Fortify Yourself Each Day
If you’re not taking time to nurture yourself because you feel overloaded, the problem isn’t a lack of time. It’s actually because you don’t have a self care mindset. You can’t spend all your emotional and physical energy taking care of others or pouring effort into your job unless you want to burn out.
You have to practice self care and it’s a lot easier to do than you think. The key is to turn your mindset from one of putting your own needs on the backburner to putting yourself first, regardless of what’s going on around you.
To fortify yourself means that you’re making sure that you develop your own strength. This relates to both the physical as well as the emotional self. There are several ways to accomplish this that will help lead you to a self care mindset.
You can practice meditation for one. When you spend time in daily meditation, it can help calm and relax you. It doesn’t have to be something that takes hours. Even just a few minutes a day can make a difference.
The result of starting a meditation habit is that it’ll help you discover the value of self care. It boosts self-awareness and you’ll notice that you’re less stressed and you’ll feel happier and better in body and in spirit.
Begin your meditation by finding somewhere as quiet as possible and practice breathing slowly in and out. Let your mind relax and focus only on the moment that you’re in. During meditation, you’ll find that things that irritate you - the stress behind the chaos that often drives your life - evaporates.
Guided visualization is another thing that you can use to fortify yourself. Using this technique can help you develop a self care mindset. It’s the practice of having a guide or instruction that helps you focus.
The focus is on certain images. It might be the mental image of a beach or warm mountain cabin. It can be anything. The guidance is given through a teacher or recording that quietly describes the images which help you to imagine and put yourself in the scene.
It doesn’t take long to learn this technique and it offers many benefits, such as decreasing anxiety, boosting the body’s immune system and raising confidence.
Affirmations are another way to fortify yourself emotionally.
These are mindset tools that are easy to make a part of your life. How you speak to yourself and what you think about yourself is how your brain identifies you. If your affirmations about yourself are positive, your brain will accept that.
If they’re negative, it accepts that, too. Your brain’s subconscious holds what it hears and sees as truth. And it doesn’t divide these truths according to what’s happened or what is current.
That’s why when you practice affirmations, these need to be in the present moment. You would use an affirmation in a way that makes it a true statement. You would say, “I am” in your affirmations rather than, “I hope or I want to be.”
When you use these present moment affirmations, your brain creates the believability so your mindset changes over time. To fortify yourself, you also have to make sure that you’re not berating yourself. When you berate yourself, you tear down the self care efforts you’re trying to practice.