Tag: self-care

What I learned from a headache

Posted on by jplatt27

A couple weeks ago, I was in a funk. For three days, I woke up tired and throughout the day had no motivation. “I don’t feel like doing anything” kept running through my head. And each afternoon, I got a headache. On my way to CVS to get some Advil, I thought “I just want to take a nap right now. I want to go home and go to bed.” And then I thought “I’m just going to empower myself to do that. I’m going to use some sick time and go home and rest. My body obviously needs that.”

I got home and climbed into bed for a nap. I thought about turning on the TV while I fell asleep but something told me not to. That I didn’t need the mental clutter and noise. That I just needed to be.

Within two minutes of my head hitting the pillow, I had a realization. There was something at work that was really frustrating me. It had been bothering me since earlier in the week but I didn’t know that consciously. It wasn’t until I started telling Mike about it that I realized how much this was affecting me — and my performance. The next day, I woke up like my usual self, energetic and ready to take on the day. And I had a conversation with my boss about what was bothering me and I felt so much better.

I share this story for two reasons:

1. You’ve got to listen to your body. You are the only one that can feel your body and hear your intuition. It’s up to you act on those messages. You can discern when it’s a “take-some-Advil-and-go-through-your day” kind of thing or  it’s a “stop, listen, or this will just continue” kind of thing. But only you can discern that. So you’ve got to listen and you’ve got to act. Which brings me to my next point…

2. Sometimes you’ve got to empower yourself and give yourself what you need.  Your boss isn’t going to say “I can tell your head hurts and that you’re in a funk” go home and take a nap. No. You need to decide that for yourself and give yourself permission to do what you need to do.

If I wouldn’t have taken that three hours off, I could’ve been stuck in that negative energy (and the corresponding physical symptoms) for a while — impacting both myself, my team, and my work.

what is self care anyway?

Posted on by jplatt27

flowers journal

I’m a huge advocate for showing up as your authentic self and pursuing your dreams big and small. A key ingredient for that is self care. But what does self care even mean?

Self care is going to vary from person to person. There is no one-size fits all self care practice.

To figure out what self care means for you, ask yourself this:

What do you need to maintain a relationship with yourself?

This can be quiet time at least once a week,
Time to dance,
Painting your nails,
Saying no to things you don’t want to do,
A morning run,
Speaking your mind,
Cuddling up with a good book,
A warm bath,
Journaling,
etc.

Please note: Self care is not a luxury. Self care is a necessity.

So tell me in the comments, what does self-care look like for you? What do you need to maintain a relationship with yourself?

P.S. My inspiration list.

5 ways to value myself

Posted on by jplatt27

During our coffee date the other day, I shared that I’m reading Money: A Love Story by Kate Northrup. I’m actually doing the exercises in this book and they are SO powerful. I’m still processing a lot of my responses both on my own and with my coach. There is just so much good stuff here, it’s a lot to digest. To be honest, a lot of my realizations make me feel really vulnerable. I hope to have the courage to share more of my responses, realizations, and takeaways here but we’ll see.

For now, here is one piece that really stuck with me.

In Money, Kate emphasizes self-value and self-care and how they relate to money. She says:

Self-care is about loving yourself. If you can’t learn to put energy toward your own care and feeding, who else will? If you can’t value yourself enough to put yourself first from time to time, how the heck do you expect to be valued in the world?

Money is about what we value. We pay for what we value. We pay attention to what we value. This is an issue of valuing yourself.

This makes total sense to me but it’s not something I’ve thought about before. Of course, self-care and money are related. One way to show that you’re worth financial abundance is to value yourself, to love yourself, and to treat yourself kindly. In doing so, you send a message to the universe, you show the universe how you want to be treated.

To be truthful, I haven’t been sending exactly the message I want to send so I’ve been focusing more on that.

Here’s my response to the second part of a two-part exercise about self-love and self-care.

Part two: Make a list of five ways that you can care for yourself, value yourself, and/or love yourself more this week.

My answers:

  1. Always have fresh flowers at home.
  2. Eat a really good salad. Bonus if you make it yourself.
  3. Curl my hair once this week.
  4. Say no. Without guilt.
  5. Blog: write and publish

And another to add that I’ve been practicing this week unintentionally but it’s a big piece of self-love for me: spend your mornings doing what feels good (something I did for a little while last year).

So what do you think? How do you show yourself love and care?