34. Try Something New Today To Care For Yourself (3/7)

we're always looking for feedback on the podcast. So if you have any feedback or you've got anything to say, and don't forget to check out our links in the show notes and send us a message and let us know how you're feeling because we'd love to hear it. So last week, we shared ways to get started with self care and creating habits and adding activities into your diaries and calendars so that you can increase your chances of sticking into a new routine. So let's talk about that, shall we? Let's talk about ways that we can keep things interesting to treat yourself and things that you've always wanted to do. So adding a new experience to your self care routine is like giving yourself a little gift every single day. It's a great way to stay motivated and to do things to care for yourself. So we're going to talk about more about that later on on the show. And we're going to talk about new ideas and things that you can try just to give you a little bit of inspo but before we get into the inspirational bit, let's get on to the science bit. And Charles got another study for you this week. Yeah,

so this is building on the previous studies as well. So I'm just sort of really hammering home how important self care is with just multiple multiple sets of evidence. So this study is called when college students look after themselves, self care practices. And wellbeing. So the study is about the behaviours that underlie well being. Because it's known already research has shown time and time again that psychological well being is positively associated with human engagement, persistence and performance. So basically, what that means is, the better you are mentally the better you perform in academic life, and I think we could be reasonably confident in saying that spills over to non students as well their professional life. So they had 206 students. They were mostly female, and they completed measures of wellbeing and self care practices. They actually did six self care practices, and four of them so the four important ones were mindful acceptance, seeking social support, sleep hygiene, and food habits. And they found that those four practices uniquely predicted wellbeing. So the students that were more sort of in tune with that actively, actively sort of trying to improve that aspect of their life or maintain a sort of self care rituals around those were psychologically

So the last episode we talked about how you can self indulge and pamper yourself, and how it makes us feel, makes us feel good. So the first one on our list is pampering yourself because it makes you feel good. And there's many different things that you can do to pamper yourself, but pampering is also a go to for many people when it comes to their self care routine. Because we think to ourselves when anyone mentioned self care, especially to me anyway, always think well, it's about pampering yourself, isn't it? That's basically what you think you think cucumbers on your eyes, you think facemask relaxing music,

you could even just go for free with exactly minimal minimal cost, just the transport. So yeah, I think something like that is really good. It's just these are just sort of ideas in the realm of pampering yourself. There's other things that you might you know, want to do. You know, some people find things like getting their hair done, or they you know, potentially that starting to get a bit pricey, I suppose it depends a little bit as well on where your budget is. You know, you have a substantial disposable income. You probably do have a wider range of options to you. But I guess we just wanted to make it really clear that even if your budget is super, super low or zero, there are still things that you can do just in your own home to make yourself feel sort of pampered and better.

Number two, which is the second part of this list that we've got for you today is just to celebrate today. So I'm really bad at doing this. Most of us don't buy ourselves presents. And we very often give ourselves any sort of tree I mean, there's times where I've not bought myself anything for a long time. And you know sometimes we do need to do this because it makes us feel good about ourselves. It makes us realise that we are special. We do deserve to buy ourselves something we go out we work we work hard and we deserve to have some special treatment.

Yeah, and it doesn't like it's something that you can change straightaway. And, again, it doesn't have to be phenomenally expensive. Yeah. So I would say think of something that's within your budget that you've been wanting for a while and then give yourself permission to go and buy it. Obviously, this is not something that you're going to repeat like weekly because you're going to end up with a load of stuff and need to declutter and probably not have any money, but just as a one off. I think that's something that can really go a long way to making you feel a lot brighter. So I don't know maybe it's like a new pair of shoes that you've had your eye on or like a phone upgrade that would make your life easier. Just giving yourself a gift doesn't matter how small it is, can be a real boost to your self worth.

Maybe it doesn't maybe it doesn't even have to be like an actual gift. Like is in a physical item. It could be food as well. You could buy yourself somebody who was really wanted to eat or you know maybe you've got some chocolates in mind that are crazy expensive. And you want to you want to buy them I mean, there's loads are these dairy free chocolates that I really, really wanted to buy but they're crazy expensive. And most of the time I say to myself, I'm not going to buy those but why not? Do you know what I mean? Do it by yourself something because you are important enough to buy yourself something

I think it's important to enjoy the little things as well. That's something that we're going to keep revisiting. Self Care just doesn't need to be on a grand scale. You know, the tiniest things can be the most meaningful and whether that is like indulging in small or low cost treats. And you know, potentially if they are low cost, and that means that you can do it more often than if you were to do sort of big grand gestures. I guess what I'm trying to say is if you have your self care routine, if something really expensive, that say you can only afford to do very infrequently. I don't know maybe you really like having your hair dial a certain way. But you could only afford to have it done like once or twice a year. Then what happens when you're struggling and you still you can't afford that. So I think it's really important to have things in your arsenal that you can just always do no matter what's going on in your life, you know, not budget dependent. So like other little things that you can do is I think it goes back to again two things that you've ever done before. Like have you ever bought yourself flowers. That's one that I came across that I thought was silly really. I people have bought flowers from before and I've really enjoyed them, but I have not bought them for myself. And flowers are not particularly expensive. Yes, if you get a giant bouquet obviously they are but if you just get like a small bandage from the local store, they're not that expensive. But actually they they do like make you smile like having them on your desk or your kitchen table. They do sort of like really seemed to brighten up the room and make you feel happy. I mean, as you can see I'm a bit plant obsessed anyway. Yeah, that's just like a little one that I thought like, seems so silly, but actually when I tried it, I did really enjoy it.

Oh yeah, I was just about to say that. People think yourself Well, other people should buy you flowers. But why? Like, I buy myself plants for the garden all the time or plants for the house all the time. What's the difference like buying yourself? Flowers, anything like that doesn't have to mean that you're lonely or that no one's no one is treating you it means that you're treating yourself you know, so reframe it look at it as though I want those flowers. I'm going to buy those flowers. I deserve those flowers.

And another example that I came up with, this is not one that I've done but I just thought be a really cute idea is if you've got like a particular food that you like, to sort of maybe incorporate that so. So for example, my sister absolutely adores chocolate. She's completely obsessed with it. It's the one thing that she could never give up. Suddenly, something that I thought maybe she could do is go to a chocolate shop and they always have like the little truffles don't know and they're like crazy expensive if you buy like a whole box of them, but if you just buy one and not too bad. So like something that she could do self care routine for her. Could be once a week. She tries a new truffle.

about it's about adding new experiences as well. So that's self care routine. So as we discussed, trying these different things, these new things which keeps it interesting and also makes them more meaningful as well, you know, plus, it's it's a lot of fun, isn't it? That's yeah, it's fun to do. I mean, it's going to be so much fun seeing you do something that you don't really want to do, but I'm going to I'm going to try and keep southcare in mind, I promise. So let's get on to our little kicker this week to pick up is a challenge. And I guess this is going to be the first of many challenges in the self care series because we want you to not only listen to the podcasts, but we want you to implement them as well and you can always just listen and go away and that's fine if that's what you want to do. But we do encourage you to get involved in any challenges or anything that we do do when it comes to our little kickers because we just think it's fun to try different things as we were just talking about there. Try new things. So try the challenge. So shall what's the challenge for this week. So