Season 1 – Building your self-care routine
Episode 1 – Starting With Self
Hosted by Britt Brown LMT, Spa Specialist, and Small Business Ow-ner
Season 1 – Building Your Self-Care Routine / Episode 1 – Start With Self – Body Be Well
Episode 1 – Starting with Self Transcript…
Hello listeners and welcome to the Body Be Well podcast, formerly known as the Body Care Breakdown podcast. I’m your host, mobile licensed massage therapist and spa specialist, Britt Brown. If you’ve been looking for a podcast that can help you navigate the art of self-care in this messy world, then tune in – because that’s what this podcast is all about! Today I’d like to introduce you to our first podcast series “Building Your Self-Care Routine”, in this series we’ll navigate the ins and outs of building a self-care routine that’s truly customized to your current needs, starting with the topic of our first episode: how to do an at home self-assessment.
Okay, so, POV (point of view): you’re finally ready to get serious about your self-care routine. It’s not that you’re treating yourself horribly, but you’ve just never really considered what taking care of your body as you age might look like. You know you have a few unhealthy habits to address, you might have some concerning health conditions that run in the family, but aside from that you’re not sure… So where do you start?
Fun fact – did you know that massage therapists are often one of the first practitioners a person will see when trying to manage things like stress and chronic pain, or as a way to fully “check-in” in terms of their body’s health and well-being? True story – and it’s because massage therapy services are oftentimes a lot more affordable than paying out of pocket to see your Primary Care Physician. So, as a licensed massage therapist, you can imagine that many of my clients are people who are about to embark on their self-care journey, and for some it’s the first time they’ve ever even considered building a self-care routine. When these clients come to me, asking me where they should start and how best to care for themselves, I always recommend starting with self. I recommend they just take a moment to sit down with themselves, really listen to what their body has to say, and go from there. If we don’t tap into what our body really needs, we could end up with a self-care routine that does more harm for us than good – and nobody’s got the spoons for that!
Doing a self-assessment at home is actually a lot more simple than it sounds, and I recommend doing an assessment of your self-care routine at the beginning of each new season, to make sure that your routine is evolving to fit the needs of your current lifestyle. To show you how easy it can be to do a self-assessment, we’re actually going to do an assessment now, together, here on this podcast. By the way – this exercise is meant to be more of a brain dump, so don’t feel pressured to write a novel when answering these questions. Okay, first thing’s first – we’re going to grab our favorite journal or a piece of our favorite paper, along with our favorite pen or pencil, and a cozy seat. Next, on our piece of paper or in our journal, we’re going to write down the following questions, and do a two (2) minutes brain dump answering them. I’ll be answering these questions along with you, so you may hear my timer go off. If putting your answers to these questions into words feels limiting or difficult, I recommend drawing your answers out! If you’d like a template of a body to draw on, I’ve linked a template for you to use in the podcast description along with a link to a Google doc with these questions. By the way – my partner Jared and I recorded the lovely nature tracks that are playing during our moments of pause, while out on a walk along Mills Creek Trail, okay, here we go!
– How am I feeling physically today? (pause for 2mins brain dump)
-How am I feeling emotionally today? (pause for 2mins brain dump)
-How am I feeling mentally today? (pause for 2mins brain dump)
-How am I feeling spiritually today? (pause for 2mins brain dump)
-How am I feeling socially today? (pause for 2mins brain dump)
After we’ve finished brain dumping our feelings, we’re going to take a five (5) minute pause to reflect on what we’ve written down (pause for 5mins reflection).
Once we’ve taken some time to process through our feelings and reflect back on them, we’re going to write down the following questions and our answers to, allowing for another 2mins brain dump for each question:
“What habits and/or self-care activities are no longer serving their purpose in my life?” (pause for 2mins brain dump)
“What self-care activities can I add to my self-care routine this (day/week/month/year depending on how often you check in) to improve my overall health and well-being?” (pause for 2mins brain dump)
Answering these questions will give us a good idea of where we can take power back in our lives, and help us make those small but necessary changes to our self-care routine, so that we can start making progress towards becoming the healthiest version of ourselves. Let’s go back through the list of tasks and activities we wrote down during our last brain dump, and pick out our three (3) easiest tasks and/or self-care activities to commit to. We’ll call these our “Easy Three”. Earlier, when writing down my self-care tasks and activities, I chose to organize mine into “week” “month” and “year” categories, but feel free to write your answers down in whatever way feels natural to you. For example – if you’re just trying to get through the week, write down the tasks you can do tomorrow, or this weekend, to manage your self-care this week. This should take us between 2-5mins to complete. For the sake of providing enough time for all of our listeners, we’ll take a 5mins pause to allow enough time for all of us to choose our “Easy Three”.
***Below are examples of Britt’s Easy Three
What can I add to my self-care routine this week to improve my health? Phone a friend!
What can I add to my self-care routine this month to improve my health? Start doing yoga at one of local community centers or yoga studios.
What can I add to my self-care routine this year to improve my health? Weekly hot epsom salt baths to maintain muscle health.
The hardest part of accomplishing any of these self-care tasks is staying committed to doing them, because as easy as these tasks are to do, they’re still on our to-do lists for a reason right? That’s the point though – we’re choosing easy tasks to manage so that we can feel that boost of confidence that happens when we accomplish something, and we can ride that wave of confidence going into the next task. If we start our self-care journey by trying to do all of the healing all at once or by starting with our most difficult self-care hurdles first, there’s a good chance we’ll burn ourselves out or get too discouraged to continue, before we even begin developing our self-care routine. All of this brings me to my next point – time assessment. We don’t have time to do everything on our self-care task list all at once, so we’ll need to make sure we schedule time for those tasks!
If you aren’t someone who regularly uses a scheduling tool, like a calendar or a planner, to keep track of your everyday routine – now is the time to jump on that train. Calendars and planners help us to keep our self-care routine on track by providing visual and kinesthetic reminders of tasks we have planned, making us more likely to stick with our routine, and less likely to over-commit our time or forget tasks. Once we’ve got our calendar filled up with all of our essential tasks (work, volunteer schedules, upcoming events, current self-care activities, etc), we’re going to take a look at what time we have left to commit to new self-care tasks and activities. You might find that you have to do some finagling with your schedule in order to commit to your “Easy Three” and that’s okay, schedule adjustments are a part of the self-care game, but they won’t be the undoing of our self-care routine. We’ll need to take our time to map things out, maybe make necessary schedule adjustments along the way, but we’ve got this!
To help you better manage your time and stay on track you might incorporate tools like “habit stacking”, for example; if you’re a coffee drinker who’s trying to get better about staying hydrated, you might try drinking a cup of water while you wait for your coffee to brew in the morning. You already have a habit of waiting around in the kitchen while your coffee brews, why not stack drinking some water onto that habit to help make it more likely you’ll increase your water intake?
If you feel like rewards systems work better for keeping yourself on track (getting a fancy coffee beverage after you successfully complete a counseling session for example), you might try downloading a habit tracker app – these apps often have cute rewards (screen savers, icons, character costumes) you can earn by maintaining consistency with your habits, which could give you the little boost you need to maintain consistency with your self-care routine. I’ve included links to two of my favorite habit tracker apps, as well as to a book titled “Atomic Habits” (written by James Clear) in the podcast description that I think you all might find beneficial, so be sure you check that out.
There we have it folks – we’ve done it! We’ve completed our at home self-assessment, and we’ve taken the first steps on our journey to becoming our healthiest selves. I hope that you’re able to use the knowledge you’ve gained about yourself here today to better understand your body’s needs, and decide where you’ll go next on your paths to wellness. Tune back into our podcast in two weeks, on October 22nd, for the second episode in our “Building Your Self-Care Routine” series – “Building Your Support Network” where we’ll be going over how to build a support network consisting of friends & family, mentors, spiritual advisors (when appropriate), and an array of necessary healthcare specialists. Thanks for tuning in to the first episode of the “Body Be Well” podcast, I’m incredibly excited to share this information with you, and I’m already looking forward to the next episode. Oh, and one last thing, a little gentle reminder, for everyone out there struggling with self-care okay? Self-care is supposed to be simple. Your self-care routine should be accessible to you and it should fit your lifestyle. The things you do to care for yourself should be enjoyable, or at least tolerable, for you to engage in. Because if you enjoy the things you’re doing to care for yourself, you are more likely to continue doing those things. Alright, until next time listeners – be well!
Links to Self-Care tools:
- Body Drawing PDF
- Purchase “Atomic Habits” written by James Clear
- Download Me+ – the routine builder, habit tracker, and self-care assistant app
- Download Habitica – the gamer themed habit and routine building app
