The importance of having a self care plan for adults

Have you ever found yourself thinking heavy thoughts or feeling like ‘I am barely keeping my head above water’ and daydreaming about escaping it all to live on a mountain top or a remote island in the sun? You’re probably the perfect candidate for a self-care plan.

Resilience is the ability to adapt well in the face of adversity, like when you may be experiencing personal or family issues, serious health concerns, work stresses, money woes, or other challenges life throws at us. Resilience is not about not feeling negative emotions; it’s the ability to bounce back from challenges in spite of them. One of the most effective ways of building resilience is to focus on self-care. It is essential to take care of yourself. Just as you would look after a physical injury by seeking support and taking positive steps to ensure your recovery, the same is true for an emotional, psychological challenge or obstacle. Remember that the brain is just as ingenious as the human body when it comes to working out ways to mend itself.

What are the 4 types of self-care?

• Physical self-care

Focus on activities that help you to stay physically fit and healthy, and with enough energy to get through your work and personal commitments. Make exercise a priority. You know what they say; “healthy body, healthy mind”. This is especially important during challenging times. Try getting a minimum of 30 minutes of exercise that makes you breathe harder on all or most days of the week, whether it's walking, swimming, biking, working out at the gym or along with an exercise video, or even doing chores at home.

Get enough sleep	Get regular physical activity	Eat regular, well-balanced meals
Reduce alcohol and caffeine consumption	Release tension in healthy ways	Balance work, play, and rest

 

• Emotional self-care

Emotional self-care activities are anything that help you to feel clear-headed and able to intellectually engage with the professional challenges that are found in your work and personal life. Allow yourself to safely experience your full range of emotions without succumbing to them. Focus on telling yourself that the situation is temporary, no matter how difficult. Life has a tendency to ebb and flow in ways that are impossible to predict, and today’s negative thoughts could be tomorrow’s sunshine. Viewing the world like this can help you gain perspective and maintain momentum to work through the current circumstances.

Know your vulnerabilities	Get help early on if you are feeling overwhelmed	Use relaxation skills
Participate in activities that give you joy	Give yourself time to heal and renew	Watch a funny movie

• Spiritual self-care

This involves having a sense of perspective beyond the day-to-day of life. Remember that stressful events provide the most effective opportunities to learn and grow. Try to identify these stressful or difficult events and use them to help you in the future. For example, if you are dealing with significant financial concerns, try to understand the things that contributed to your situation and what you could do in the future to avoid repeating the same mistakes rather than beating yourself up about the current situation.

Find creative ways to express yourself	Connect with nature	Meditate
Read inspirational works	Practice gratitude	Use religious and/or spiritual resources and communities

• Social self-care

Social self-care is about maintaining healthy, supportive relationships, and ensuring you have diversity in your relationships so that you are not only connected to work people. Spending time with like-minded people outside of work can be a great way to establish new connections to people and the world at large. Even if circumstances seem beyond your control, connecting with others who feel similarly can help form an important bond. Exchanging life stories can lead to new ideas on ways to manage, take action, or cope with the curveballs of life. Doing so will make you realise you are not as alone as you may feel in the moment of stress.

Be aware of withdrawal and isolation	See how work can offer support	Make an effort to have fun
Use friends and family and community for support	Seek out others for social activities	Help someone at work

Developing a self-care plan

Self-care relates to what you do at work and outside of work to look after your holistic wellbeing in order to meet your personal and professional commitments along with maintaining a positive and strong mindset for the future. Self-care is a deeply personal matter and can take time and trying a number of different strategies to find what works for you. Everyone’s approach will be different, don’t dwell on negatives if it is taking you a while to find your feet. Ultimately, self-care is identifying activities that support your wellbeing.

What is a self-care workshop?

Interactive workshops run by Pathways to Resilience explore how stress impacts brain function. Throughout the program you will be shown how reflective tools can be used to bring into awareness the messages of the body and the impact of our thoughts and emotions on our wellbeing.

Once we have debunked the notion that ‘self-care is selfish’ we can open up to being able to use powerful tools to improve wellbeing, such as the practice of self-compassion and gratitude. Participants step through a number of processes, creative and cognitive, to experience the ability to change the way we think, feel and respond, increasing our capacity to regulate during stressful and overwhelming experiences. With the offer of practical short and long-term strategies in self-care, participants are able to work with a new grounded and connected way of being for both themselves and their classrooms.

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