Improve Your Self-Care Routine In 3 Easy Steps

You read this headline and you are wondering, “What routine? I have zero time for a self-care routine! Or maybe, you just don’t know what a self-care routine would look like for you.

You think that you do not have the time for self-care. You know you must do something to feel better, but you just don’t know what to do or where to begin.

I get it. I thought I had it all figured out with self-care. I mean how could I not? I was a marriage and family therapist. It was only expected!

To my surprise, I came home one Saturday evening with two little ones that changed the course of my entire life! I thought I was prepared to have a peaceful road to motherhood but instead it was chaotic, stressful, and extremely difficult.

There was absolutely no time to have a nice long shower, get my hair and make-up done in the morning, wear some nice clothes and shoes, and head out the door and go shopping or to do something fun!

Instead the mornings were not only painful, as I struggled to get out of bed just recently having had major surgery, but I was zombie-like having not slept, just barely managing to put my hair in a bun and wearing my oh-so-unsexy pajamas from the night before.

My first trip outside of the house was to the local Walgreens store and it was the best self-care feeling in the world! Finally, a moment where I was by myself and I could enjoy browsing and looking at drug-store make-up!

I mean, don’t get me wrong, I was so in love with my twins, but the guilt! Oh my, the guilt!!! I could not bare leaving them alone for just one second. My husband would encourage me to get out, but I just couldn’t.

Have you been there? Or are you there now? Do you feel the guilt?

I hear this way too often. This feeling that if I do something for myself, I must sacrifice something else in return.

This guilt effect doesn’t only happen to new moms. It happens to experienced parents. It happens to women with other life situations that involve grief and loss, a change in career, or becoming caregivers to other members of their family.

I’m here to tell you that it doesn’t have to be so difficult. It is possible to implement a self-care routine without much effort and better yet without the guilt. All you have to do is to want to implement self-care.

Let me show you how.

1. Choose an area of focus for your self-care routine.

Understand the different areas of self-care. You can read more about this in our previous post. Focus on the area where you feel you need the most from at this moment in time. For some of you it may be caring for your physical health, while for others it may be related to your emotional health.

Another way to figure out a baseline of where you are with your self-care routine is to take our self-care quiz to determine where you are with caring for yourself. You can then implement these steps and use the quiz to reassess your score in a few months.

2. Pick one thing you can easily do for yourself within that area.

Once you have established the area of self-care were you would like improvement, go further another step and determine what is ONE thing you can easily implement today.

For example, if you need to improve on your physical health, you may want to try to commit to drinking water or taking that one vitamin that your doctor recommended at your last physical appointment.

Do not choose more than one thing to do. Life may be overwhelming and stressful for you and you do not want your self-care to also become another chore on your list of many things to do. Have fun with it and make it super easy!

Schedule it for the next 21 days.

Next figure out how to most easily commit to doing this for yourself for the upcoming days. To ensure you do not overwhelm yourself with this and make it enjoyable, first schedule for the next day. Once you do it the first time and feel good about it, try to schedule it for the next three days. If you accomplish that and still feel great about what you are doing, go ahead and schedule the next 7 days and so forth.

Work in one step at a time. Examine if what you chose to do is right for you.

For example if you choose to drink one glass of water a day. Maybe what you want to do is fill your bottle with water the night before and place it on your nightstand to drink the following morning. You may enjoy drinking water or you may dislike it.

If you find that you dislike drinking water, maybe you want to adjust it to drinking water with lemon or adding a healthy flavor to the water for you to be able to enjoy it.

If you are having trouble deciding on what to implement to begin your self-care routine, I’ve listed below some of my favorite things to do for my own self-care that are easy to implement and do not require too much time or effort:

• Drink water
• Wake up one hour before everyone else for some alone time
• Read 15 minutes a day
• Pray or meditate 15 minutes a day
• Listen to a mindfulness app for 5 minutes a day
• Walk 15 minutes a day
• Listen to my favorite podcast
• Eat fruit
• Eat vegetables
• Journal for 5 minutes a day
• Go to bed 15 minutes earlier
• Write a positive note to myself and put it on my bathroom mirror

Where ever you are in your self-care routine, I hope that you can implement something positive for yourself to incorporate into your daily routine. Get yourself on the road to practicing self-care.

Be your most beautiful self.