This post shares 10 simple self care ideas, and explains what self care is and why it’s important. There are so many lists of self care ideas on the Interwebs that the abundance of information can feel a bit overwhelming.
This post breaks down some key self care concepts and into simple to digest info, and provides a manageable and customizable list of ideas.
You can read from start to finish or use the Table of Contents below to jump to the part you need.
Enjoy!
Table of Contents
- The Problem:
- What is self care?
- Different types of self care
- What kind of self care is best for you?
- 10 simple self-care ideas
- Conclusion
The Problem:
- You feel guilty when you take time for self care
- There are too many self care ideas out there and you don’t know what’s best for you
- You don’t have time for self care
I get it. And I’ve seen it with tons of other women. The trick to overcoming these barriers is to understand why self care is so important and then identify a couple of easy and simple strategies that work for YOU.
What is self care?
Let’s start with what it isn’t. Self care is not taking care of your basic necessities. Busy people, particularly women, often mistake handling their normal human needs as self care, but in reality you basic necessities are separate.
Let’s break it down.
Basic necessities = fundamental elements required for people to live healthy and fulfilling lives. These include:
- Food: Eating nutritious and safe food.
- Water: hydrating regularly with clean water.
- Shelter: having a safe place to live, including a space with privacy and security.
- Clothing: having access to clothes that fit the environment and meet your personal modesty requirements.
- Healthcare: access to basic and sufficient healthcare services including preventative care.
- Education: personal growth and learning opportunities that equip you with knowledge and skills necessary for your personal development, employment, and participation in society.
- Sanitation and hygiene: showers, baths, anything that prevents disease and promotes overall health.
- Social connections: meaningful relationships with family and friends and community contribution.
- Financial security: access to economic stability and livelihood.
This means that taking a shower is not a self care idea. Eating a meal is not a self care idea. Hugging your siblings is not a self care idea. Each of these is an example of meeting basic needs. It is too easy to short change ourselves into thinking we’re doing self care when, really, we’re doing the bare minimum to take care of our human needs.
You are worth more than the bare minimum.
So what exactly is self care? And what are some simple self care ideas?
Self care = the deliberate and conscious actions that we take to prioritize our physical, mental, and emotional well-being. Self care ideas are about more than basic needs. They are about activities and practices that not only promote health and day-to-day living, but also encourage relaxation, joy, balance, and resilience.
Instead of meeting a baseline, self care is about nourishing ourselves.
Examples include:
- Exercising in a way that specifically makes you happy.
- Taking a nap, even when it isn’t necessary. Sleeping in just for the joy of it, or even going to bed early if you want.
- Taking extra care with hygiene and physical care, like getting a manicure, doing a hair mask, or getting a facial.
- Playing games, reading for fun, learning new skills with no direct benefit beyond pleasure.
- Practicing mindfulness, meditating, journaling, seeking therapy, and expressing emotions through creative outlets.
- Cultivating healthy, happy relationships, setting boundaries, spending extra time with loved ones, and seeking and offering support to friends and family. (Helping others can be a powerful form of self care).
- Exploring your own personal sense of meaning and purpose through meditation, prayer, time in nature, or new hobbies.
Self care is not selfish. It is meeting a higher level of needs beyond survival and it is essential if you want to live a life you love. It will help you better cope with stress, prevent burnout, improve resilience, and enhance your quality of life, which is a major aspect of longevity.
Different types of self care
There are 5 major types of self care, each focusing on different aspects of well-being. Some of these are great for really social people and some are great for people who prefer to recharge alone.
I do recommend that you pick at least two categories to explore because the more variety you have, the more holistic and well-rounded your approach will be, which in turn results in better quality of life.
The 5 major types of self care are:
- Physical self care
- Emotional self care
- Mental self care
- Social self care
- Spiritual self care
Let’s take a closer look.
Physical self care is all about nurturing your body without judgment. Before we talk about examples, let’s look at this concept more closely.
Physical self care
Our physical bodies face a lot of judgment from ourselves and others. As a result, giving our body attention without judgment can be tricky. Keep in mind that your body is doing its absolute best for you at any given moment.
Try to be grateful for everything that your body is and can do. It pumps blood to your heart and mind. It draws breath into your lungs. It shivers to warm you up and sweats to cool you down. Many of us can hear, see, smell, and feel the world around us, which is a gift in and of itself.
I’m not saying you have to love every nook and cranny, but your body is amazing and it is giving you everything it can.
So when you workout or eat or sleep or take an extra long bath for no reason other than that it feels good, try not to think about what you look like to yourself or others.
Instead, accept that you look how you look in this moment and that you’re body is capable of amazing things.
Emotional self care
Emotional self care is all about recognizing, understanding, and managing your emotions in a neutral or positive way. This is another area where it’s good to embrace acceptance. We all process our emotions differently. There is no prize for “most well-adjusted.” But there is significant payout for embracing your own emotional needs and wants and understanding them deeply.
Our emotions help us form relationships, make decisions, recognize danger and joy, and figure out our own identities. They are incredibly important, just like our bodies are incredibly important.
It sometimes feel like our emotions take over who we are, but try to keep in mind that our emotions are not us, just like waves are not the ocean (James Norbury, Big Panda, Tiny Dragon).
Mental self care
Mental self care is a close cousin of emotional self care. It focuses on maintaining well-being and cognitive function. In some ways, this kind of self care can actually be a bit uncomfortable because it requires your mind to grow and improve flexibility.
Social self care
Social self care means nurturing healthy relationships with others in such a way that you feel rejuvenated rather than drained.
One of the big challenges here is that relationships often involve give and take. Some of us give.
A lot.
The whole point of social self care isn’t to be selfish, but it is to be self aware of when you are engaging out of obligation versus desire.
Spiritual self care
Finally, we have spiritual self care, which is all about nurturing your inner self and finding meaning and purpose in life. The Japanese sometimes call this ikigai. We sometimes associate this concept with slow living because one key tenet is that you have to slow down long enough to reflect.
What kind of self care is best for you?
It depends! Every person is different and so our self care needs are different. Self care is also a dynamic process, not an end result (sort of like doing the laundry). In general, it helps to take a few minutes of self-reflection on your current needs, feelings, and experiences.
Make sure you don’t wait until you feel like you need self care to start self care. Sort of like drinking water. You want to be drinking before you’re thirsty. In other words, check in with yourself regularly. You can use these steps.
Pause and evaluate how you feel physically, emotionally, mentally, and spiritually. Look for signs of stress, fatigue, or imbalance in these areas.
Do a quick check of the last week and look for areas of your life where you may be neglecting self care. Do you feel physically exhausted? Restless? Emotionally drained? Mentally overwhelmed? What types of self care have you already done and which ones are you missing?
Identify and track self care ideas that are particularly helpful for you as a person. For example, my husband loves sitting quietly in the office, listening to music. Sometimes he builds models, sometimes he just sits and listens. He always feels more centered and settled afterward. It might help to experiment with different self care ideas to find out what works best for you.
Listen to your body and emotions when you try a self care idea; they often provide valuable clues about what you need and what works best for you.
And don’t forget to consider sources of stress and tension. Sometimes, we get so used to chronic stress, it can be tricky to remember what it feels like when that stress is reduced or gone completely.
Giving yourself some time to stop and think about points of tension related to work, relationships, finances or other areas can also help you figure out what kind of self care ideas will work best on any given day. Don’t hesitate to get some feedback from trusted loved ones here. They might notice patterns of stress that you haven’t recognized yet yourself.
Finally, trust yourself and your intuition. Your instincts and inner voice are incredibly valuable when it comes to figuring out what you need. Honor what feels right for you at any given moment. Your best compass in the self care journey is your own self.
10 simple self-care ideas
Physical self care ideas
- Self Care Idea #1: Identify 1-3 types of exercise that make you feel powerful. The goal is to embrace what you’re body can do and how it can feel. My go to exercise types are swimming, biking, and light weight lifting. I like how swimming makes me aware of my breathing. I like how biking makes make legs look and feel, and how it gets me outside. I enjoy how much easier every day life is when I left weights.
- Self Care Idea #2: Consume foods that bring you joy and make you feel good. I love a salad, but I also love pastries. I try to get a little bit of each every week without judging the thing that brings me joy in the moment. This way, I don’t feel guilt when I eat something sweet because it isn’t a matter of deprivation, but balance.
Emotional self care ideas
- Self Care Idea #1: Journal or draw your feelings. Don’t be afraid to draw positive feelings or negative ones. Remember, the goal is to identify, accept, understand, and process. Think back on previous experiences and give some sort of output to your emotional response to them. Or look forward to things that you are anticipating. Getting your feelings on paper through art or words can help you process those feelings in a healthy way. And remember, it’s not about the quality of the drawing. No one will see it but you.
- Self Care Idea #2: Make a music play list that explores the emotions you’re feeling. You can keep it totally private, but making a play list will help you identify what you’re feeling and listening to your play list will help you figure out why you’re feeling the way that you are.
Mental self care ideas
- Self Care Idea #1: read, play a game, or solve a puzzle. These are all sort of interrelated. The trick here is to be an active participant, not just a consumer of entertainment. If you’re reading, actively try to predict what is going to happen in the story, or try and make connections before the author reveals them. If you’re playing a game, choose something that requires your mental engagement to solve problems.
- Self Care Idea #2: Take breaks from thinking about work or daily life. Cognitive labor is still labor. If you’re thinking about working, then you are, in fact, working. Giving yourself permission to rest mentally in terms of scheduling, decision making, and thinking is important for growth. Your brain needs rest periods just like your body does after exercise.
Social self care ideas
- Self Care Idea #1: Spend quality times with friends, family, and loved ones. This is time that should be relatively unstructured and unencumbered by obligation. Doing activities together like watching a movie and discussing it afterwards, playing minigolf or yard games, going to the pool, taking a walk in the park, or visiting a museum are all great ways to get quality time with people who are important to you.
- Self Care Idea #2: Set boundaries and understand that not everyone is going to be equally close to you. This is particularly important with work relationships and acquaintances. There are only so many hours in a day and it is ok to prioritize how you spend those hours and who you spend them with. Relationships should help form a foundation of stability not create a routine through tension.
Spiritual self care ideas
- Self Care Idea #1: This one is a little tricky because many of us have wildly varying spiritual needs. That being said, taking time to be meditate, pray, or do some mindfulness activities can go a long way toward scaffolding your spiritual self care needs.
- Self Care Idea #2: Engage with nature. Nature is spiritually rejuvenating for all of us, though that might manifest in different ways. Engaging with nature can be as simple as appreciating a tree on a sunny day, lighting a candle in your office, or listening to a fountain. Sometimes the best we can do is put a nature-based instrumental video up on YouTube. You don’t need to go on a 10-mile hike to appreciate the natural world (though definitely do that, if that’s your jam). Find a few simple ways to bring nature into your life more consistently and try to be as mindful of your connection to the natural world as possible.
Conclusion
Self care isn’t about meeting your basic needs, it’s about nurturing yourself as a person so that you can grow and be happier and healthier. Self care looks a little different for all of us because we’re all living different lives and have different needs and wants. Make sure you take some time to evaluate how you’re doing physically, mentally, emotionally, socially, and spiritually.
Try to accept that your needs will shift and change as your life shifts and changes, and keep in mind that self care is a dynamic process. Reflection is the first step in any self care activity. In fact, self care ideas boil down to three basic steps:
First, reflect and identify where you need some self care out of the five major types.
Second, pick a self care idea that fits that type.
Third, do that self care activity.
By combining some experimentation with reflection, you can gain valuable insights into who you are as a person and what types of self care you need at any given time.
What’s your favorite self care idea? Which one will you try next? Let me know in the comments!