The Illustrated Self-Care Bible
CONTENTS
COVER
TITLE PAGE
FOREWORD
INTRODUCTION THERAPIES
WHAT IS SELF-CARE?
THE SELF-CARE CONTINUUM
THE BENEFITS OF SELF-CARE
HOW TO USE THIS BOOK
PART ONE: TAKING CARE OF YOUR BODY
INTRODUCTION
WHAT IS SLEEP?
SLEEP STATES
HOW MUCH SLEEP?
INSOMNIA
BREAKING THE INSOMNIA HABIT
A HEALTHY BEDROOM
LEARNING TO RELAX
FOOD AND SLEEP
BEDTIME
BATH TIME
NIGHT THOUGHTS
FOOD AND DRINK
NUTRITION
DRINKS
TIMING OF MEALS
MINDFUL EATING
VITAMINS AND MINERALS
TAKING SUPPLEMENTS
SUPPLEMENT FORMS
DAIRY
EGGS
FRUIT AND FRUIT JUICE
GRAINS
HERBS, SPICES, AND SEASONINGS
LEGUMES (PULSES)
MEATS
MUSHROOMS
NUTS AND SEEDS
POULTRY
SEAFOOD AND FISH
VEGETABLES, NON-STARCHY
VEGETABLES, STARCHY
EXERCISE
EXERCISE FOR YOU
AEROBIC WORKOUTS
PILATES
PILATES POSTURE AND BREATHING
PILATES BETTER BALANCE
YOGA
MORNING YOGA ESSENTIAL
YOGA TONING OF THIGHS AND BOTTOM
YOGA TONING OF ABDOMINALS AND WAIST
YOGA TONING OF ARMS, BUST, AND NECK
MASSAGE
ORIGINS OF MASSAGE
MASSAGE STYLES
BENEFITS OF MASSAGE
MASSAGE TECHNIQUES
MASSAGE AS SELF-TREATMENT
NECK SELF-MASSAGE
ABDOMINAL SELF-MASSAGE
MENSTRUAL PAIN SELF-MASSAGE
EYES AND FEET SELF-MASSAGE
PART TWO: TAKING CARE OF YOUR MIND EMOTIONAL WELLNESS
HEALING THE MIND
EXPLORING POSSIBILITIES
STARTING TO MEDITATE
CULTIVATING ATTENTION
MINDFULNESS OF BREATHING
STRESS
EMOTIONAL RESILIENCE
FORGIVENESS
SELF AND SELFLESSNESS
IDENTITY AND TRUE SELF
CONNECTING WITH NATURE
FINDING SIMPLICITY
COMMUNICATION
KINDNESS AND COMPASSION
PART THREE: TAKING CARE OF YOUR LIFE BALANCE SOCIAL WELLNESS
FRIENDS AND HOME
SUPPORT SYSTEMS
SETTING BOUNDARIES
COMMUNICATION
ASKING FOR HELP
SPATIAL WELLNESS
FINANCES AND WORK
MONEY MANAGEMENT
WORKPLACE WELLNESS
TIME MANAGEMENT
OPPORTUNITIES FOR LEARNING
SETTING GOALS
PART FOUR: REFERENCE AND RESOURCES
SELF-CARE CHECKLIST
SETTING GOALS TEMPLATE
EXERCISE PLANNER
HEALTHY EATING TEMPLATE
BUDGET TEMPLATE
USEFUL RESOURCES
FURTHER READING
COPYRIGHT
ABOUT THE PUBLISHER
FOREWORD
When life is busy and you’re juggling multiple demands, you may often be the last person you take care of. There’s no doubt that other people’s needs and demands matter, but it’s important to look after your own health and well-being, too.
The Self-Care Bible helps put the emphasis back on you, so that self-care becomes an essential part of your everyday life. It outlines exactly why your health and well-being is crucial and the reasons why you should focus on it regularly, not occasionally or when you happen to remember.
The book explores three key areas of self-care—physical, emotional, and social/life-balance—and offers practical advice, tried-and-tested techniques, and ideas for incorporating self-care habits into your daily routine.
There’s a wealth of information about wellness and how you can nurture yourself to a healthier, more balanced life. Emphasizing the power of natural health, this guide gives step-by-step exercises and advice on healing remedies, massage, meditation, yoga, Pilates, and nutrition.
The emotional wellness section offers insight into common struggles, including better ways of coping with stress, developing emotional resilience, learning to be kinder and more compassionate, and to practice forgiveness. Social wellness topics covered include developing support systems, setting boundaries, and workplace wellness, plus the all-important issue of knowing how and when to ask for help.
Use this book to help nourish, inspire, encourage, and motivate you to live a healthier, fuller life. Whether you read it from start to finish, or dip into it when you feel the need, enjoy the variety of ideas and inspiration it contains and take pride in giving yourself the self-care you deserve. The templates and checklists at the back of the book will help you plan out and put these new ideas into action.
Enjoy exploring the information at your fingertips and, most of all, enjoy developing your own regular self-care habits.
RACHEL NEWCOMBE, GENERAL EDITOR
INTRODUCTION THERAPIES
WHAT IS SELF-CARE?
Self-care isn’t a new concept. However, it has become a lot more popular in the mainstream in recent years, and rightly so. It’s a buzzword that you may have seen on social media and in magazines, but it’s about more than just looking and feeling good. Put simply, self-care is the act of looking after and nurturing yourself—physically, emotionally, and socially.
Discovering and focusing on self-care will allow you to live your best life.
In today’s hectic and often stressful world, it’s easy to forget to focus on yourself and to look after your needs. When life is busy, it’s only natural to get caught up in work, taking care of children, rushing from one place to another, and enjoying an active social life. With so many commitments to juggle, it’s no wonder that looking after yourself can get overlooked.
It’s often only when things “catch up” with you, when physical or mental health problems occur, that you realize you matter, too, and you need to stop putting yourself last.
That’s why self-care is so important. When you learn to focus on self-care, you can integrate it into your daily life to form part of your regular routine. Self-care is about achieving a better balance in your life and knowing when to give in, stop, and look after you. It’s learning about your needs, how you cope best in certain situations, and how you can manage difficult issues better. And it’s about finding things that you enjoy doing and including them in your life as much as possible.
Ultimately, discovering self-care involves learning to look after and love yourself so that you can experience optimum wellness physically, mentally, and emotionally, allowing you to live your life as the best version of yourself.
SELF-CARE IS NOT
—
Self-care is not about being selfish. It is not a selfish act to focus on yourself and to take time to look after you; it’s actually it’s a self-respectful act. The more you take time to look after yourself and keep your physical, emotional, and social wellness in check, the more energy you’ll have for focusing on your work, friends, loved ones, and the commitments and activities in your life. By developing regular self-care practices, you’re taking control and empowering yourself.
ELEMENTS OF SELF-CARE
—
The art of developing self-care habits doesn’t involve one single act. Instead, there are multiple elements involved, from improving areas of your physical wellness routine and looking after your emotional health, to taking care of your life balance and achieving a better social wellness. It is incremental and holistic.
PHYSICAL SELF-CARE
—
Physical self-care involves taking care of your body in order to improve your physical wellness. One of the key elements of keeping your body moving and maintaining the energy you need to get through the day is to ensure that you get a good night’s sleep. It is also important to learn how to truly relax and develop healthy night-time routines, giving yourself the best chance for your body to unwind and find deep and restorative sleep.
What you choose to eat and drink plays a major role in your physical wellness. This involves making healthy choices about the foods and drinks that will make you feel good and give you the right balance of the energy and nutrition you need.
Keeping active and looking after your physical wellness is a key part of self-care.
Incorporating self-care into your life will help you toward a happier, healthier you.
Exercising is a vital element of physical self-care, too, and it helps if you can find forms of exercise that not only meet your body’s exercise needs, but that you enjoy doing and can incorporate into your daily life.
EMOTIONAL SELF-CARE
—
Mental health plays an equally important role to physical health, yet it is often overlooked. Emotional self-care practices involve finding ways to take care of your mind, from managing stress and developing emotional resilience, to learning to meditate and exploring new ideas for creative pursuits.
Emotional self-care also involves finding out more about your true self and developing skills such as kindness, compassion, and improved communication to help you cope better with challenging situations at home or work.
SOCIAL SELF-CARE
—
Social self-care involves taking care of your life balance and improving your social wellness. How you live, the support systems you have, and how you communicate with other people can all affect you. So too can your work and home life factors, such as how you deal with money and time management. Focusing on ways to improve your social habits and develop healthy social relationships can boost and re-balance your social self-care needs, allowing for deeper and more nurturing relationships.
Developing a self-care routine won’t happen overnight. It’s a gradual process of finding what works best for you and the areas you most need to focus on, then applying those to your own life. The more you practice self-care, the more it will become second-nature, and the happier and healthier you can be.
THE SELF-CARE CONTINUUM
—
Self-care plays an important role in all areas of your physical, emotional, and social wellness. While it is good to focus on what you can do to help yourself, it’s also important to acknowledge that there are times when you might not be able to manage your health entirely on your own. In fact, asking for and accepting help and advice when you need it is a key component of positive and successful self-care.
Health professionals view the concept of self-care as a continuum. This means that there are situations in which you are fully responsible as an individual for your health and can consciously help yourself and make your own choices. But there are also times when other people should play a part and be professionally responsible by providing you with pure medical care.
The self-care continuum is like a sliding scale. On one side there is you, the individual providing yourself with pure self-care, and on the other side there are health or medical professionals providing you with pure medical care. In between there’s a gradual changing scale of scenarios on the continuum where the level of your own involvement and that of other people evolves as required. An example of this “in between” are the situations where you need advice or guidance from other people, but can apply their advice to your self-care, without requiring pure medical care.
PURE SELF-CARE
—
Pure self-care means that you are responsible as an individual for looking after and managing your health and well-being. This affects the daily choices you make, your lifestyle decisions, and how you self-manage minor ailments and cope with long-term health conditions.
Daily choices are the actions over which you have complete control. This includes the choices you make about things on a daily basis, such as what you eat and drink, what time you get up in the morning, what time you go to bed, and how you manage your hygiene.
Lifestyle choices are the decisions you make about what you do in your free time, as well as in your work. Examples include whether or not you smoke, how often you exercise, what type of diet you follow, what type of job you choose to do, what hobbies and interests you have, etc.
If you experience minor ailments, such as a sore throat, cough, insect bite, cuts, or bruises, then in many cases you’re able to use your existing knowledge to make decisions about how to manage these issues yourself. Or you may need to seek help and advice from a natural health practitioner or pharmacist and use their guidance to help you self-manage the ailment.
Pure medical self-care can be necessary in the cases of severe or sudden health concerns.
In many cases, if you have a long-term health condition you can often learn to self-manage it without the need to constantly see a health professional, unless a change occurs. For example, in the case of asthma you can manage your health by using inhalers as prescribed, or if you have anxiety, you can take care of yourself by taking prescription medicine or having treatments as advised.
PURE MEDICAL CARE
—
At the other end of the self-care continuum is pure medical care. These are the situations and circumstances where you require help beyond pure self-care. This is where you put yourself in the hands of health and medical professionals who become responsible for supporting your health.
Pure medical care becomes essential if you have a sudden, unexpected accident or illness, have major mental health problems, or suffer from major trauma.
Acute conditions are those that suddenly and unexpectedly happen, such as a stroke, heart attack, an accident at work, or being involved in a car crash. These are situations where you need to turn to medical professionals for help and care (and where it would be damaging to your health and well-being if you did not).
While long-term mental health issues, such as depression, can be successfully managed through self-care (often with guidance and intermittent support), if you experience sudden, acute major mental health problems, then in-hospital psychiatric care may become necessary. In such cases, medical professionals become responsible for looking after you in the best way possible.
In situations where major trauma occurs, such as experiencing severe injuries or a serious car accidents, pure medical care is essential. In these cases, the responsibility for looking after your health and well-being lies with healthcare professionals.
Pure medical care continues until you recover and you can then resume the process of self-care again.
THE BENEFITS OF SELF-CARE
There are numerous benefits to be gained from maintaining self-care. As you begin to regularly incorporate self-care practices into your daily life, you’ll notice positive changes occurring—physically, emotionally, and socially—and you’ll begin to feel happier and healthier.
Small changes can have a big impact, and that’s certainly true for self-care. Self-care involves consciously choosing to do things that nourish or improve your wellness. The more you practice self-care and integrate the habits into your everyday routine, the more benefits you’ll gain.
Looking after yourself will make you feel stronger, more positive, empowered, in control, and better equipped to face life’s ups and downs head on. Self-care can help reduce stress and enable you to sleep better and deal with difficult emotions. The benefits aren’t just personal—they can impact on all areas of your life, from your relationships and lifestyle, to your work and productivity.
From a practical point of view, self-care isn’t hard to do, nor is it time-consuming to work on. It has the benefit of being accessible to anyone, and there are plenty of ways to incorporate elements of self-care into your life without spending money.
Here’s an insight into just some of the many benefits you could unlock from taking time to focus on yourself and working on your self-care strategy.
MORE ENERGY
—
Regularly practicing self-care, such as eating heathier meals, knocking insomnia on its head, and engaging in exercise you enjoy can result in increased energy. In turn, having more energy helps put the zest back in your life and has many positive benefits, as outlined below.
IMPROVED SELF-CONFIDENCE AND SELF-ESTEEM
—
Taking positive actions to nurture yourself through self-care boosts self-confidence and self-esteem. Self-care can make you feel happier and healthier, more confident in your own self-knowledge, and more mentally connected and in control—even when life throws you a curveball.
BETTER DIET AND NUTRITION
—
Physically, your body will benefit from having a healthier, more nutritionally balanced diet and from getting a better range of vitamins and minerals. Expanding your diet and exploring new food options will mean you’re eating a better variety of nutrients, boosting your energy and, in turn, helping your overall physical health.
GAIN A BETTER UNDERSTANDING OF YOURSELF
—
Taking time to focus on yourself gives you the opportunity for introspection. Sometimes it might be hard to face reality and bring up old wounds and worries. But working through these issues can result in gaining a far better understanding of yourself and how to find reserves of strength and coping mechanisms for the next of take over knocks.
IMPROVED SELF-COMPASSION
—
The more you learn to take care of yourself, the better you feel. As you practice self-care, you’ll find that your levels of self-compassion will increase, you’ll be less critical about yourself, and you’ll feel more positive and understanding.
IMPROVED ABILITY TO RELAX
—
You might think you know how to relax, but not all forms of relaxation are equal. If your previous relaxation attempts simply involved slumping in front of the TV at the end of the day, self-care techniques could be a revelation. You’ll gain an improved ability to relax, both for short periods during the day and at the day’s end, and be able to put them into practice to help you feel healthier and more energized. Plus, self-care activities that help you relax can help reduce stress and anxiety, too.
The benefits of self-care can impact your relationships and your way of living at any stage of your life.
Taking time to relax can help reduce stress and anxiety in a busy life.
FEELING MORE SOCIALLY CONNECTED
—
As you focus more on your social self-care needs, you’ll feel more socially connected. You’ll nurture the social connections that are most important to you, identify ones that aren’t, and develop a stronger support system.