When I think of self care, I think of beauty products, spa treatments, or related things. But when I see “self care” as “caring for yourself” then my thoughts immediately change. It’s doing exercise, doing things that bring you pleasure, exercising boundaries, taking time for yourself, practicing mindfulness, self improvement, allowing your body to rest.

So how to improve self care? I believe that self care should be a lifestyle, something we’re always doing, and at the same time, we can always do better. It’s the small reminders in everyday life: eat, rest, noticing your battery is on low, and deciding what’s best for you today. In the book “the 4 agreements”, one of the agreements is to “always do your best”. But, funnily enough, the book emphasizes the importance of not “doing more than your best”, as that would come at the cost of doing your best tomorrow. So I guess improving self care is the constant exercise of examining the balance of your life, assessing where it weights too much and shifting the scale. And the thing is that this also changes over time: maybe what was too much yesterday will not be enough tomorrow. Who knows? It’s a question to ask yourself every day.

As for me, today, I think it’s combating the inertia of inactivity, and being mindful of the dopamine vices of daily life: TV, scrolling, social media. And practicing mindful meditation, which I did more often in the past but got to admit have been having a hard time to regain the habit. I hope that these will put me in a course of better self care, as in some days I wonder if my flexibility and patience are less present as it used to be, that the smaller things are starting to affect me. Maybe that’ll be the cure, even though I’m not sure what’s the cause of all of it, and not sure that searching for the cause is a fruitful endeavor either.