How to Create Your OWN Self-Care Routine in Easy Steps

Self-Care is about taking care of yourSELF

Some may have mixed feelings about practicing self-care.

You may be wondering why you need to have a regular self-care routine.

Because let’s face it, the word self-care has been overused, and the self-care culture may be a bit overdone. This may devalue the importance of having a self-care routine.

But we already know that self-care is important. I think we can all agree that there are an endless number of ideas out there on how to practice self-care. Let me just say here that it’s more than just fancy spa days, face masks, “treating yourself” with shopping, and bubble baths.

It’s about prioritising yourself, your needs, and most importantly, you don’t need to rely on other people. There’s a reason why it’s called self-care… you’re doing it for yourSELF!

This blog post is going to outline how to develop your own self-care routine that you do regularly, to make sure that you are always taking time for yourself, doing things that you 100% enjoy.

How to Develop a Self-Care Routine

Step 1 – Set your non-negotiable, non-productive days

Let’s put it on the table – your self-care is non-negotiable.

It needs to be just as important as your work meetings, your exercise, and everything else. Treat this routine just like how you would treat an important meeting.

For quite some time, I’ve been using this rule of thumb. Let me tell you, since using this I have felt the difference it had made to my productivity and how I hardly have any days where I completely burn out. You feel much more relaxed and rested. When you feel relaxed and rested, you actually become more productive! Hence, it’s okay to have unproductive days once in a while!

It’s quite funny because ironically, the more time you set for intentional rest, the more productive you become. When I had never set rest days, I burned out for sure!

Now here is the rule of thumb:

• ONE hour of non-productive time a DAY (minimum)
• ONE rest day a WEEK
• Three days (in a row) rest days a MONTH – (works as a three day weekend)
• ONE week of non-productive days a QUARTER

Above is just a guide. You can adjust the number of days based on what works for you. I personally find that this is a good number that doesn’t give me so much rest that I get too comfortable with not doing anything, and also doesn’t give me less rest that I get burned out. That’s something for you to consider when adjusting the rule of thumb above.

Remember that these are non-negotiable rest days. It’s when you are NOT doing anything productive nor are you pressuring yourself to do work.

This is the time for you to be lazy as much as you want, and have as much fun as you want. This is your time, it’s your self-care!

Here’s something quite funny that you might come across while you’re having your non-negotiable rest day – you may find yourself wanting to work on something. Just like how on days where you should be working, you want to take a rest, on days when you should take rest, you want to work. Kind of funny right?

On some of my Saturday rest days, I sometimes find myself wanting to do more work, but I stop myself because the rest day is non-negotiable. As you can see, there’s also that benefit as well. When you have rest days, you find yourself having more motivation and drive to work. That just levels up your productivity game!

So ironically setting intentional rest increases your productivity, Sit on that for a bit.

Step 2 – Discover your love language

If you haven’t read Gary Chapman’s book, the Five Love Languages , you definitely should! Yes, it’s intended for those in relationships, but you can use them for just yourself as well! You can incorporate the five love languages into your own life to practice self-care.

OR you can discover your own love language and do self-care activities that meets that love language. This is because as I said earlier, there are so many self-care ideas out there, it’s hard to figure out where to start. If you know your love language, it would be easy to narrow down a list of self-care activities.

You can discover your love language in a couple of ways. There’s the short way, and there’s a long way. Let’s go to the long way first.

The long way is practicing all the five love languages on yourself and discover for yourself which activities that you enjoy the most. I have written a separate blog post on how to practice the five love languages on yourself, and there are plenty of ideas that you can use to practice them in your own life when you’re doing self-care!

If you are not familiar with the love languages, we’ll list them here:

Words of Affirmation

It’s where we say simple statements of affirmations such as compliments and words of appreciation. When we’re doing self-care, we’re saying them to ourselves!

But don’t worry, there are many words of affirmations self-care activities that doesn’t just involve talking to yourself. A few ideas you may consider incldue:

1. Writing a letter to your future self.
2. Don’t say anything negative about yourself in front of anyone.
3. Compliment yourself in the mirror every time you see your reflection.

Quality Time

It’s when you give yourself undivided attention. It may sound cringe to “go on dates with yourself”, but you don’t have to make it cringe! A huge benefit of doing things on your own is that you get to figure out what you like doing. You don’t have to worry about the other person not liking it, you just worry about what you think.

These ideas include:

1. Taking a Walk – doesn’t matter where, as long as you’re out of your house and outside.
2. Exploring your city – you’ll be surprised on how many places you still haven’t been too!
3. Sit down and do nothing – yes this is a thing. This is honestly my favourite activity. I have the time of my life when doing this.

Physical Touch

This is when you feel love through physical touch. This may include:

1. Doing skincare – I never knew that this counts! When you take care of your skin, you are meeting the love language of physical touch!
2. Having a mini spa day – have to include this somehow!
3. Take a bubble bath – also have to include this too!

Receiving Gifts

This is where you give yourself a gift that reminds you on how much you care for yourself, and love yourself.

They do not have to be expensive! Your worth has nothing to do with how much a gift costs. It’s more about the thought that was put in.

Here are some ideas on gifts you can give yourself:

1. Do a parade of gifts – whether that’d be a box of chocolate, or food delivered to you, it’s a gift that reminds you of what you enjoy and helps you relax.
2. Get a living gift – where you purchase a plant and you nurture it! This is for all the plant lovers!
3. Keep a gift idea notebook – Every time you think of something that you want to buy, write it down under gift ideas. Then when the time comes for you to get something for yourself, you can look at the list of gifts. This is also the best technique (from personal experience) to delay gratification. It helps you to not make impulsive purchases. By writing something down before you get it, and then revisiting the gift idea notebook again, you may find yourself not wanting to get it anymore!

Acts of Service

Doing tasks and actions for yourself, which would make your life easier and less stressful in the long-run!

Here are some ideas:

1. Declutter your spaces.
2. Do some major acts of service for yourself – this may include washing your car, painting your room, cooking a meal, etc.
3. Give your room a makeover.

So pretty much with all five of these love languages, you can try out activities for each and discover for yourself what you enjoy doing the most. If you find yourself enjoying the quality time activities and feel recharged every time you do them, then quality time is probably your love language.

If you find yourself recharged every time you get a gift for yourself, receiving gifts may be your love language.

Now here is the short way….

take the quiz on the Love Languages website.

Wait, this whole time there was a quiz??

Yes there was, and you can definitely take it if you just want to know right away.

But the reason why you may want to do the long way instead is that you get to do the discovery yourself, instead of having a quiz result tell you what makes you feel better.

Step 3 – Brainstorm like crazy & keep a list

It may seem a bit overwhelming when you have the abundance of self-care ideas out there, and the need to discover your love language so you can narrow down those activities. I don’t blame you, it’s easy to get indecisive.

That’s why it’s important to remember that you get to pick and choose what works best for you so you can recharge your batteries in a way that works for you.

Now, remember that the non-negotiable rest days that we had set above, you’re never going to have the excuse that you don’t know what to do, because you are going to be having a go-to list of self-care activities. You’ll never run out of ideas because not only will this list be long, it’s going to be continuously added overtime, each time you come up with something.

Here is the best benefit about having rest days – you get to discover hobbies and passions that you would’ve never discovered if you didn’t have any rest days. I know that with me, I discovered my hobby of going on coastal walks and hikes by the beach during my rest days.

Imagine if you never had a rest day and just spent every single day working. Not only do we get burned out in the process, we never get to discover things that we never even knew about ourselves. Rest is not just about being lazy, it’s about discovering things that you don’t know about yourself. It’s about discovering new ways to make yourself happy and feel fulfilled. You discover your passions that could someday make an impact to this world.

I guess technically with that last sentence, you technically end up doing something self-less by doing self-care. :))

So that there are no excuses at all, here is the link to my self-care Pinterest board:

Discover your endless list of self-care ideas HERE!

It’s Okay to Be SELFish with your SELF-care

We’ll just be honest here, self-care might feel a bit selfish… and that’s okay.

As much as it’s human nature for us to want to help people in the best way we can, if we feel burned out, we’re not going to be able to help them any way.

Just think of your phone, your phone does a lot of things for you. From contacting people, to social media, to keeping you entertained through music and videos, it’s all for you. But there comes a time when the battery is low, and it needs to charge. You can’t expect your phone to continue to do all these things for you if their battery is low right? So that’s why it needs rest and charge until the battery is full again.

It’s the same thing with us as human beings! We can do a lot of things for people. But, when our battery is low, we can’t expect ourselves to be able to give all we have like how we usually do. Just like our phones, we need to rest and recharge until our battery is full again, so then we can go back to helping other people.

So if we have that compassion for our phone battery being low and we let it charge, let’s have compassion for ourselves and give ourselves the necessary self-care we need to recharge.

-Lauren 😊

Book(s) this post was inspired by:

(not sponsored in any way!)

• Five Love Languages – Gary Chapman

Disclaimer: If you think that any of what I had written was good, the credit actually belongs to the one whose book was the inspiration for this post. If there’s anything on here that you think is quite stupid, that’s 100% blame on me 🙂

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