I remember the first time I Googled “Self-care ideas”. Innumerable articles came up, and like any other Googler I looked at the first two or three. These lists were exhaustive, some giving as many as 100 different self-care ideas. Funny enough though, almost none of them really resonated with me. Now I realize that self-care, like many things in life, is subjective. Self-care, defined as taking care of your mental, emotional, and physical health on a semi-regular basis as a way to prevent or treat any form of illness from the aforementioned categories, is going to look different from person-to-person. For example, some people go running as a form of self-care but me, I can’t run 20 feet to save my life.
With this said, the following suggestions are purposefully vague and general. They’re meant to be rough guidelines from which you will hopefully think of the best forms of self-care for you.
1) Create a healthy sleep schedule and stick to it.
I’ve witnessed the vicious cycle of lack of sleep countless times over the years; friends of mine wait until late at night to start their work, end up staying up ridiculously late, barely get any sleep and make all their classes their next day but they’re too tired and sleep-deprived to really focus, or they get a proper amount of sleep but miss their classes. Either way, they fall behind in their classes, lose more sleep and destroy their sleep schedule even more to try and catch up, and the cycle continues.
Take care of your body and mind, and maintain a healthy and normal sleep schedule.
2) Block out a chunk of time every day for you to do whatever you want, whatever helps you destress, whether that be watching Netflix, going for a run, etc…
No matter how many homework assignments you have to do, midterms you have to study for, or extracurricular obligations to go, you should block out 30 minutes to an hour each day of time to relax, decompress, and recharge your battery. Everyone has to take a break at some point, and there’s only so much studying you can do before your brain becomes overloaded with information. The benefits you will gain from giving your brain a break will outweigh the lost time that you could have spent working, albeit unproductively given your burnt out state of mind.
As for ideas of ways to relax, there’s always Netflix, Popcorn Time, coloring, exercise, playing an instrument or performing, whatever works for you.
3) Surround yourself with people who make you happy, who don’t talk shit about you behind your back or criticize you or judge you for anything. Don’t settle because you think you won’t find anyone like that, because you will.
They say that the quality of a person’s character is the sum of the qualities of the people they surround themself with. I don’t know how true this actually is, but I do know that I’ve made the mistake so many times of being friends with people who didn’t make me feel good about myself and who I didn’t feel like I could be myself around. There were “friends” in my life that I didn’t feel like I could go to when I felt like hell because they made me feel bad enough when I felt good. However, I was so insecure about starting over friend-wise that I convinced myself that everything was my fault and that I needed to change.
Looking back now, I become saddened by how unhappy I was and the person I became just to please people who didn’t truly value me for me.
I’ve only been in college for six weeks, yet I have made friends who bring me up, who appreciate me for all of my quirks, for all the good and the bad, even when I mess up, they still constantly support me and are there for me. As Marilyn Monroe once said, “...But if you can’t handle me at my worst, you sure as hell don’t deserve me at my best.”
Moral of the story is, don’t settle or surround yourself with people who don’t make you happy. It’s better to be on your own for awhile and look for positive people, rather than immerse yourself in toxic environment just for the sake of not being alone.
Look, college is hard and stressful enough as it is. You don’t need to keep people in your life that are making it even worse
4) Make sure you’re happy.
This point is similar to #3 except that it applies to the people in your life, where you live, what you’re doing with your life, etc...Make sure you’re doing what makes you happy. A friend once told me that the only person who’s going to be with you for your entire life is you, so you better make sure you’re happy with yourself. Of course, this doesn’t mean give a big middle finger to the universe and do whatever you want without consideration or respect, do what makes you happy while hopefully not bringing harm on anything or anyone else.
