7 Ways to Stay Motivated with your SELF-Care

And no, I am not going to tell you to go to the spa.

Self-care, it seems like, is such an overused word, it seems like it became so devalued.

But no matter how many times the word self-care has been used, it is still very important to prioritize.

No matter what we do, whether we are working, studying, or run a business, we need time for ourselves. Because think about this, no matter you do, you’re going to be interacting with people. Even if you don’t have a job, you’re still going to be interacting with people. That ‘s why you deserve some time with yourself… aka self-care.

I’ll admit, when we have busy schedules, self-care may be the easiest to neglect. However motivating yourself and staying motivated with your self-care is actually just as easy, when you put your mind to it.

That’s why, this blog post is going to outline seven ways to stay motivated with your self-care, so that it’s never something that you neglect.

1 – Have a Self-Care Routine

I have recently done a blog post on how to create your own self-care routine in easy steps. Creating a self-care routine involves setting a non-negotiable time for it, and knowing exactly what you’re going to be doing to recharge yourself regularly.

Doing a regular self-care routine where you’re doing nothing involving work or studies, and just doing things that are just for you, in turn would allow you to feel well rested and recharged. You’ll have new motivation and drive to do the things you usually do. But a big bonus, is that you may find yourself enjoying certain activities, that could turn into a passion, and we all know that having a passion can go anywhere.

Here are the steps to creating a self-care routine, which you can also read more on in the blog post that was linked:

1. Setting your rest days.

This is absolutely a non-negotiable one. You treat your self-care “time” like a very important appointment that you cannot miss. You wouldn’t just decide to skip an important work meeting or appointment when you felt like skipping it, do the same thing for your self-care.

You may also so that you may not have any time. But at any time in the day, you find yourself just mindlessly scrolling through your phone, or just watching TV, you just revealed to yourself a good time to set non-negotiable self-care time. You are not supposed to dread your self-care time. It’s understandable to dread your work meetings and appointments, but why would dread the time in your schedule for your self-care time? That self-care time is for you.

It’s okay to have days when you’re unproductive! You want to make sure that you reset and recharge yourself before you get to the point where you’re burned out.

2. Know your love language.

It’s no secret that there are many self-care ideas out there. You can look at Pinterest and you can see an endless amount of activities that you can do for self-care. If you’re like me and you’re very indecisive with little decisions, it’s going to be hard to choose one self-care idea.

That’s why it’s important to know your love language, because it will help a lot in narrowing down the self-care activities that you see everywhere. You know what activities you will like the most.

If your love language is acts of service over quality time, you’re probably most likely going to enjoy the self-care activities where you declutter your room, or wash your car, or cook something for yourself, than the self-care activities where you go for walks, spend time with yourself when you go and explore different things.

You can take the Love Language Quiz for the shortest way to find out OR if you want to go above and beyond, try activities for all love languages and then find out from there. Personally, that’s what I think is the most fun, that’s what I did, and that’s how I discovered my love language.

Read about how to practice the five love languages on yourself in the linked blog post.

3. Brainstorming

This continues from the last step, keep a list of self-care activities, whether they are with your love language or not. This is so when the time comes for your self-care appointment, you have never ran out of ideas, and there’s no excuse to skip it.

2 – Have a Self-Care Space at Home

I’m all about having different environments for different things. For example, my desk is just for work, and my bed would be for sleep.

Because imagine all of them mixed up together. Imagine if I used my bed for sleep and study, and I used my desk for watching TV. It doesn’t sound like a good picture doesn’t it?

My point here is that when it comes to our self-care, we want to have a space somewhere that we associate as a self-care space. Just like how we associate our bed for sleep, and our desk for work, we want to associate this certain space for our self-care.

Because let’s face it, our brain needs cues. When we have our bed, it cues our brain that it’s sleep. When we have our desk, it cues our brain that it’s time for work. So if we have our self-care with any of those things, our brain is going to get confused.

So how do we create a self-care space in our home? What if our home is small? What if I live with other people? There’s a solution, because I was in that same exact position.

First thing to do

The first thing to do is to actually take note of what spaces in the house you use for your every day activities. A good way to start is to think about what you do from the time you wake up and go to bed on a regular day. It may look like this:

• In the morning, you obviously just slept on your bed, your bed is a space for sleeping.
• Then once you wake up, you go to your desk to work on important things, your desk is for work.
• Then if the weather isn’t good for walking outside for your exercise, then you go to the corner of your room and do an at-home workout, your corner of that particular part of your room is for your exercise.

And I think you now get the point. You may find that there are some activities that you do that you don’t do in your house, and yeah… feel free to skip those. Your main focus is figuring out what spaces in your house that you do for different activities.

Then you do this…

Then the next thing you do is to find a space that you can be alone with no distractions. It may be a bit tricky if you have a house that’s small or you live with other people, and that’s fine. You can work with whatever you have. So, I decided that the place where I’ll be with my self-care is on my bed.

I live in a dorm (a tiny studio apartment), so I don’t have a living room. The only place I can really relax in is my bed. When I’m about to go to sleep, I spray sleep mist on my bed, and I associate the smell of that spray with sleep time. That’s why, when it’s my self-care time, I don’t spray the sleep mist until it’s bed time.

Then this happens…

Then that chosen space will only be for self-care. Every time you see that space, it’s associated with your self-care routine. Having a set self-care space at home tends to motivate you more to do your self-care. Just like how if you always see junk food in your kitchen, you’re going to want to eat that junk food most likely. Same thing if you always see a book everywhere, you’re more likely to want to read a book.

3 – Setting Your Non-Negotiable Rest Days and Hours

This is an expansion of the first step in your self-care routine. Here’s why you need to set non-negotiable rest, whether that’s for a day in a week, or for an hour in a day.

One, for obvious reasons if you do a lot of work with no rest, there’s a high chance for burn out… and from personal experience burn out is not fun.

Two, you have something to look forward to. I have realized from my personal experience was that when I had no rest day or hour to look forward to, it was extremely hard to motivate myself to work. But when I started setting non-negotiable rest days and hours, it became a lot more motivating to work. This was because, my brain knew that there was a reward in store for me for the hard work that I was doing.

And three, which I think is the most rewarding outcome for having rest days and hours is that you’re NOT allowed to do any work. It’s NON-NEGOTIABLE to do work. So, what do you do? Well, you just do anything other than work.

You can do some of the activities on your self-care list from your self-care routine. What you would find because you’re not working, is more motivation and drive to do your work. You may feel like you want to work even more, and that’s exactly why rest is so important because it’s going to give you that renewed recharged drive to continue with what you’re doing.

4 – Surrounding yourself with inspiration with a content diet

During the 2021 lockdown in Sydney (when I first wrote this blog post), I had to try my best to block ALL news from my devices because I have felt my anxiety levels increase and my stress by reading COVID-19 updates. When I didn’t control my feed, it was a lot harder to feel motivated to do anything, even my self-care.

Now, we don’t have to be in a lockdown, or in a global pandemic to surround yourself with much more positive and inspirational material. We should always be surrounding ourselves with material that is going to uplift us and motivate us, rather than drain us.

I mean how did you feel after reading the news?

How did you feel after scrolling one hour or more on social media?

How did you feel after watching rant videos on YouTube?

I can assume that it’s anything but feeling uplifted and positive.

Think about how eating junk food isn’t going to make our body the healthiest.

Same thing with consuming “junk” content. It’s not going to make our mind the healthiest.

That’s why it’s important to be mindful of the content that we are consuming, our diet is not about the food we physically eat.

Because if we are constantly feeling depleted and drained by the content we are consuming, it’s going to be a lot harder to motivate ourselves to even do self-care. Even though self-care is supposed to recharge us, it’s a lot harder to want to do it.

5 – Use Pinterest

I have been SO obsessed with Pinterest lately. I used to love Pinterest when I was 13, but I rediscovered my love for it just now. Pinterest is really good for a couple of things.

The first, is that there are endless self-care ideas on Pinterest.

Second, Pinterest is not for sharing your life, it’s meant to share inspiration, and that’s exactly what I feel when I go on Pinterest. I can go on Pinterest first thing in the morning and I actually do that because I can go on that app and feel so inspired for my day, when Instagram and Facebook gives me the opposite of that.

And that counts as self-care. When you are able to control what goes in your mind, and control what you get to see, that is self-care.

When you limit the amount of things that’s going to affect your mind, drain your energy, whatever it may be, that is self-care.

When you increase the positive and inspirational material, and decrease the negative material, you will be blown away on how much of a difference that makes. That all counts as self-care!

If you haven’t gotten a Pinterest account, I recommend that you do. You don’t have to follow anybody, you don’t need to have followers… you don’t even need to post anything. You can just have the account and use it to find inspiration. I love Pinterest, and I promise you, I’m not sponsored by them.

6 – REELS (hear me out here!!)

Okay, I don’t take credit for this one because I got this idea from one of my favourite YouTubers, Erin May Henry. She mentioned about one of the ways to increase your confidence is to watch reels BUT watch reels where you see confident women to increase your confidence.

I’m no expert on this, and I’m going to truthfully say that what I’m about to say is not 100% accurate, but from my personal experience, Instagram does pick up what you usually look at on the app, and then give you more of that content.

For example, with me, my explore page was filled with everything I was insecure about. Girls with flawless skin, bodies, in perfect relationships, on luxurious vacations… you can imagine how I felt after consuming all that content! My explore feed was made out this way, because I was engaging with these sort of posts.

But when I started following and engaging with more posts with inspirational, motivational, and educational quotes, with how to’s on various topics such as habits, personal development, and productivity, Instagram picked up on that, and therefore filled my explore page with exactly that.

It was the same when I started looking at business tips and Instagram tips posts. Instagram picked up on that! When I started looking at more posts on self-love and self-care, Instagram gave me more of that! Let me tell you, there’s not a post on my explore page where I felt insecure about myself.

As you can see, by changing what you consume and engage with on Instagram, you can actually end up controlling what you see on your feed and explore page!

And that’s how I am able to get the “right” reels on my explore page and reels feed. The Instagram Algorithm only puts in reels that are motivational and educational. The certain “niche” or “topic” of these reels are personal development, productivity, habits, and self-care. By watching those REELS, I end up feeling so much better with myself. Especially when I watch reels on self-care.

So I guess what I’m trying to say here is to watch reels BUT you need to make sure that your reeds feed and explore page is giving you reels that are going to uplift and motivate you, NOT make you feel insecure. Consume the type of content you want to see with Reels, and then let the Instagram algorithm take care of itself.

7 – Making Time for Your Health – such as eating habits and exercise

Last but not least, an important way to stay motivated with your self-care is to take care of your health in general. This includes your eating habits and exercise.

Now, I’m not going to expand on the obvious health benefits of eating healthy and exercising, you can go to the doctor with that.

And I’m not going to say this as an expert as well, but instead from personal experience.

From my personal experience, taking care of my health (physical & mental health!) is the number one motivator with my self-care. Why?

Well, first I am aware based on my own circumstances that healthy eating habits and exercise gives me many health benefits. When I commit to healthy eating habits and make time for exercise and follow through on it, it tells me that I care about my health and my body.

Because exercise and healthy eating habits to me isn’t about achieving a certain body goal. Exercise and healthy eating habits to me is about taking care of myself. For you, when it comes to motivating yourself with your self-care, taking care of your health in general is going to be key for you too.

Let’s face it, your brain always wants validation. Either from other people, or from based on what you follow through on. What I mean by this is that for example, if you want to be more productive, your brain always wants validation. Your brain either wants validation from other people saying “wow you’re being super productive!” OR if you’re always following through on your commitments such as your schedule, doing the tasks you said that you were going to do, and always completing your hardest tasks, your brain will take note of that, and will validate your goal to be productive.

Same with your health! Your brain is going to want validation. Your brain will either get validation from people saying “Wow, you’re so healthy. Always eating healthy and exercising!”, or your brain is going to notice that you always do things to take care of yourself with all your areas of life. When you’re always making sure that you’re eating healthier, consuming the right content, and making time for exercise, your brain will notice those things.

**Okay just remember here, this is my personal experience! There’s no accurate confirmation about all of this, this is what I have felt happened to me.

And when you always feel like you’re taking care of yourself, it will spread throughout all the other areas of your life, including your self-care.

You’re Supposed to Feel Selfish with Your Self-Care… and that’s okay!

I’ll admit, in the beginning of making self-care as part of my regular schedule and routine, it felt selfish. But guess what… it’s supposed to be selfish, and it’s not a bad thing!

Because with your self-care, you get to do things for yourself. You get to pick what you like doing, and you don’t have to worry about anyone else not liking the activity, because you’re doing doing it for you. That’s why it’s called self-care, you’re doing it for yourSELF.

At the end of the day, self-care isn’t about using your free time for yourself, it’s about making time for yourself. Making that commitment to yourself. Make yourself a priority, not a free time option.

-Lauren 😊

P.S I recommend you read these blog posts next:

How to Create Your Own Self-Care Routine

How to Take Care of Yourself With a Busy Schedule

Boundaries – an overlooked form of self-care

How to Practice the Five Love Languages on YOURSELF

Your Ultimate Personal Development CHECKLIST

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