I defined these four pillars for myself and those who I was working with a couple years ago. I found for myself personally breaking down my own self care in these four pillars to be valuable to practice self awareness when I was feeling “off.” I can trace back a lot of my depression and/or anxiety to a neglection of one of these four types of self care. This then allows me to address the situation and tackle it head on. The more tools you have in your tool box to take care of yourself the easier it is to find solutions that pop up day to day. I hope this helps you like it has for me!
Everyone practices self care in different ways and we all have different areas of our life that need our attention. My four pillars include physical self care, emotional self care, intellectual self care, and environmental self care. For some of us, certain pillars will be easier to maintain and others will be more difficult. For example, physical and intellectual self care for me is easy, but emotional and environmental? Not so much!
It is important to have systems in place to help you “check in” with yourself frequently to know what you need to focus on. Ideally we are doing something to address each pillar each day, but again it will depend on what YOU need at that moment.
Physical self care involves exercising, hygiene, maintaining a healthy weight, going to regular health care appointments, and sleep to name a few. For some of us, this is the easiest way to practice self care and for others we can struggle to practice physical self care. You don’t have to exercise every day to practice physical self care, in fact sometimes what your body needs is REST! It is important to learn to listen to your body.
Emotional self care involves staying in touch with our feelings, spending time with loved ones, expressing your emotions, therapy, and medication if necessary are all examples. This type of self care usually makes us feel vulnerable and we prefer to practice it by ourselves, with our closest companions, or someone in our professional care team. This is the scary one for a lot of us.
Intellectual self care includes reading, learning new information, writing/journaling, and having intelligent conversations with others. Intellectual self care can be neglected at times, but is an important part of taking care of yourself. Find something you are passionate about and learn a little bit about it everyday or try writing down your creative ideas and then act upon them. Me writing this is one of my primary forms of intellectual self care!
Environmental self care includes the food/drinks we keep in our home, how clean we keep our spaces, the people we spend time with, and how our work or living space is set up. If we keep items in our home that do not align with our goals, then it will inherently be more difficult to succeed. This same concept goes for the people we keep in our circle. Are they lifting you up or holding you down? Do you have boundaries in place to help protect your space & time?
Think about your life day to day, do you practice one of these pillars more frequently than others? Is there a pillar that you currently aren’t addressing in your self-care routine? Check in with yourself periodically throughout the day and ask yourself what type of self care you need in this moment.
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