Jenna Zaffino:
Hi. I'm Jenna. Today, we're going to explore some of the ways in which we can truly meet our needs for care on a moment to moment basis. We know the term self care has been co opted as a marketing term that often refers to luxury spa treatments and special occasions, really. And those things are wonderful, but they're not necessarily the tools in our toolbox that help us work through a challenging thought or interaction or sensation in our body. So today we're going to look at the things that literally don't cost anything and start to develop some tools that we can use at any given time to meet our own personal needs. I'll invite you to take out a notebook and something to write with and come into a space that's comfortable for you. You definitely don't need a swing for this exercise.
This is just my little comfort spot that I've set up for myself where I do a lot of self reflection. For you, let it be a place that feels supportive, calm, and relatively quiet so you can do some good thinking. Once you're ready, get comfortable, allow any tension that you are able to release from your body to just melt away, and let's take a few moments to just arrive in our seated position and open our mind to having some creative thoughts. We'll begin with the area of physical care since we usually have a good deal of sensations and information about what's going on in our body and how we need to work with it. So the first question that I have for you for your notebook is how do you care for yourself physically? And this could be anything from exercise to rest, nourishing food, breathing in accordance with the way that your body is supporting your breath, even brushing your teeth regularly. What are the ways in which you already care for your body physically? Take a few moments to write your answers down in your notebook, and then we'll come back to the next question. Next, I'd like to ask you what you already are doing to address or release stress and tension within your body. What do you know already works? Now this is gonna be different for each one of us.
Some of us need to get really calm and still and slow down and others of us need to really expend some energy and shake it off or dance it off or walk it off or whatever it is for you, scream into a pillow. Everybody manages and works with their stress differently. So I'm interested for you to look at what you do that you know works for you and let's keep this in the mindset of an act or action that you know releases tension without bringing on more stress in the process. So for some of us, you know, we've heard the t terms stress eating, let's say, and that can be a behavior that might feel good in the moment, but later might not feel so good physically. So let's think about the ways in which you address your stress that really work well for you without causing more stress in the process. Take a few minutes to write, and I'll be back with the next question. Next, we'll look at the ways in which you're supporting yourself mentally. Maybe you're a person who sees a mental health professional or has a regular check-in with a friend, family member, caregiver? Perhaps you're somebody who writes things down in a journal to get them out of your head? What are some of the things that you know work for you? I'll be back in just a sec to expand on that one.
Let's expand on the last question. But before we do that, let me just mention that in the event you find that you haven't necessarily been doing anything purposeful to support yourself mentally, I want to encourage you to avoid judging that fact and just simply note it as a place of awareness for maybe more attention in the future. We don't need to beat ourselves up over what we're not doing. This is all part of understanding our own needs and how to meet them simply. So after you have considered some of the ways in which you might be supporting yourself mentally, let's think about your thoughts. What are the ways in which you allow your thoughts to come and go? Are you allowing your thoughts to come and go? Or are you having those thoughts and holding on to them and ruminating on them? It's a really great space of awareness to understand how you interact with those thoughts and whether you are a person who can let them float on by or whether you're somebody who kind of keeps them activated with more inner dialogue. Again, try not to judge yourself. Be in a space where this is a place for awareness, where you simply get to understand, okay, this is a place I need to work a little bit harder on, or this is a place I'm doing really well with.
I'll be back in a few moments. So we've talked about your physical body. We've talked about your mental well-being. Let's talk a little bit about your emotional well-being. So we have our thoughts and we have our feelings and sometimes the 2 can feel like they're the same thing, but we wanna just expand our perspective a little bit and begin to differentiate between the 2. So the question I have for you is how do you care for your emotional well-being or your feelings? How do you allow your feelings to be felt, and what happens next? Let's take a few moments to consider this question and journal a little bit about your thoughts and what you might be doing in consideration of interacting with your feelings. Once you've had a chance to write about what you're already doing surrounding your emotional well-being, let's think about some other ways that you believe would be helpful to support your emotions and your feelings. What else could you do to support those things on a regular basis? Take a few moments and write, and then I'll be right back with our final question.
Lastly, we remember that our well-being not only involves our selves, but also the people we interact with on a regular basis. How do you receive and also give happiness within your relationships? How do you receive good feelings, and how do you offer them back to others who you choose to relate with on a regular basis? Let's think about the relationships you have and how you support them. And finally, on the subject of relationships, how could you enhance the relationships that are important to you? How can you get more of the good stuff, so to speak? Take a few moments to write down your ideas, and I'll be right back. So we've gone through our physical, mental, emotional, and relational areas of care. Now care is a verb as much as it is also a noun, and often it requires that some action is taken to animate it, to help it become more real in your day to day life. So looking at your answers to the questions that I asked, what tools can you pull out of your writing? What things are already working really well for you? And what are your thoughts about things that you might add in on a regular basis to care for your body, your mind, your heart, and your connection with others? These are the self care tools that often are overlooked as being, you know, just flippant or mindfulness. But when you determine which ones are really working well for you, it becomes your own personal toolbox that you can absolutely use on a daily basis. They're also inarguable.
They can't be wrong because you've determined that they're right. And in the event that a tool doesn't work for you, you can always just revise it or toss it out and choose a different one. I wanna encourage you to put some of these tools into play in the week ahead to weave this well-being into your life, remembering that when your body is asking for attention, you have these ways in which you care for it. When your mental health is asking for attention, you can interact with your thoughts in a way that maybe brings upon more relaxation and less stress. When your emotions are asking to be felt, you can do that without being overwhelmed with them. You can interact with them in a way that helps you feel like you're expressing yourself. And then finally, when you need that connection, you know who to reach out to and how to reach out to them. Maybe pick 1 or 2 tools and put them to the test this week.
Remember, every new habit, every new behavior requires little action steps towards becoming consistent with them. The ones that are the most exciting and interesting to you are most likely the ones that will become the strongest habits the sooner rather than later. So choose those, go forth into the week ahead, and remember, you are strong, resilient, and the small moments matter. I'll see you next time.
