Is self-care really that important? BONUS top 3 self-care techniques!
If you’re struggling to get your life together or wondering how to best take care of your self, I’m so glad you’re here – let’s talk about self-care!
You’ve probably heard over and over about how important self-care is. But without knowing WHY it’s so important, it’s easy to push it to the bottom of your priority list. So I’m diving into the science of the role self-care plays in your physical, mental, and emotional health, including the impact self-care has on chronic stress.
And bonus, I’ve also included my top three tips for incorporating self-care into your life and building a self-care routine that works for YOU and your busy schedule!
If you want to get to the science behind why self-care is so important, read on or watch the video below!
Let’s start with a few facts
- First, your nervous system has two different states it can be in. The Sympathetic Nervous System state – also referred to as fight, flight, or freeze. This state is triggered by fear and it’s how your body helps to keep you safe. The second nervous system state is the Parasympathetic Nervous System, or rest and digest. This is the state you need to be in to refill your mental, emotional, and/or physical energy reserves.
- Second, self-care is a mental and emotional hygiene tool. It’s just as important as brushing your teeth or taking a shower.
- Third, just because something is supposed to be relaxing, doesn’t make it self-care. Have you ever sat down to try and meditate and found yourself more worried and wound up than when you started?
About your nervous system
You’re looking for solid reasons why self-care is so important, so I want to dive into your nervous system a little more.
Let’s start with the Sympathetic Nervous System. It’s your body’s natural response to fear. It helps keep you safe when out on the savannah you see a lion and want to avoid becoming its dinner.
Unfortunately, your body can’t tell the difference between the fear of being eaten by a lion and the fear of doing poorly on a work project, or the fear of being late for an important meeting because you’re stuck in traffic.
Many of us are in a state of chronic stress. From worrying about work and bills, to family matters and friendships, to what to make for dinner and how to find time to get those birthday cards in the mail.
Do you ever notice that your jaw aches from being clenched all day? Or you have a headache and your neck and shoulders are sore because you’ve had them hunched up and the muscles tightened for hours? These are physical manifestations of that chronic stress.
The impact of chronic stress on the body
Here are several effects the American Psychological Association cites chronic stress has on our bodies:
- Tension and migraine headaches
- Acute breathing problems for people with asthma, COPD, and other reparatory issues.
- Increased risk of hypertension, heart attack, and stroke – due to increased levels of stress hormones and elevated blood pressure – both part of a Sympathetic Nervous System state
- Chronic fatigue, diabetes, obesity, depression, and immune disorders – again, due to the way the body produces and responds to stress hormones during the Sympathetic Nervous System state
- Heartburn, acid reflux, nausea, diarrhea, and constipation (our digestive system is an “optional” system during life or death situations – if you get eaten by the lion, it doesn’t matter if you digested your last meal. If you survive, you can digest once you’re safe – so when you’re in Sympathetic Nervous System, the body diverts resources away from the digestive system and to your extremities – your body believes it’s much more important you’re able to run quickly than to finish digesting your lunch.)
- Issues with the reproductive system including: irregular menstrual cycles, issues with conception and pregnancy, difficult pre-menstrual symptoms, and more. (Again, like the digestive system, your reproductive system is viewed as “optional” during times of stress.) A side note, I primarily talk to and work with women, but chronic stress can also wreak havoc on the male reproductive system as well.
In addition to the physical issues, there are a host of mental and emotional ones.
- Chronic stress can disturb our peace of mind by causing us to loop through anxiety, fear, regret, and worry over and over again.
- It reduces our efficiency and productivity because we’re focused on surviving, which often results in our doing things inefficiently. Have you ever been juggling five different things, stressed and overwhelmed and realized you need to find information from an e-mail you know someone sent you a week ago? You scroll, scan, search, and finally find the e-mail, grab the information you need, and then promptly close everything up. Only to go through the same exact process tomorrow because you didn’t finish reading down in the message to get the additional details you needed for step two of the project? That’s survival mode.
- And it can lead us to feel everything or nothing. Mood swings, crying for unexplained reasons, feeling numb inside. These are all symptoms of burnout which is a result of chronic stress. (If you only have five gallons of gas in the car, it doesn’t matter how much you WANT to keep going, the car stops once you run out.) You can learn more about burnout here.
The impact of self-care on chronic stress
By now you might be thinking, ok, so chronic stress is bad, but where does self-care come in?
If you don’t want to have to deal with all the physical, mental, and emotional issues I noted above, you have two options. You can either remove all the stress in your life. Which practically speaking means bailing on anything in your life that causes you stress, and which isn’t realistic or even desirable to most of us.
Or you can learn how to shift your body out of the Sympathetic Nervous System state and into the Parasympathetic Nervous System state.
Remember I mentioned that self-care is part of a healthy mental and emotional hygiene routine? True self-care – there’s a lot of confusion out there about what self-care actually is – triggers you to shift from the Sympathetic Nervous System to the Parasympathetic Nervous System. It’s the equivalent of turning off your car and refilling the fuel. And I’m using the word hygiene intentionally, because it really is just as important as brushing your teeth and washing your hands.
The more frequently you incorporate self-care into your day, the more frequently you remind your body that it doesn’t need to be residing in fight, flight, or freeze. Which means you’ll feel better, you’ll be more resilient and be better able to tackle the speed bumps in life as they come. And you’ll be less likely to have to deal with the host of physical, mental, and emotional issues I noted above.
Ok, hopefully by now I’ve convinced you WHY you need to incorporate self-care into your daily life. Let’s talk about those three strategies to get self-care into your everyday.
Self-Care Tool #1: The Audible Exhale
If regularly read my blog or listen to Solicited Advice, you’ve probably heard me talk about this before! The audible exhale is a trigger that tells your body it’s safe to shift from the Sympathetic Nervous System to the Parasympathetic Nervous System. You can learn more about the why behind this here.
I talk about this technique a lot because it’s not only powerful, it takes just a minute or two.
This audio will guide you through the audible exhale with a bonus visualization to release even more stress!
How do you feel now. Did those three breaths shift you away from stress even a little bit? Set an alarm on your phone for every hour and take these three audible exhales. You can also use them anytime you’re feeling stressed, anxious, worried, frustrated, overwhelmed, or angry.
Self-Care Tool #2: The Mindful Moment
When we’re anxious, worried, and stressed, we’re usually thinking about things that have already happened, or have not yet happened. Take a moment. Really look around – is there anything in this exact moment for you to be afraid of? I’m guessing the answer is probably no. Because the answer is almost always no.
When we can bring our focus and attention to the present moment, we move out of fear, and out of the Sympathetic Nervous System, and into the Parasympathetic Nervous System. We remind the body that there isn’t an immediate threat to our lives and that we can relax.
That’s why the mindful moment works – here’s how to take one.
Pause what you’re doing, look around you and notice – what do you:
- See?
- Hear?
- Smell?
- Taste?
- And feel – with your hands, on your skin, and inside your body?
Try to be as detailed as possible when going through each of your five senses. By observing the world around us with each of our senses, we pull our attention back to the present moment.
Try using this technique every time you take the first sip of a beverage or the first bite of a meal. Or use it every time you cross a threshold – from one room to another, or from indoors to outdoors and vice versa.
Self-Care Tool #3: Move your body!
The third technique is to just move your body. We can get so wrapped up in our mental loops that simply moving our bodies can help break that cycle. Again, just like with the other two techniques, this doesn’t need to be anything long or complicated. It’s simply bringing your awareness back to your body and the present moment in another way.
Stand up. Stretch your arms up overhead. Engage your core to support your lower back. Take a full inhale and reach your finger tips even higher.
Exhale and fold over, hinging at the hips. Allow your head and hands to hang heavy. Maybe your hands touch the floor, maybe they don’t – it isn’t important. Keep a soft bend in your knees. Reach your tailbone up to the sky and feel your spine stretching and elongating as gravity pulls your head down toward the floor. Take a full deep inhale feeling the breath tunnel down into your belly. And then sneak in an audible exhale for bonus points!
Inhale and come back up to standing. Stretch your arms out, engage your core, and twist your arms and torso over to the left. Take a full inhale, and on the exhale come back to center. Twist over to the right, take a full inhale, and on the exhale, come back to center.
Now lower your arms, and shake it out – just like the hokey pokey, shake loose anything that’s clenching or gripping. Allow your arms and legs to feel like jelly as you wiggle and shake them out.
Then go ahead and sit back down.
Again, this takes just a few minutes. Just like with the audible exhale, use this either as a triage tool, or even better, incorporate it into your everyday by setting a reminder to stretch every hour.
You can use one, or all three of these techniques – they all help to shift you from the Sympathetic to Parasympathetic Nervous System. And they are all great self-care tools!
I’m sending you a great big hug – you’ve got this!
If you enjoyed this episode of Solicited Advice, check out other episodes, and while you’re there, make sure you subscribe to my YouTube Channel so you don’t miss out on future episodes released each Monday & Thursday!
