A self-care routine is vital for our individual well-being. Ensuring we have a self-care routine to care for ourselves helps to provide healthy outlets to manage our mental health, physical, and emotional well-being. Many individuals desire to have a self-care routine that aligns with their individual needs, but creating a routine and being consistent with it can be a challenge. Where can you begin? Start dreaming, start creating, and start designing.

Dream, create, and design

Spend time alone and reflect—what would you like your self-care routine to look like? Would you like to be an early riser? Would you like fitness or a certain activity to be a part of this routine? Would you like to regularly visit a third space where you feel connected and belong? Would you like to create healthy meals and weekly meal prep be a part of this lifestyle? Or maybe you are unsure where to begin? Either place is a safe place to start—having a lot of ideas or being unsure where to begin.

Consider setting aside 20 mins a day to create, dream, and design your self-care routine; however, if you prefer longer blocks, set aside one to two hours. And then dive in and create—there are many different tools you can use—to create a mind map of words, pictures, or phrases, or create a collage of the self-care routine that aligns to your individual needs and desires.

One small step

It’s always encouraging when individuals want to improve their self-care and at the same time, creating change in your life can also be a balancing act with balancing other responsibilities. To balance all these responsibilities, try to start with just one small step. For example, instead of aiming to wake up every morning to go to the gym. It could be helpful to start the first few weeks with trying to go to the gym just two times a week in the morning.

Why is this helpful? Life is complex and we never know what may come up and possibly disrupt this new routine and it’s easier to try to be consistent once or twice a week rather than five to seven times a week. Secondly, if you maintain the routine for a few weeks, you are far more likely to stay motivated by your positive change.

Create boundaries

Set aside time and reflect—what is your goal with creating a self-care routine? What would you hope to be different with your life? Less stress? A sense of peace and calmness? A sense of accomplishment with achieving a personal goal? Hold onto those thoughts, as these are great foundations of why you want healthy boundaries to protect them.

  • Social boundaries: Give yourself permission to make changes to your social calendar—this could look like declining future social events. Or getting together with friends on a Thursday evening instead of a Friday evening to ensure you can wake up early Saturday morning to bike to the Farmer’s Market to purchase healthy items to use for your meal prep.

  • Personal time: Set aside time for yourself without feeling guilty that you aren’t using this time to support or spend time with others. Maybe you choose early mornings as your self-care time as you know you will not be disrupted during this time.

  • Communications and boundaries: Often when you make a personal change in your life others are going to notice and may have a comment, which could be both negative and positive. Be prepared and if a friend or family member starts to make negative comments about the changes you are making, reply with, “I’m not comfortable talking to you about this, but I’m happy to talk about ….” and can quickly shut a disruptor down.

Phone time & self-care

Studies have shown that the average person spends 4 – 5 hours on their phone a day! I’m not saying this makes individuals feel guilty about their phone use, as there are many different reasons why an individual will spend hours on their phone. I’m pointing this out to share an insight that you likely have more time in the day than you may think you do. You can free up more time for your self-care routine by reducing your phone use.

Let’s pause for a moment and recognize I am only suggesting reducing, not removing, your phone use. Try starting by reducing your phone use by 30 minutes in a day. This could be as simple as not using your phone for the first hour when you wake up in the morning and then using this time instead by doing an activity you enjoy, or you could use this time for morning stretches. Stretching helps to reduce tension in the body and helps to decrease stress—what a great way to start your day.