Self-Care Series Part 4 : Building a Self-Care Toolkit
Everyone should have their own self-care toolkit! It can be physical, mental, digital, or a combination of those things. Here are some ideas that you can use for inspiration in creating your own!
Tangible items in you Self-Care Toolkit:
A journal with a habit tracker. Try to take a few minutes out of each day to track your habits and moods. This allows you to acknowledge patterns and correlations between how you’re feeling and how well you’re caring for yourself. It also helps remind you to complete the self-care tasks that we take for granted, especially in difficult times. For example, flossing your teeth, eating three substantial meals a day, spending time outdoors, and taking off your makeup at night are essential parts of self-care that we often don’t see as such because they are such “normal every-day” tasks.
Glitter, stickers, or a craft. How can you be down when you have 100 sparkly dog stickers to stick on whatever you want?!
Some lovely-smelling essential oil blends that relax and invigorate you– lavender and rosemary are our favourites. Pop them in a diffuser or mix with a carrier oil, melt into bliss, repeat.
Beauty kit: Stay well-stocked in nail grooming supplies, face masks, and Epsom salt soaks! Create a beauty routine that never fails to perk you up on the gloomiest of days.
You favourite book: Go dog-eared and highlight your favourite passages! Reading some of your favourite quotations from the your top book really help ground and center you when you’re feeling low.
The Tool-Kit that is your mind!
A list of folks you know you can rely on when you need them. Sometimes we may feel like we are alone… but we never are!
Practicing self-compassion. If you’re a bit of a perfectionist, and you can probably be hard on yourself when you don’t do your best or get something right on the first try. Being mindful of how you’re treating yourself is incredibly important. Being kind to yourself is often taken for granted, and there are many forces at work in the world that make it all too easy to get down on ourselves. When you have compassion for yourself, you can gain confidence and self-esteem, as well as improve your capacity for compassion for others.
Working with affirmations. Don’t forget to tell yourself every day that you’re smart, kind, loving, hard-working, talented, worthy, and wonderful.
Grounding yourself in the five senses is an excellent tool for dealing with stress and anxiety. Take a moment to be present and tune into your surroundings. What do you hear? What do you see? What do you smell?
Digital Self-Care
Try learning a new language! Apps like Duolingo to practice French and German are a great distraction from every day stresses and you get the feeling of accomplishment when you finish a lessons! It never gets old.
Have a little fun with the Costar astrology app for comprehensive astrology chart readings and knowledge. You don’t have to believe the stars have anything to do with you, but reading detailed horoscopes on the daily is grounding and centering. You can even add your friends to your chart and see your compatibility!
Podcasts! Podcasts! Podcasts!! Try losing yourself in a podcast. They’re usually free, and there’s one out there for just about every niche interest. Subscribe to your favourites and ask around to see if your friends are listening to anything. It’ll give you something new to talk about!.
A folder of cute animal photos on your phone is sometimes exactly what you need.
Engaging with social media has many positive and negative impacts on our lives. Social media allows folks to curate how others see them. This can cause us to feel down on ourselves or jealous of others when we see only the best highlights of others lives. Remind yourself that you only see the best slices of others’ lives on Facebook and Instagram- and that it’s okay to tune out or disengage with social media.
“One of the best guides to how to be self-loving is to give ourselves the love we are often dreaming about receiving from others. There was a time when I felt lousy about my over-fourty body, saw myself as too fat, too this, or too that. Yet I fantasized about finding a lover who would give me the gift of being loved as I am. It is silly, isn’t it? that I would dream of someone else offering to me the acceptance and affirmation I was withholding from myself? This was a moment when the maxim “You can never love anybody if you are unable to love yourself” made clear sense. And I add, “Do not expect to receive the love from someone else you do not give yourself.”