Self-care may sound like a fluffy wellness word, but experts emphasize it’s deeply important. Without self-care, someone can feel burned out, depressed or anxious. Many people also find that their relationships suffer when they don’t take time for self-care.Taking good care of yourself is crucial for having the physical, mental, and emotional energy to accomplish your goals. Just like a car needs regular maintenance to run properly, so do we. Without self-care, we break down.

What Are the Benefits of Self-Care?

<ul>
<li>Get 8 hours of sleep a night.</li>
<li>Go for a walk in nature. Incorporating movement into your routine is important for physical self-care</li>
<li>Eat a nutrient-rich meal. Not getting enough essential nutrients can lead to feeling mentally and physically drained.</li>
<li>Listen to a podcast. This is an example of mental self-care, and it can be done at the same time as physical self-care.</li>
<li>Meditate.</li>
<li>Journaling is an effective form of emotional self-care because it can help you process and understand your emotions.</li>
<li>If you have religious beliefs, connecting with like-minded individuals at a church, temple or mosque is a way to practice spiritual and social self-care.</li>
<li>Volunteer in your area.</li>
<li>Meet a friend for coffee. Studies show a direct link between friendships and life satisfaction.</li>
</ul>

Ways to Practice Self-Care Ideas

<ul>
<li>Physical: This type of self-care is taking care of your body - getting enough sleep, making sure to work movement into your day, and fueling your body with nourishing food.</li>
<li>Mental: It starts with paying attention to how you’re talking to yourself.</li>
<li>Emotional: It is about understanding your emotions. Journaling and therapy are examples of emotional self-care.</li>
<li>Spiritual: Connecting to a higher purpose can be a form of self-care. For some people, this is tied to religion, but it doesn’t have to be.</li>
<li>Social: It involves spending time with people you enjoy.</li>
<li>Financial: It involves budgeting, financial planning, and managing debt.</li>
</ul>

Self-Care Ideas: The Types of Self-Care

Ease your stress with any of these easy self-care ideas

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Self-Care Ideas

While you may think of self-care as enjoying rose petal-infused bubble baths, that’s not all it is. There are several different self-care ideas and types, all of which are important for your physical, mental, and emotional health.

To say the COVID-19 pandemic is stressful is an understatement, but one silver lining is that it’s made more people realize the importance of self-care.

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10 Easy Self-Care Ideas That Can Help Boost Your Health

Easy Self-Care Ideas That Can Help Boost Your Health

There is a positive relationship between how much fun you have at work and how prosocial, ethical, and altruistic you are with your colleagues. So even if fun doesn't increase your performance, it increases your desire to be friendly and avoid being a toxic colleague. Organizational programs to support fun activities seem to significantly reduce turnover, but teams led by managers who support such activities perform worse. The key lesson for managers is if you over-optimize for fun and experiences, you may sub-optimize for performance and productivity.

Fun has surprising benefits

Research shows that over 75% of college-educated workers expect passion to be a key ingredient in their career choices. Yet, throughout human history, work was mostly work, and enjoying it was an exception. For example, ancient Greeks and Romans regarded work as something to give to slaves. Medieval peasants typically worked half a day. The Protestant work ethic saw work as a moral obligation rather than a hedonistic pursuit.

Work and fun didn't always mix

Assuming we all want to work in places that are entertaining or amusing is misguided. <ul><li>Millennials and Gen Xers tend to score higher on individualistic traits, which predict more hedonistic and self-indulgent work environments.</li><li>Extroverted and agreeable individuals desire fun workplaces.</li><li>Excessive work involvement increases the likelihood of risking other areas of life, including family, relationships, and health, and leads to burnout.</li></ul>

Differences in the degree to which people need fun at work

We expect the evolution of work to provide more opportunities for people to thrive and enjoy their careers. In 1930, Milton Keys predicted that technology would be so advanced in the future that we would work only 15 hours a week. Although he was wrong, we should consider whether the extra twenty hours most people put in each week has anything to do with enjoyment or our passionate relation to our jobs and careers.

Working more hours

Research shows that loving your job improves your creative performance at work by nine percent. Similarly, there is at most a nine percent overlap between how much you love your job and how well you perform at it. Those who love their jobs may be terrible performers, and those who are miserable at work can be among the top-performing employees. Still, extrinsic rewards such as pay, status, and titles do nearly nothing to improve people's job performance. So, having employees who care about their job is still your best outcome.

Love for the work does not always equal performance

There’s a positive relationship between how much fun you have at work and your propensity to be nice and to avoid being a toxic colleague.

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What science says about having fun at work

When we spend time in nature, there is always something fascinating and beautiful for our attention to move toward, but nothing that demands our full focus. This state of meandering that can revive an exhausted brain is known as soft fascination. Recent research found that walking through a local park or spending some time observing a stream physically quiets the brain.

Soft fascination

Just like running exhausts our muscles, focused attention many days in a row can make decision-making hard and willpower beyond low. What you need is to give your brain a rest from effortful concentration and stress without becoming bored. There are many ways to approach this, such as engaging in hobbies. Yet, according to science, the best way to rest your brain is to spend time in nature.

Effortful concentration can exhaust our brains

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The Science of How to Use Nature to Reboot Your Exhausted Brain

Avoid taking too much risk when the economy is booming. Likewise, avoid buying into things you don't understand. Things only become troublesome when you make bad investment decisions during periods of high growth. For example:<ul><li>You bought houses without income in the 2000s.</li><li>Or you bought stocks and crypto with borrowed money over the last year.</li></ul>

Tips on investing

When you recognise economic patterns, you'll know that the current trends are expected and normal. <ul><li>Knowledge. Learn more about how the economy and stocks work. When you have better knowledge of the history of finance, you won't fall for too-good-to-be-true investments. Read good books on personal finance that have stood the test of time.</li><li>Mindfulness. Knowledge will not give you full peace of mind, so practising some form of Mindfulness or Stoicism can help detach from money stress.</li></ul>

The economy is affected by various factors out of your control

2022 is a year of inflation. It resulted from the huge disruption that Covid caused. The high inflation and low economic growth are all over the media. <ul><li>Inflation is getting higher</li><li>Stocks are down</li><li>People are starting to get fired</li><li>Companies are barely hiring</li></ul> Investment ads claim they have investment strategies to generate significant returns during inflation, yet famous hedge funds like Tiger Global are down 60%. So don't be seduced by investment ads that try to profit from fear and greed.

The current economic situation

When we're faced with economic problems, we can view them in two ways:<ol><li>Up-close perspective: Looking at inflation, interest rates, debt, consumer spending, joblessness, etc.</li><li>Broad perspective: Looking at long-term trends and historical patterns.</li></ol> Taking a step back for a broader view can teach us about what's happening now.

Look at the big picture

Periods of high growth and low growth are not uncommon. For example, look at how the world went from the great 1920s to the Great Depression in the 1930s. Investor Howard Marks discusses the concept of cycles in his book, Mastering The Market Cycle. He states that the economy grows, on average, at a consistent pace. The economy will get stimulated and make people take more risks and consume more. In turn, this period often causes inflation and slows things down. Recessions and slowdowns are normal. However, when you invest long-term, these fluctuations won’t harm you.

Periods of high growth and low growth

It’s difficult to have peace of mind during periods of uncertainty, like the ongoing inflation. Here are some practical tips and perspective.

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How to Have Peace of Mind During High Inflation - Darius Foroux

Morning exposure to <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S2352721817300414">sufficient daylight</a> is also important for entraining the circadian rhythm, which is important for healthy sleep. So, while excessive sunbathing is unwise, so too is closeting yourself indoors without any sunlight at all.

The Morning Sun

In many parts of the world, there’s a deeply ingrained belief that sunny days make us feel more cheerful. It seems like common sense, but the scientific evidence is surprisingly equivocal.
Yes, there are individual studies supporting the link – for instance, in 2013, researchers at the Freie Universität Berlin reported that people surveyed on exceptionally sunny days felt more satisfied with life than people surveyed on cloudier days.

How The Sun Influences Our Mood

Flipping things around, even the idea that many of us are more prone to depression in the gloomier the winter months (known as ‘seasonal affective disorder’) is controversial. While too much sunshine is undoubtedly bad for your unprotected skin, sunlight exposure is also beneficial in many ways because it allows the body to create more vitamin D, which can <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/07315724.2015.1039866">reduce the risk of cancer</a> and <a href="https://www.karger.com/Article/Abstract/441266">lower blood pressure</a> among other health benefits.

Just The Right Sunlight

It's worth making the most of the sunshine, but be sure to keep your skin protected.

10 Easy Self-Care Ideas That Can Help Boost Your Health

What science says about having fun at work

The Science of How to Use Nature to Reboot Your Exhausted Brain

It's time to
Read like a Pro.

How to Have Peace of Mind During High Inflation - Darius Foroux

CURATED BY

10 Easy Self-Care Ideas That Can Help Boost Your Health

What science says about having fun at work

The Science of How to Use Nature to Reboot Your Exhausted Brain

It's time to Read like a Pro.

How to Have Peace of Mind During High Inflation - Darius Foroux

CURATED BY

It's time to
Read like a Pro.