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Self-Care and Routine

This month, I decided to participate in the IndieWeb Carnival to encourage me to write more blog posts. Coincidentally, this month's prompt, "Self-Care and Routine", is quite applicable to some of the goals I've been working on in my life. Check out the prompt information and original post from Pablo Morales here.

Self-care has always seemed to be really tough to define for me, and I have a tendency to focus more on filling up my schedule with responsibilities and tasks rather than focusing on myself and my mental well-being. The past few months, I've been trying to think a lot more about what I can do to promote better mental health and self-care, while getting rid of my awkward feelings when I don't feel productive.

Some examples of things I've been trying to incorporate into my time as a form of self-care include watching more movies for fun, picking up reading again to get some time away from my devices and work, looking into other hobbies I can do that are less "productive-feeling" like cross-stitch, and trying to get more exercise in. I've also been trying to work on my own behaviors, such as spending more time idle in order to feel a bit more comfortable in it, and trying to take on less responsibilities to give me more free time to work on self-care.

Since these are all fairly new routines/activities in my schedule, I haven't really had an opportunity to step back and check-in with myself or take some time to reflect on how I'm feeling with the new self-care systems in place. I am, however, excited to read the other posts for this month and see what others are doing for their self-care and routine and hopefully it might inspire some new routines for me to work. I already enjoyed reading Pablo's initial post, as it made me realize that I'm not alone in finally starting to engage in self-care after years of neglecting it, and his list of routines and behaviors being fairly similar to mine was very encouraging.

Hopefully this post also helped someone, but worst case I got to sit down and write a bit and that's all that matters!