Why is Self-Care Important?

I'm the most excited! We're gonna be discussing my self-care challenge. I'm gonna be talking about self-care, fitness challenges, and all that's coming up. So I was advertising it as a fitness challenge because obviously, fitness is my thing. I love fitness. Still, it's really more like a self-care challenge. That's what prompted me to come and talk about what do you expect and what my goal is. We're looking to accomplish this challenge because the goal is to become more self-aware and become more self-aware of why we want to increase our fitness. You know, becoming more aware of our sense of self, and you know what, guys, it's more because this is a journey I have been on.

So I'm super excited, so I am officially going to change the fitness challenge. I'm gonna call this a self-care challenge. So if you hear me calling it a self-care challenge, that's why, because I feel like that's more appropriate. Obviously, I'm gonna incorporate fitness, I promise. But it's more of just self-care too. I want to talk about what makes you happy? What brings your sense of purpose? What are some things that you desire, and do you do them? Do you do the things that make you happy? Do you do what makes your heart want? When's the last time you self-reflected on the way things made you feel?

Let me just tell you, coming from a personal perspective and a personal standpoint, it was sporadic for me about four or three months ago. I'll talk about that in a bit, and that's a hard thing to get here into cyberspace and say, but that was my reality. I didn't self-reflect a lot because I had so much going on. I want to talk about the struggles that I've experienced with this. And are you wondering, have you lost yourself? These are some things that you might be wondering about. Are there things that you hide about yourself?

Like in relationships, whether it's with your children, family, spouse, significant other friends, or in-laws. Are there things you hide about yourself because you feel like you're going to be criticized or misunderstood or disliked? You know, that's a big thing. Do you feel like you are responsible for many things in a relationship? Do you find yourself sacrificing being the main one in a relationship? That sacrificing thing, see yourself saying no to something that you desire that would make you happy. But you sacrifice for the sake of a relationship. If you find yourself doing that, it's time before you lose yourself and who you are. What makes you happy? It's prevalent for us, as mothers, wives, and employees, because we carry so many roles and men do. But as women, we carry on a lot of responsibility as the manager of schedules, vacation, party planning, and taking on all these roles.

We get sucked into this, and it absorbs our time and identity, and then we're like, well, who are we? Because we're doing all these. So we have our role as a wife. We have our role as a mother. If you're not married, you have your role in a relationship, your role as a parent, and an employee in your career. WE HAVE OUR ROLE, but who are you? Because a lot of times, what happens is that if we don't know who we are, we can never live up to our potential in all these other areas.

I'm digging into this and the self-discovery piece because we have to sacrifice as adults in many different areas. The number one area that we need to not offer is our Self Care understanding of ourselves. So other things to think about are, are you absorbing yourself with your children because you're guilty? You know, especially, as I can only relate to a mother's perspective, you know how you are taking care of your child. You start comparing yourself to other moms. Oh well, I breastfed my kids for a year. Come close to me, I was like, well no, that's not. You know, that's what I chose to do because that makes my way right now. And who are you as a mother? Are you absorbing yourself and your children?

Are you putting your children and other people in front of your own needs? And you do have to do that to an extent. But we have to have the right balance. Often we place other relationships above our own, and when we put our kids above ourselves, we do that as parents, and there's a fine line there. But this is just a mental check. Is this something you do on top of all these other things you're doing? Losing yourself is when you shrink who you are, minimize who you are, abandon yourself, and self-sacrifice. You lose perspective on where you begin and where others begin. Those boundaries start fading. You find yourself not setting firm boundaries with those around you, and you put everybody else above yourself. The more you say yes to other people, the less you're seeing and the more you're saying no to yourself and your desires, and the more you shrink, the more you lessen your cravings, and you just stick them down.

Does this sound familiar? I can definitely relate, and as I said, I'll talk about my story in a minute, but where do you go from here? If you find yourself in this, what do you do? Are you going through the motions? What makes you happy? How do you become better? How do you start working on personal growth and development and expansion? You know, you have all these things, but it's overwhelming. Putting everybody above yourself and you have all these desires, or do you even realize you? You're just going through the motions, and it's about learning to become more vulnerable with yourself. It's being expressive about knowing who you are and your desires.

Understandably, you might have a tendency not to speak up for yourself. Still, I want to start doing that more. You know, understanding that kids have importance but they, your kids have taught you how important it is to spend time with yourself and I want to do an exercise.

When's the last time that you were stressed? I'm trying to get here from my nail appointment in time and spruce up my makeup. I was driving off fast, stressed. Like, why just I shouldn't chill. I'll get there if I start late, so be it. I'm doing great tonight. So I want to do exercise because we as people stress way too often. I want you to put your feet on the ground. If you have anything in your hands, just put them down for just a second to close your eyes. And I want you to inhale through your nose and out of your mouth. I want you to do this again. Inhale through your nose and out of your mouth, and when you're ready, you can open your eyes, and congratulations! You have practiced self-care. Yes, that's simple. Society tells us that you know you have to go on the spa weekends, and you have to go, and you have to spend a bunch of money on getting your nails done and doing all these things for self-care.

But that's not true. That's really not true. Self-care is deliberate. Take care of your well-being through restorative actions, like what we just did. We don't have to go and spend money now, granted. I believe that some people might not think this. Personally, I believe that taking care of my nails and getting my nails done is taking care of myself. Some people believe that taking care of your mind and emotions is self-care. I think it can be a combination of things, but self-care does not have to be an act of spending money. When I went and took care of myself and got my hand nails and feet done, it made me feel good, but I don't have to do those things to feel good, and this is the point.

Deliberate care of well-being through restorative things. Stress is a significant thing in our lives. Caffeine, coffee, caffeine, alcohol, and sugar are the foods we consume that stress our bodies. I mean, I can go into it. It gets way over our heads about the effects of physical effects and how it raises our blood pressure and cholesterol levels. It increases our mortality rates because when we stress, our body produces cortisol that, in tune, it starts a self-destructive cycle. So I'm not gonna get into all that, but I just want to identify and let you guys know that the things we consume in our bodies, let alone eating, can cause our bodies to stress.

I want to talk about what started and prompted my journey in this whole realm of becoming more self-aware because I always prided myself on doing everything. If you guys know me, most of you know that I'm married. I'm married to my high school sweetheart of 17 years. We have four children, and like one child that we've adopted, biologically our nephew, we went through all this change all at once. While I was in school becoming a nurse practitioner with mental health, it was like all this stuff, and I just kept trucking. But what I found was what really happened was it all kind of happened by fluke. Not really by chance, but I realized I wanted to get healthy. I knew that I had gained all this weight, and I needed to get fit.

I said this. I was almost 200lbs, and this is me from a previous college runner. I was way overweight, and I felt terrible. I truly felt awful, but I never truly processed it. I was like, I feel good, but I was experiencing all these depressive symptoms. I couldn't focus, I couldn't concentrate, and I was overwhelmed. I was never self-reflected. I didn't have the time. I never made the time. I'm a business owner, and my husband owns a business. We have four busy children who are constantly growing up, but I knew that I would make time where time was needed. I knew that, but I wouldn't make time to care for myself. As a matter of fact, I was like, I'm not depressed, I don't feel depressed, but being in mental health, I had no motivation to do anything that brought me joy. I knew that I used to love making hair bows and doing all kinds of creative things decorating.

But I was like, there's nothing, I'm not doing anything. I'm just going through the day-to-day waking up, seeing my patients, and I genuinely love what I do. Still, I couldn't indeed be sympathetic because it was hard for me to find joy in the things in daily life. I wasn't unhappy. I wasn't crying. I'm not depressed. I was not being honest with myself because I never wanted to self-reflect. So this is a moment of transparency because I want to help you all and hope that I can reach somebody just by my story.

I needed that. I didn't know that I needed it, and I'm so grateful because I started making the fitness journey. I started realizing, and I started working with a life coach, and it was just the perfect combination for me. I started learning I had not taken time to think about anything. I haven't taken the time to process what I ate yesterday and how it affected my body. The kids made me mad because they wouldn't stop bickering. I never even stopped like, okay, well, if you would have done this, this and this, maybe they wouldn't be bickering with each other. There are these things that I was just going through the motions, and I had that moment of realization as I started working out.

I was avoiding working out because I knew that it was sabotage. I never knew my subconscious mind. I never took the time to reflect and process that. I was sabotaging myself because of the original where it came from. I had to ask myself, why this, why do you feel that? I had to get down to the why and figure out it was because I knew I could not go out here and exercise and run and perform as I did in college, where I was the star, and so here I was. All I have to do is get moving. Look at me now. I'm fit because I had to identify where those thoughts were coming from. I didn't even realize they were even thoughts. So, where does that lead us to today? I started taking control over my diet, eating clean, and when I say clean, it does not mean perfection.

I started limiting my calories. I started not limiting myself to 1600 calories a day; 1680 calories a day is what I eat. I work out and get my feet moving. You have when you set goals for yourself and get it moving, incorporating movement and stuff. You have to keep them sustainable where you are. So incorporating diet, but also doing restorative actions. I talked about self-care as deliberately taking care of your well-being through wholesome things, restoring what you haven't been doing. So the diet was one, incorporating fruits and veggies in my refrigerator. Now I have grapes, apples, oranges that I love, nectarines and peaches, and strawberries. Those are my favorites, but I go to that when I want something sweet and have a hummus dip. I love hummus! Hummus is so good, and when we go through this challenge, I will be recommending things that I personally like that I have found. Also, other people are good resources for you to follow and everything.

So the first thing that's gonna be diet and the three things. One thing you've already done is a moment of reflecting in silence. You must grow and process why you're doing some of your things. You have got to sit and reflect. If you don't sit and remember, it's never going to click. It's never gonna click because you have to stop when you go through the day-to-day. You just go and get on your phone, and you're just distracted from the day to decompress. You just disengage, get on your phone, and scroll instead of sitting before you walk in the house before you step out of your office.

Now we're all working from home. Take a moment to sit, reflect, be comfortable, sit on your couch chair, and reflect. Today, I got frustrated about X, Y, and Z yesterday. I mean, earlier in the day, I could have done this differently. So another restorative action is movement. When you set goals for yourself, for example, my goal is to run with my daughter, bond, and do that with my daughter. I think that is gonna be amazing, right? Because we can bond and do that. That's not gonna be everybody's goal. I'm a runner. I can run two miles right now if I want to because why?

Let me say your goal might be to go and walk. But guess what? My goal started with walking first. We have to set goals within our appropriate boundaries, and I'm not going to say that to demean anybody. I'm saying it because we have to make our goals where we currently are. When we set our goals too high, we're gonna feel defeated. So start your goals out small. I started my goal with 15 minutes of walking and moving my legs. Then it turned into 20 minutes of walking. Then it turned into 25 minutes of walking. Then It turned into about 20 minutes of walking and five minutes of sprints, and not even constantly running it. I still don't consistently run; that's where I'm at.

I can go run right now all I want, but in my mind, this is what I have to do to continue and maintain a successful routine and keep my legs moving every morning. I always video when I'm out walking, and sometimes I forget, but just to encourage, hey, get those legs moving, get moving. Movement is going to help. The third thing is getting out into nature when we go outside. We just go outside, get in the sun, and let our feet touch the ground. Something is liberating. There are studies about grounding and shown positive improvements in our moods within our bodies and diets. Taking moments to reflect and moments of meditation and silence don't work for you?

You can get out your phone. If you're a journalist, get out your journal and reflect, get out your phone on the voice app, talk into it, and just talk about your day, and you will find that felt good to sit back and think about it. You find yourself craving that time, so I firmly believe incorporating these things, and these restorative actions can most definitely help. Suppose you were like me three or four months ago, when you're sitting there going like taking 30 minutes of my day and reflecting. Getting outside, moving, and how can I find the time to start thinking about the time that you were watching the tv at night or on your phone. In that case, you know, watching scrolling on Facebook or watching Netflix, and remember that it's not about being perfect when you start practicing these things. You will hear me talk about how I struggled this weekend. I went way over what I needed to eat, did not work out, and felt tired. It's not about being perfect. It's about getting started and being consistent, realizing and reflecting: "I'm starting to feel really good, but when I get outside, and my body starts producing endorphins, I'm happier. I'm starting to feel more purposeful."

Just remember that what if you showed up for yourself? What would be possible? What could you accomplish? What goals do you want to achieve? Where do you want to go in life? I'm telling you, there's so much. It's limitless. What you can set your mind to, you just have to start somewhere, and I know the feeling of wanting to get started and needing to do something but feeling overwhelmed. Some of the things we're going to be doing are that I will challenge you every day. I will. You don't have to get anything fancy.

I got myself a journal. I just liked it because it was cute. Had a simple reminder. Live simply. Get you a diary, a notebook, whatever every day. For the next 30 days, I will challenge you with a journal topic. Something simple. You can either use your journal, or you can use your phone. I think that's a great time of reflection, and I'm going to give you some prompts in that and help y'all. I want these 30 days to be a good jump start emotionally for you and for you to take control over some regions of your life that you desire. It's gonna be setting goals for yourself. Why are you doing that?

So every day, we're going to start with a journal topic and just some encouragement to get moving. I'm gonna give you videos and share resources with you guys. It might not be me doing the workout. It might be, you know, someone else or whatever. However, just know that my goal through this challenge will be to help you be the best you possible in any way that I possibly can. I am super excited! Taking this time has truly transformed the way I feel. I've always felt purposeful in what I do and my career. Personally, being able to make a difference, the way I feel like God has given me, has been liberating, totally liberating. So I am super stoked to start this with you guys.

Remarkably inspiring. Such an eye-opener. It is so refreshing. It is so important to take time for ourselves. Whether it's taking that time to do the vacation and resetting or having that renewed perspective, or whether it's taking this time and doing these things, I can help. I am so thankful. Let me know if there's any way I can help you guys.