Self care is essential to our well-being. It is the practice of taking an active role in protecting one’s own well-being and happiness in periods of stress. Self compassion entails being warm and understanding toward ourselves when we suffer, fail, feel inadequate or feel burned out. Self kindness is about showing kindness and understanding toward ourselves when we fail at something or when we are hurt. In short, showing self-kindness means treating our worth as unconditional even when we fall short of our own expectations, whether it’s through our behaviors or even just our thoughts.

Signs of Poor Self-Care

• Personal relationships that can be predominantly one-way caring relationships with self as giver
• A strong Need to be Needed
• Constant Perfectionism in Work Tasks
• Professional or Personal Success Defined Solely by Others
• Overwhelming Exhaustion
• Loss of Enjoyment
• Feelings of Unfairness
• Insomnia
• A sense of Ineffectiveness in Life
• Chronic Stress

Barriers to Effective Self-Care

• Lack of awareness of your needs
• Believing self-care is a sign of weakness
• Mistaken belief that self-care is self-indulgent or selfish
• Guilt
• Denial
• Focusing on problems rather than prevention
• Not knowing how to effectively care for ourselves

In working together to design an effective personal and individualized plan for your well-being, we start where you are now. Then we look at the gap between knowing about self-care and actually practicing it through self-awareness, self-assessment, and self-monitoring. This leads to educating you in how to take an active role in protecting your well-being and happiness.

If you are interested in enriching your life through learning better ways to restore, sustain, and enhance your well-being, contact me today.