I, Me & Myself Need Care

An ideal picture that pops into my head when I think of self-care is this: me curled up on the sofa with a hot cup of coffee and a bag of cheese puffs in one hand, a romantic novel in the other, wrapped in a blanket with Taylor Swift’s Folklore in the background. Well, one can dream, can’t they? With a society that is reluctantly accepting the concept of mental health, it is hard to expect people to be understanding and empathetic. Such a society and its institutions expect us to engage in the rat race and push beyond our limits, often causing us to burn out. We are often drowned in a sea of ‘This is just a phase, you got to move on’, ‘It’s all in your mind, try thinking positive’, ‘Stop overthinking’ and the likes. Here is where we need to step up and take charge because at the end of the day, we ourselves can be our best friend as well as our worst enemy and it is up to us to choose who needs to win.

Here are a few ‘little’ things that we could do to gain more control of our lives and indulge in caring for ourselves:

• A simple ‘no’ can go a long way
  
  

I can’t stress this point enough. The number of times we find ourselves under a pile of ‘favours’ and ‘small help’ in a single day can be unimaginable. You would love to be the one who is reliable or always there. You would love to be the one who lends ears and shoulders for those in need. However, you can’t help others unless you help yourselves. You are allowed to be selfish sometimes, you’re allowed to recover and to heal and that requires that you say “Sorry, no. I don’t think I’ll be of much help to you now. Maybe another time?” The temporary feelings of guilt will vanish as soon as you realize how much you needed that ‘me’ time.

• Your feelings are valid!
  
  

No one else has gone through what you are going through now and no one else gets to decide how you got to feel or deal with it.  However, ironically enough, it is often not someone else but we who beat ourselves up about it. We often start comparing us and our problems to those who’ve got ‘so much more’ to deal with. We think we do not deserve to feel blue when others have it more difficult. What we’ve got to understand here is that we need not downplay our feelings because they are valid. We get to decide the best way to cope with them.

• Drain out the negativity or better yet, detox
  
  

Along with the daily stress at work or school, our activity on social media can sometimes take a toll on our mental health. The glitz and glamour of the posts often make us forget that all that glitters is not gold and the seemingly ‘happening’ lives of others make us wonder what’s wrong with ours. A helpful tip on social media is to subscribe to more pages that promote well-being, take you to your happy place and make you feel good about yourself and unfollow people and pages with toxic news, upsetting quotes and those that intimidate you. Often, a digital detox (i.e. logging off social media accounts) for a couple of days or weeks may do you a whole lot of good and get you back on the right track of self-care.

• Make a personalized self-care checklist
  
  

There are numerous articles online, providing tips on self-care and different ways in which we can grow mindful of ourselves. There are also applications which provide daily positive reminders and tasks to feel productive. From the plethora of choices, you can choose the ones that you can relate to and try indulging in them and find out what works for you.

In a world that is busy getting up-to-date with the latest ‘in’s and ‘out’s, it seems impossible to isolate ourselves on the pretext of self-care or expect others to look out for us. Instead what we can do is create a safe space for ourselves by keeping a regular check on our mental health and remembering that no one can love and care for us as much as we can.