You have likely heard of the term “self care if not selfish” and I believe most would agree that in order to show up in all areas of your life as the best version of you, that you have to cultivate time to take care of yourself. But how often are you doing this? How much of your day are you actually spending doing something that’s loving towards yourself?
There are only 24 hours in a day. The average person is likely sleeping anywhere between 5-9 hours during that time, maybe a little less or more. On top of that, they probably have an 8 hour work day and maybe a 30 to 60 minute commute to and from work. So that’s an additional 10 hours. Maybe they are also a student and/or a parent and spend the majority of the rest of that time towards their obligations, and are left with only a couple hours, maybe even a couple minutes, of their day to just decompress.
Think about your own schedule and the moments that you have to yourself. What are you doing? And how can you utilize more of this time to take care of yourself? No matter what you have going on, I promise you have the ability to make time for more self-care.
Some of you might think what I’m about to say next is unrealistic, but it’s essential to feeling the very best about yourself. You need to dedicate at least one hour (two if you can) of your day doing something loving for your mind, body, spirit, soul, whatever it is! It can be the first hour that you start your day, during the afternoon, or the end of your day. You can even space it out, it does not matter. What matters is that you spend time every single day showing up for YOU, one way or another.
What might that look like? Well it’s different for everyone. You might go for a 30 minute walk in the morning and then spend your lunch journaling, meditating, and reading. Or maybe you start your day with affirmations and/or your skin care routine, you spend your lunch stretching and/or doing some breath work, and the evening reading a book. You can do all your self care at home and don’t even have to go anywhere. The point is, that you are spending a portion of your day-every day-doing something that’s going to make you feel good about yourself.
And to those who feel like they don't have time…are you saying that your job, family, school is ultimately more important than your well-being? Because none of those things matter if you aren’t taking care of yourself.
And at the end of the day we make time for what’s important to us. You don’t have to start out right away spending hours of your day doing self-care, but you should at least be doing one thing every single day out of respect for your well-being. And once you’ve got a self-care routine, try to extend the time you spend on it or find additional methods of self-care that you can add throughout your day.
For my numbers folks, if you’re spending 1 hour of your day purely on self-care, that’s really only 4% of your day, or 4% of your week. So if you need to go to bed a little earlier, or spend less time on social media, then do that. At the end of the day the most important thing is that you are cultivating intentional time out of your day to take care of yourself because you literally only get to live in this moment once as you are experiencing it.
So how will you experience it?
Photo by Brandy Kennedy on Unsplash