‘New years resolutions’ are often known as promises that we make to ourselves when a new year begins, most often giving us the means to start fresh and make good choices with a clean palette.
That said, sometimes it can be that we overthink this, or over discipline ourselves, or underappreciate the chance it will take for us to benefit. For that reason, new years resolutions are perhaps more well known for being broken than anything else.
It’s why in the first month of the year, gyms are often filled to the brim, but in February, those numbers start dwindling once again. But what if instead of telling yourself that you need to achieve, achieve, achieve in the new year, you focused on caring for yourself? What if we flipped the script and decided that being an ally and friend to ourselves is the plan for the new year?
Might it be that we would be much less likely to fail, or feel motivated to step back from our pre-arranged goals? After all, once you build self-care momentum, it’s hard not to keep it going. In this post, then, we’ll discuss how self-care habits could come to define your 2022 for the better, rather than feeling that tired sense of obligation to goals you may or may not want to achieve in the first place.
With that in mind, let’s get started:
Skincare & Products
Taking care of your skin is an essential part of self-care because while this can help you look better, it can actually improve your health. Your skin is the largest organ of your body, and so it pays to make sure rashes are dealt with well, that you clean your face and body each day to do away with a buildup of grime, and that you make sure it’s protected should it be sensitive or suffer from other conditions like growing acne.
Having a list of products you use for your self-care and skincare each morning and night is a good idea. This might involve activated charcoal face washes, moisturizers, lotions, and more. It could also involve body butter, or lotions that help cuts and bruises.
Supplementation
Eating a healthy, well-balanced diet is an essential element of feeling better and gaining more energy, but it’s also true that even a thoroughly balanced diet is not necessarily going to yield you all of the vitamins and minerals you need for health optimization.
This is why it’s healthy to enjoy a multivitamin and a fish oil tablet at the very least (depending on your allergies), the latter promoting the healthy development of skin and joints. Supplementation can also involve aid for day to day functions, such as fibre used for helping you stay regular, while vitamin D, an essential hormone to aid with the immune system, is best used in times like these. You may even use zinc to help you stay more alert, heal wounds more quickly, and aid with good sleep.
Your supplementation approach must always be approved by your doctor, and the routine which is correct for one person may not be correct for you - and it’s worth keeping that in mind. Regardless, applying such an effort can, for obvious and understandable reasons, help you get the best from a careful and managed nutritional intake.
Perfect Your Sleep Schedule
Sleeping schedules can be tough to keep up with, particularly if you work differing hour patterns, have children, or go through difficulties such as insomnia or other sleep issues. Yet to the degree that you can manage it, perfecting your sleep schedule is perhaps one of the most important pieces of advice you could follow on this list.
This is because sleep is related to almost every vital recuperative function we have. It’s essential to make sure you get around 7 to 9 hours of sleep each night depending on your needs. This is best aided by keeping a solid bed time and wake up time, as well as ensuring solid sleep hygiene.
Sleep hygiene means making sure your sleeping environment is well-considered and your protocols for falling asleep are reliable. Sleeping in a well-ventilated room, for instance, can help, as can making sure you use earplugs in noisy environments, and keeping the room dark can help too. It might take a little time to achieve, but over time, you will no doubt notice the thorough benefits of perfecting your sleep schedule.
Try Meditation Regularly
Meditation is more of an optional extra to a healthy living lifestyle, but many people swear by its benefits.
Put simply, sitting down and concentrating on the inflow and outflow of your natural breath through your nostrils for ten minutes at a time can help you learn to focus and manage your concentration outside of the usual distractions we find all around us. Meditation can also provide us with the means to release our stress, even though it’s an active discipline.
Over time, as you get better at it, you’ll find that your cortisol levels decrease and you’re more capable of focusing on whatever the task at hand is. That’s almost always a worthwhile skill to train, and you can do all of this with the added benefit of removing your stress.
Staying Grateful
Self-care isn’t always about getting out there and perfecting your bodily health or discipining yourself to work as hard and as intensely as possible. What matters is readjusting your priorities from time to time.
For instance, taking a step back and staying grateful for what you have could be a practice you incorporate into your life more. Even during the tough times, this will help you get back to a sense of normal and focus on your everyday functioning more easily, giving you perspective, and shielding you from worrying too much.
Staying grateful can also help you enjoy what you have when you have it, which is a skill in itself.
With this advice, we hope you can try these new self-care habits and flourish as a result. It’s the least you deserve.
