was first published on Soulaia.com

Are you a get up at 6 a.m. and go until 9 p.m. kind of person? Do you feel like you are “racing against the clock” nearly every day? Is your motto “rest is for the weary”? And when you do get “rest”, is it during those ten minutes you have in your car in between appointments, or those five to six hours of sleep you get each night?

If you answered ‘yes’ to any of these questions, then this one’s for you.

I would not disagree that there is nothing more important than a good night of sleep. Without it, doing anything faster and better is nearly impossible. But if you’re waiting for sleep to give you the proper rest, recovery, and care your nervous system needs to begin tomorrow with a fresh mind, healthy body, and sharp brain, you’ll be waiting forever.

The key to doing more and doing it better isn’t found in your energy drink (which leads you to feel sluggish and unproductive as soon as the initial caffeine and sugar “high” wears off), your Bulletproof coffee (which can give you better mental clarity and focus for some time but is devoid of nutrients), or your time spent vegging in front of the television on the couch (during which your brain’s neurons are still firing because information is being taken in – hence you’re not getting real rest – but these neurons are also not wiring and culminating in more efficient neural pathways because information isn’t really being processed). It isn’t even found in a good night of sleep (which provides the bare minimum of what we need to function normally and is a great start but in and of itself not enough to keep you functioning highly all day).

It’s time to lay the traditional notion of rest to rest.

 

When it comes to functioning at our best, sleep just doesn’t cut it.

Here are five other ways to rest, recharge, and take care of yourself built on the understanding that the key to doing more and doing it better is found in your ability to consciously, continuously, and purposefully give yourself a break– emotionally, mentally, physically, and cognitively.

1. Time away.

Go for a day. Go for a week. Go for a month. Whatever you do, just go to a different place. Because when it comes to an all-encompassing body, mind, and brain recharge, there is nothing quite as powerful as a change in our physical environment. It’s why the travel and tourism industry will never die. It’s also why people will never stop coming back from Hawaii saying “I want to move to Hawaii”. Sure, the place is beautiful and there are plenty of reasons to move there, but first and foremost, for most people it’s simply a welcome change from the environment they’re used to.

You needn’t wait for that two-week vacation to reap the rejuvenating benefits of time spent away. Take a day off and visit a neighboring city, sit and read in a coffee shop or library you’ve never been to before, and enjoy lunch in a new local joint. Change your environment, change your routine, and before you know it, the juices of rejuvenation will be coursing right through you.

2. Connection to art and nature.

Not to knock television, but when it comes to true relaxation, true joy, true pleasure, and true anything else, it comes from what’s true within our internal (i.e., creative) and external (i.e., natural) world, and not from the world portrayed on popular TV shows and social media. So the next time you want to truly recharge, consider connecting with your own nature by doing something that encourages your creative potential like journaling, scribbling, decorating, or taking an art class. You could connect with the creative potential of others by visiting an art gallery, eating a meal full of color and texture, or taking an extra moment to ponder the sculpture in front of the state capitol building.

Don’t forget to look up, down, and around. One of the best ways to rejuvenate at the cellular level is to connect with mother nature. Whether it be going for a bike ride up the mountain, taking a walk barefoot through the sand, lying down in the grass, gazing up at the stars, or just opening your windows to allow sunlight and fresh air to flow through your home or car, let yourself be soothed by nature’s elements. Not only can your body get a powerful boost from its anti-inflammatory properties but your mind can reap big benefits from its anti-depressive and stress-reducing qualities.

 

 

3. Solitude.

Introvert, extrovert, ambivert… no matter what you consider yourself to be, taking time to yourself is a well-known effective way to recharge your system. Taking time to be alone, sit in a quiet space, gather your thoughts, and process your emotions can be incredibly restorative. Especially if you are always “on” and playing a leadership or mentorship role for others, taking some time in solitude to switch “off” for a few moments can be invaluable.

Self-reflection, self-understanding, and self-soothing all happen when we are in solitude because by being alone, we give ourselves a chance to step back from the noise that is our daily life and thereby take a much-needed mental and emotional vacation, and give our brain a cognitive rest. The important thing to note is that you are spending time in solitude by choice, not because there is no one around and you have to. The first (being alone willingly) has the capacity to reduce all sorts of markers of chronic stress while the latter (loneliness) can drastically increase them.

4. Permission to not be helpful.

Whether it be around the house with family, at work with colleagues, or with friends over the weekend, stay the kind person that you are, and see if you can simultaneously be okay with not being the one to always lead the charge to help. This is a good example of why sleep just doesn’t cut it when it comes to providing the kind of rejuvenation that allows you to function optimally. If you devote yourself to meeting the needs of your family between 6 a.m. and 9 a.m., your co-workers and boss between 9 a.m. and 5 p.m., and your family again between 5 p.m. and 9 p.m., get a night of rest, and then rinse and repeat, you will have thoroughly failed at the ‘getting real rest’ game. Not only will you not have restored your mental, emotional, and physical capacity on a daily basis, but you will have negatively altered your body’s ability to do so in the long term.

The moral of the story? Take a break from your responsibilities. Ask a neighbor to drop your kid off at school while you sip your morning coffee for an extra 30 minutes, hire a housekeeper once every few months to relieve yourself of having to clean the whole house, and/or learn to say “no” to that favor your friend is asking you for just this once. When you give yourself permission to not be helpful in each moment of every day, you give your body-mind system permission to turn its attention from “them” out there to “me” in here. When each and every one of your cells is focused on you and only you, oh what a difference that will make! True relaxation, here you come!

5. Something “unproductive”.

We live in a world where production of things that can… wait for it... make us more productive (goods, gadgets, dollars, brain hacks, children, etc.) is the M.O. (modus operandi). Inherently, there is nothing wrong with that, but if all we are doing is producing, then it’s safe to assume that we are not restoring and rejuvenating. So the last (and some say, best) tip is to do anything at all that isn’t waiting to get checked off your never-ending to-do list. While running around accomplishing things on our list of to-dos makes us feel important and worthwhile in the moment, it eventually leaves us feeling devoid of meaning and worth if we (a) never stop to investigate to what extent this list is made up of activities that give us meaning and if we (b) never stop to realize that we are incredibly and inherently worthy (of love, success, happiness, etc.) whether or not we check most or all of the items off the list.

So set your list of to-dos aside, tell your inner worrier (who may want to freak out at the thought of abandoning a to-do list for any amount of time) that the world will not end if you do not accomplish all that’s on your list today, and go do something– anything– that you’d consider “unproductive”. You may be surprised to see how rejuvenating and restorative this period of “unproductivity” can be for your creative capacity, mental power, neural networks, and physical strength. From this perspective, the most productive thing you can do is to be unproductive!

There is an inextricable relationship between your mind, brain, body, and world. If you’re not satisfied with how your brain, mind, and/or body are recovering from day to day, don’t just leave it up to chance. If you can reconstruct rest and consciously, continuously, and purposefully engage at least one or two of these alternative methods, you may find that it opens up a whole new world of doing more and doing it as well as and even better than you did before.