I make an ongoing effort to fix this mess and define self-care the proper way.
EXCERPT from Oddball: Building Resilience With Self-Care
Self-Care Defined
Self-Care is the systematic and conscious care of yourself so that you build resilience, become balanced and gain health. From resilience, balance, and health the world is our oyster. Self-care has a lot of loose definitions out there. Let’s tighten that up and talk about self-care for chronic stress and pain. Self-care is about something we forgot to do: that is to listen to our body, mind and spiritual needs. It consists of actionable, conventional and unconventional tools and techniques, including using beauty to relieve chronic pain and stress (Beauty Heals Pain).
This can be any of the following: general mindfulness of your breathing, water, shelter and rest, addressing family, financial, professional, social and spiritual issues that are causing chronic distress. This includes consciously establishing new and healthy habits while eliminating unhealthy ones with a specific plan.
We humans can be particular about how we receive and interpret information. For the sake of simplicity and to make these ideas easily applicable, we need to organize and categorize them. I try to do that by talking about care of the self in terms of the physical, emotional, and spiritual. But they are all connected and interrelated. If you don’t believe in the spirit then do your best to focus on your physical and emotional well-being. Your spirit will thank you.
The care of one’s self is all important to me. I often use the term “power self-care” because of the effectiveness of balancing one’s life and reducing pain self-care has. So here power self-care and self-care are used interchangeably. I realize that at the moment the latter is a trendy term but for me it is a fundamentally part of my life that gives me a semblance of relief from extreme and chronic physical, emotional, and spiritual pain.
Self-care is a huge topic. So big volumes can be written about it. It ranges from basic hygiene to creating boundaries against hurtful people, things, and places. Traumatic events and chronic stress I have experienced that led me to make this transformational shift.
Are you ready, willing and able?