Let’s start your new month by taking care of yourself right?
At the start of a new month (and a new year! Happy 2022!!), you may be wanting to start fresh. It completely makes sense that you want to start every single month fresh, and make the most out of it.
This blog post is all about starting fresh in a new month in terms of your self-care! We go through 10 simple self-care tasks that you can do at the start of a new month!
By doing these 10 things, you allow yourself to enter a new month with a clearer headspace and more motivation to tackle the goals that you have!
1 – Take a Day OFF (like seriously)
One of the first ways to self-care at the start of the month is to take a day off. Whether that’d be the first day of the month, or any time during that first week… take a day off!
Believe me, days off are productive, even when you are not doing anything.
It will prevent the burnout from overworking too much, and it also gives you room to discover yourself outside of your normal work/study life. Because if your life is all about work/study, go home, and repeat, then it’s hard to discover what else you’re about that way!
So give yourself a day off!
2 – Spend time ALONE
That’s why it’s called self-care right?
Not only do you need to take a day off, you also want to spend time with yourself… My favourite self-care motto is “me, myself, and I”.
Just note that you don’t just have to use your days off for alone time. You can use any time in the day. In fact, having alone time every day is actually pretty essential!
Having alone time is extremely important because it’s your opportunity to do things for yourself. You get to pick what you like doing, and you don’t have to worry about anyone else liking the activity. You’re doing it for you.
Self-care isn’t just using your free time for yourself, it’s about making time for yourself.
Make that commitment to yourself. Be your own priority, not your free time option.
3 – Do a Self-Care Activity that Meets Your LOVE LANGUAGE
If you aren’t aware of what love languages are, they’re all about the different ways to express love. They come from the book The Five Love Languages by Gary Chapman.
The five love languages include:
- words of affirmation
- quality time
- acts of service
- physical touch
- receiving gifts
It’ll be beneficial to know your love language because it will help you know what activities you should do more of.
There are an endless amount of self-love and self-care activities out there, and they’re not all going to work for you. By narrowing them down to your love language, it’ll be easier to decide.
For example, if your love language is quality time, then do a self-care activity that allows you to spend time with yourself! It may include solo movie marathons or going for a nature walk!
It’s worth doing a self-care activity related to your love language every month because it helps you consistently show self-love to yourself in general. It makes sense, if you find that you always feel amazing after doing a certain activity, then you want to do it!
If you want to read about how you can practice the five love languages on yourself, definitely read this blog post!
4 – Revise your Self-Care Routine
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.
Revising your self-care routine is great to do monthly because overtime, what we like and what recharges us changes.
Doing the same thing over and over again is going to lead to boredom. When it leads to boredom, it leads to not feeling as motivated to do our self-care. So, for us to always feel motivated to do our self-care routine, we want to switch things up once in a while!
If you find yourself getting a little sick of your current self-care routine, then switch things up a bit! It doesn’t have to be a big change, even just adjusting your self-care routine slightly can make a big difference!
For example, if your self-care routine always involved journalling, reading, and saying affirmations, you can switch it up by possibly adding a candle into the routine to change the environment, or switch reading for listening to a podcast. The possibilities are endless!
To read the steps on creating a self-care routine, read this blog post!
5 – Limit Consuming Time
This is all about limiting the amount of media we consume.
It’s essential to observe how you feel after consuming certain material or media.
At the start of the month, note down the media that makes you feel motivated and uplifted, and the media that drains you. Obviously, once you make this observation, you know that you need to consume more of the uplifting material rather than the draining ones.
Think about how you feel after reading the news.
Think about how you feel after scrolling for hours on social media.
Think about how you feel after you read a book or listen to a podcast.
There are some people who reflect on their physical food diet every month, and think about what foods they need to eat more of, and which ones they need to stay away from. Do the same for your mind food diet!
If you want an expansion on how taking care of our minds is just as important as taking care of our body, read this blog post!
6 – Pinterest FUN!!
Yes, Pinterest is a monthly self-care task… a fun one too!
Pinterest is a great place to find more ideas for the type of self-care activities you want to do. Since Pinterest is more of an idea-sharing app than a “display your life” app (I’m talking about you Instagram!), you can go on it without feeling like you’re comparing yourself.
If you haven’t gotten it yet, just get an account. You don’t need followers and you don’t even need to post anything. Just search what you want and save as many pins as you’d like.
You can do this task every month so you can try out new ideas to help you with your self-care! Remember what we said earlier about “switching your self-care routine” up? Pinterest can be a great way to find ideas on how you can shake things up.
For more ways to motivate yourself to do your self-care, read this blog post!
7 – Exercise
You can’t miss this! Yes, you should be doing this every day, but starting your month with physical movement can set you up for a good month!
Exercise as a monthly self-care task is not just about doing exercise once a month. It’s more about discovering new ways to get fit so you’ll always feel motivated to exercise.
We’ve mentioned this a couple of times already, but when we do the same thing over and over again, we’ll get bored. Then, when we get bored, we don’t feel that motivated.
Exercise is also so easily accessible, both with time and money! While you can get a gym membership, you can also find YouTube workouts for free and just go outside for a walk free of cost! Plus, there is nothing to lose by trying a new exercise routine every once in a while.
The worst thing that could happen is that you discover that it’s not really what you like doing, and you just go back to your original routine…. but at least you’ve tried!
8 – Reflect on how you can improve every area of your life
This includes your:
- Physical health
- Mental health
- Social Health
- Financial Health
- Intellectual Health
Self-care is literally about taking care of yourself. It’s just about about relaxing and having fun! And what does taking care of yourself include? It includes taking good care of every area of your life!
You can definitely check out this blog post on the self-care actions for every single area of your life. But every single month, you just want to think of ONE thing you can do to improve each of those areas of your life.
It doesn’t have to be anything too big or fancy, it can be sometime quick and simple. For example, to improve your physical health, you may just include eating greens in every single meal.
9 – Identify what GIVES you Self-Love and What DOESN’T
One easy self-care tip for more self-love is to have A LOT of self-awareness.
The tips that have been mentioned above all involve being self-aware in a way. You want to be self-aware because you want to do more of the things that work, and less of the things that don’t.
One of those things to be self-aware of is to know what gives you self-love and what doesn’t give you self-love.
For example, an activity that can give you more self-love is saying affirmations, and what doesn’t give you self-love is going on social media.
By making a list of each of those things, it’ll help you know what activities you should be doing more of, and what you shouldn’t be doing as much.
10 – Journal about anything
If you’ve heard of morning pages before, it’s pretty much when you just write down everything that’s on your mind immediately once you wake up in the morning.
However, for this one, we’re revising it a bit. Instead of morning pages, it’s monthly pages.
It’s still the same thing. At the start of every month, you just write down everything that is on your mind. You just brain dump everything that your mind is thinking of, and it can be pretty much anything.
By doing this, it helps you clear your headspace a bit, and it helps you think a little clearer on what you want to do for the new month. This is a self-care task because it helps you not feel too overwhelmed about all the other priorities and deadlines you have in your life.
Plus, this is an easy task to do as well. You’re just literally writing what’s going on in your mind! Once you finish it, you can have a look at it, and break downL
- What you need to get done now
- What you can get done during the month
- What can get done at anytime, and there’s no hurry
By doing this exercise, your mind feels a lot more clearer entering into a new month.
You Can Start Fresh Every Day
Just remember, that while this blog post is about the 10 self-care tasks to do at the start of the month, you are not limited to just doing them at that time! You can do it at anytime in the month, and you can always use each day as a new fresh start.
The last thing we want is to feel like we messed up a bit in the middle of the month, and then wait until the next month to start fresh again… it’s a bit of a waste of time.
That’s why, definitely use this list to start fresh any day of the month, and just be kind to yourself in the process!
-Lauren 😊
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Related Articles:
Self-Care ACTIONS for EVERY AREA of Your Life
Self-Care Tips for MORE Self-Love
7 Ways to Stay Motivated with Your Self-Care
How to Create Your Own Self-Care Routine
How to Practice the Love Languages on YOURSELF
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Hi, this is Lauren! I’m a law grad from Melbourne, Australia. On laurenbarri.com, I create content on all things personal development, productivity, self-care, and habits! I am super passionate about these topics because of how they helped me in all areas of my life, and I want to share it with others!
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