Self-Love & Self-Care

Lifetime Resolutions

Self Love simply means regard for one’s welbeing and happiness. Self care means to be mindful of your own needs.

Self-Love and Self-care both need to be our primary way of love and care because loving yourself will help you love others and caring for yourself will help you support the people you care about. When you love and care for yourself you are better able to meet the needs of others because if you dont love or care for yourself you can’t give what you don’t have and in this case love and care.

Self-Love and care have proven to reduce and eliminate anxiety, depression and stress. Loving and caring for yourself can boost your confidence, self esteem and can produce positive feelings.

Self-Love and Self-Care are not selfish words. They are necessary part of welness. Wellbeing is the state of being comfortable, healthy or happy.

There are 8 dimensions of wellness; physical, emotional, environmental, finacial, occupational, social, intellectual and spiritual. These dimensions are all connected and they are each important to a person’s overall health.

Emotional Wellness

This part of wellness involves managing your feelings and having the tools you need in the up and downs of life.

Feelings; build habits to help you deal with your feelings. forgive yourself. Practice gratitude always. Accept who you are. Allow yourself to see and improve your inner beauty as resolutions. Always find new ways to make you feel better and have inner peace always. Always find the positive whatever happens to you even if what happened is bad, positive thinking has a ay of making you feel better afterall it has already happened.

Self-Care; Make time for YOU. Do what makes you happy this will have your spirits up. Practice self affirmations, the power of affirmations lies on repeating them regularly because when affirmations are repeated over and over again they begging to take charge of your thoughts and slowly change your pattern of thinking and ultimately changing your life. Let’s start now say this out loud; I AM WISE, I AM STRONG AND I AM BEAUTIFUL.

Stress; Learn different ways of coping with stress so as when something comes up you are better prepared. Take a step back in a stressful situation

Physical Wellness

Physical wellness is the role you take in maintaining your body for strength and energy through nutrition, physical activity, good sleep, usage of drugs, alcohol or tobacco products.

Healthy nutrition balancing; a healthy balanced diet supplies the body with sufficient nutrients to carry routine tasks. Balance is the key. Supplements are also a great help to help balance nutrients in our bodies.

Preventive medicines, hospital check ups even when you are not sick which can help know any disease you are at risk for.

Physical activity doesn’t mean you have to hit the gym everyday, it’s simply about balancing you activity with inactivity. Find an activity you like and comfortable with like swimming, gardening, bike riding, jogging, walking, running or any home workout that can help you decrease a sedentary lifestyle.

There’s no magic in starting on Monday to start taking good care of body. The magic is in STARTING TODAY.

Social Wellness

This dimension is defined by how you choose to connect with the community and people around you.

Social wellness requires you to build not just relationships with others but healthy relationships by good communication skills, setting boundaries, treating others respectfully, being kind, genuine & authentic to others.

Meeting new people is good and can help you build supportive systems, networks and of course help avoid loneliness. Meeting new people doesn’t necessarily mean that you have to meet new friends everyday because developing and maintains good friendships takes effort and when it comes to friends quality counts more than quantity. Don’t get me wrong its good to have a diverse of friends but you only need few close friends who are always there for you through thick and thin.

Being involved with the community can be enjoyable for you if you look for groups you share interest with like book clubs, sports clubs. Also pick up the phone and connect with others.

Occupational Wellness

The work you choose to do and how it gives to your community and the fulfillment you get.

Occupational wellness involves satisfaction with your choice of work and the type of work that fits with your values and skills. In case you don’t feel the support in your office, find support from others close to you and do your hobbies so as to balance the work stress.

Build good relationships with your co-workers just like any other relationship this also takes work. Always remember to balance your workload too, ask for help when you need it.

Financial Wellness

This involves one’s relationship with money skills for managing resources. Financial satisfaction can reduce worrying and stress since it’s one of life’s biggest stressors.

Ways to improve your financial wellness include; having a household budget, savings account, tracking what you spend inorder to prioritize, donating to meaningful charity, using debt as financial leverage and taking debts from credible institutes, planning for the future (retirement accounts, looking for financial freedom). Financial freedom by acquiring assets; asset meaning something that brings you money.

When it comes to money it’s about how much catch but how much you keep.

Environmental Wellness

This dimension of wellness is about how the environment has an effect on you and how you have an effect on the environment. The environment can impact how you feel emotionally or even physically since there are diseases that can affect your body because of a dirty environment.

Environment is also connected to emotions there’s just that feeling you get in a well cleaned and well organized home or work place. I don’t know about you but a clean made bed after a long tiresome day can really relax my brain.

Even a change of scenery like a walk outside, feeling the breeze outside can make you feel better.

Spiritual Wellness

Spiritual wellness is a broad concept as it represents one’s understanding on purpose, values and belief and where one can find comfort and relief.

Each one of us has different values and beliefs. Know yours practice them daily. Know more about values and beliefs of others apart from yours so as you can be more understanding, accepting and open minded. Also share your values and beliefs with others appropriately so as to build better relationships.

Intellectual Wellness

This dimension involves stimulating your brain to keep it active and being engaged with learning.

Learning means to acquire knowledge through studying, experience and being taught. You can choose to acquire knowledge on anything today there are different platforms to learn about anything you like whether it’s cooking or being a proffesional about anything.

You will never have enough skills or knowledge inshort you will never know enough. “I have learnt that I still have a lot to learn” — Maya Angelou.

Sadly people take learning as academic education that once you graduate there’s no more learning or reading. That is why many people ignorant even if they are literates.

You can also make time for brain teasers like puzzle games, boards games, chess, sudoku any that you like to keep your brain active.

Loving and Taking care of yourself starts NOW and it never ends.

Well-being is a life long journey.

With Love,

Sandrahope M.