Taking care of yourself: 10 keys to strengthen personal self-care

The unbridled rhythm that we impose on ourselves and the numerous shoulds and internal and external demands that restrict us make us we often forget our self-care on a day-to-day basis.

Taking care of yourself is listening to you from the certainty that your nature is to be well and that being well is what you deserve. This type of well-being involves respecting your own needs to allow your body to recover its ability to self-regulate.

It is about following our impulses more to do what the body asks of us, what we like, rather than what is imposed or what we are supposed to like, although today’s society is organized in a way that makes us addicted to the opposite.

To return to connect with the need to take care of ourselves it is essential to ensure our good mental and physical health. How to achieve this reconnection with personal care? we give you the keys to awaken your full potential.

1.Hear us again

The most important thing is to strengthen the invisible thread that keeps us in communication with ourselves, with our bodily sensations and most genuine needs. Sometimes the distance that we experience with the body is such that we are incapable of identifying the fatigue that overwhelms us, hunger and even small pains…

The head occupies so much space that the sensations are buried, as if anesthetized.

And more at this time when the fear of getting sick favors this distance perhaps as a defense mechanism. But only by reconnecting with the sensations we can identify what can give us satisfaction at each moment, what we need to feel good.

2. Stop, rest and play

It is the body that lives in the present, and not the mind. Therefore, to keep alive this communication with our interior, we need to return to the here and now, and slow down.

If you observe the natural rhythm of any other living being –your cat, your dog, etc.–, You will see that everyone takes time to stop and rest, even to play. In fact, they spend more time sleeping and playing than doing any other activity. How many times a day do you give yourself permission not to do? And to play?

3. Give yourself love

Allow us this time to stop and listen to each other it depends on the amount of love we can give ourselves. Without that love, self-abuse in the form of self-demand, unkind internal dialogues or feelings of guilt, can be constant.

It is about understanding that we deserve to be well, and that what we ourselves do not give ourselves, neither can others give us. In fact, if you give it to yourself, you will stop demanding it.

Loving yourself would be a first condition to be able to love those around us.

However, many people consider self-esteem and self-care as a form of narcism.

But, just like on planes in case of an emergency, if oxygen masks drop, we are invited to put our own on first and only then dedicate ourselves to helping others. We must remember that if we lack oxygen, we can do nothing for others.

4. Do not blame yourself or push yourself too much

However, it is easy to get lost outside. The women, because They tend to care more for others than for themselves. and men, because they are more aware of external success than of their needs. The many centuries of Judeo-Christian culture have led women to blame themselves when they put themselves first. They have taught us above all to sacrifice ourselves.

Our culture values ​​duty more than pleasure and love.

Selfishness has a bad press, to the point that taking care of oneself ends up meaning more doses of self-demand to achieve new goals: for example, in order to achieve a more attractive body we force ourselves to exercise or follow a diet to lose weight. We take care of ourselves by striving from the strict. Again we do it from the external “should”.

5. Think about the needs that we must cover

As living beings that we are, we depend on an environment and this must satisfy our needs, needs that we can identify through physical sensations. When the stomach growls it is because we are hungry.

When we yawn, we need to sleep. These needs range from the most basic, such as physiological needs (sleep, eat, drink, have sexual relations, etc.), to the highest and spiritual needs such as self-realization, including the needs for security, affection and recognition.

Today, paradoxically, Physiological needs are the ones that we are covering the worst: we sleep less than ever in history, sleep disorders are common and we eat fast and poorly. The sex doesn’t go over very well either. It’s the ultimate after all the obligations. We do not have self-care in the most basic integrated into the day to day, which in turn prevents us from satisfying our highest needs, since the basic ones constitute the ground on which the rest are based.

6. Remember that we are nature

This lack of contact with our physiological needs is largely explained by the fact that we live far from nature in spaces such as cities that make it impossible to perceive the changes in light that come with the hours of the day and the seasons of the year and that separate us from a rhythm and cycles in accordance with nature.

This way of living disconnected from nature installs us in that world of ideas and “how it should be”.

It disconnects us from our body and leads us to stop respecting its rhythms. For the first time in human history, in the year 2020, the mass created by man exceeded that of nature. In other words, it seems that it will be increasingly difficult to recover this contact with our body, with our origin, and therefore attend to our most basic needs.

7. Move more to reconnect

Living in cities also prevents us from attending to another important primary need: movement. The city implies a greater use of the car and living in closed and small spaces. However, we are made to move continuously.

Doing physical activity regenerates us internally and energizes us.

Pediatrician Emmi Pikler points out, for example, the importance of free movement in children’s development.

In adults, Exercising facilitates the discharge of fears and tensions. Moving also allows us to develop organismic wisdom, that is, to connect with the physical sensations that tell us what feels good and what doesn’t. Movement generates internal strength to change things and transform what we don’t like. For all these reasons, moving is self-care.

8. Take care of the relationship with others

Another element of self-care is contact with others. Relationships help us feel good about ourselves. We need hugs, intimacy and belonging, because it gives us security. We are social animals that self-regulate through others.

Our autonomic nervous system is designed to empathize and feel compassion, to read in the faces of those around us those signs that indicate danger or otherwise. When these signs awaken security, pleasure and happiness appear, while insecurity puts us on alert and makes us feel miserable, because it is in a safe environment where we can feel free to play, to be spontaneous, to be calm. and enjoy.

9. Feeling in harmony

The psychologist Abraham Maslow defines the peak experiences as those in which the person feels in complete harmony with himself and with what surrounds him and therefore experiences a deep state of well-being. In this state, the person is one with the world.

We could consider that it is the moment in which that person feels all his needs are satisfied, including those for self-realization. One is more in touch than at any other time with the face of “God” on earth. But what do we need to promote those experiences, that way of feeling?

You can make a list of all the resources that facilitate the feeling of fulfillment from all those happy experiences that you can remember. All those resources, which are already in you, constitute one of your main internal potentials to develop self-care.

10. Exercise to know how to take care of ourselves

We propose an experiment to connect with this feeling of fullness in your life day-to-day and know what could make it easier.

Close your eyes and relive an experience of well-being. Remember a moment in your life when you felt particularly good, a moment in which you have felt very happy. If you can, recall the best moment of your life or one of the best. watch your body

What were the bodily sensations you had thanks to that experience? What was your breathing like? In what part of your body did you feel pleasure or well-being: in your legs, in your chest…? What conditions led to these sensations? Freedom? The lightness? Recognition? The movement? Laugh, sing, share, play…?

Allow yourself to feel it and pay special attention to what changes in your body when you enter this state.