Self-care is the process of taking care of yourself with activities that promote health whether that be physical or mental. Individuals engage in some form of self-care practices daily with food choices, exercise, sleep, or even a bath or shower.
Self-care is also a way of focusing on you improving yourself. It is about giving yourself what you need to be healthy, strong, positive.
Self-care can play a big beneficial role in your struggle with mental health. Most psychotherapists will often teach you ways to bring your mental health down with a self-care treatment. If you cannot go to therapy to get help with your mental health, self-care practices can be a cost-effective alternative, on today’s blog we will give you some tips.
1. Walk more in nature
The first self-care tip is to walk more in nature, on a recent study walking in nature can reduce stress by up to 25%. Not only does it strengthen your physical health, but it also increases your physical well-being too.
You can achieve this by just walking in nature for up to 30 minutes, making this a daily occurrence or even more than 3 times a week would be a big beneficiary to your physical and mental wellbeing.
2. Meditation
The next tip is to clear your mind with meditation – Just 30 minutes of meditation a day can dramatically bring down your stress levels.
Meditation can better help better focus through doing this daily, and it may help enhance memory and mental clarity. These benefits can help fight age-related memory loss and dementia.
Meditation can help you better understand yourself, find your best self, and increase positive feelings and actions toward others.
Giving yourself 30 minutes a day to re connect with yourself and forget everything about your life, can be beneficial for your mental wellbeing.
The reason meditation is so good is because it is accessible for everybody, being able to do this anywhere and anytime is so key to being able to destress yourself at any point of the day.
3. Have a bath or shower
The third and final tip is to have a bath or shower. Baths can make your heart healthy, taking a regular warm bath can help reduce blood pressure, according to some research. This is a great self-care practise because it can help reduce blood pressure, it can also help in preventing more serious heart conditions, like a heart attack or stroke.
Hot baths are a great stress reliever, when you expose your body to warm water, your cells will produce heat Stress proteins which protect you from stress. Regular baths ensure their constant production, which enables them to perform better, especially after a stressful day.
Although stress can lead to physical and mental health conditions, and can aggravate existing conditions, the good news is that it can be tackled as we have said above by investing in wellbeing. A stress risk assessment is a popular and sound place to start.
We say prevention is better than cure! Commit to year-round activities, conduct health checks, offer 1-2-1 coaching, educate, and empower employees with the wellbeing tools they need; that said – start with your stress risk assessment (this is included in our Tonic and Me well@work App)
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