Prioritizing self-care, stress management, and healthy routines

Prioritizing self-care

For starters, it isn’t selfish to take care of yourself. The healthier you are, the more present and impactful you can be for others.

What are you doing to take care of yourself?

How are you taking care of your physical, emotional, mental, social, and spiritual wellbeing? How are you elevating these dimensions of wellness to a greater level?

When each of these dimensions are of optimal health, we’re able to better handle the stressors in our lives. Which in turn helps prevent and address disease and illness.

2 key points to share:

1. Getting proper sleep is a foundational need. It results in better cognitive function, improved immune function, reduces stress, aids in the body’s natural toxin removal functions, along with a long list of other benefits. Be mindful of your sleep! If you’re working on addressing a health issue, spending on supplements, consultations, and therapies, but not getting the right amount of sleep, you’re not taking the personal steps to support your body functioning properly.
2. Positive engagement with family and friends/positive thoughts, increases levels of dopamine and serotonin. 2 important chemical messengers (hormones), involved with movement, coordination, motivation, happiness, digestion, and metabolism. Social connections that are negative in some manner, maybe in the form of people who are often negative, are bad for your health. Hence why many preach about positive thinking.

Prioritizing stress management

Most of us are caught up in a stressful daily loop. We know it isn’t good for us. But we can’t make a lasting significant change. It’s tough! The world is an extremely stressful place.

So how do we combat stress?

We need to proactively take little to big steps to improve the stress our body deals with.

Little things like a single session of deep breathing a day. The 4-7-8 technique takes under 1 minute! We can all find 1 min in our days. Or putting our phone down and not listening/reading news at least 1 hour before bed.

Also, depending on where you live, there may be a long list of supportive services and therapies to help manage your stress. From meditation, to yoga. Fitness facilities, to spas. We have many therapies at our practice to help with stress.

One awesome therapy we love is FLOWpresso. It’s a deep pressure, full-body compression system that is paired with infrared heat to encourage lymphatic drainage and relaxation. It’s available as a walk-in therapy too! So you don’t need to be an established patient to use and enjoy it:)

Promoting healthy routines

Routines, especially positive ones, can reduce anxiety and stress, promote more sleep and energy, boost immune function, and improve mental and emotional wellness.

How do we promote healthy routines?

One thing we try to do (mostly successful, but not always) is start the day with a positive action. Something that sets the tone for the day.

So, when we wake up in the morning, after we’ve gotten out of bed, we don’t check our phone – be that emails, social media, news, etc. We likely didn’t miss much overnight. And if we did, we can check in on it 1 hr later and not likely miss anything. Instead, before we pick up our phone, we do some stretching, get some exercise, or reflect on what type of day we’d like. Visualizing a positive day makes it more likely we’ll actually have a positive day.

Our end of day routine is just as important – putting our mind and body at ease, to promote more restorative sleep. We don’t pick up our cell phone or computer at least 1 hour before bedtime. And we leave our phone out of the bedroom – eliminating sources of blue light and reducing EMF exposure while we’re sleeping. Not thinking about a work email, reading news, or scanning social media, keeps our minds in a more inactive state, helping us fall asleep faster and get better REM sleep.

How do you create positive routines for yourself?

What motivates you to keep those routines? If you start something new, and for whatever reason skip some days, don’t be too hard on yourself. Every day will bring new challenges. We don’t have to be perfect. We just need to keep trying to do the best we can.