As a college student, currently trying to complete general education credits and my degree credits, I am always stressed. Depending on the weeks I am only getting less than 5-6 every night, not including when I am involved in many extracurricular activities. I am always trying different ways of decompressing but it is difficult when every week of my life feels like it’s on repeat. The same classes, but with more homework, readings, and papers, constantly losing sleep rarely gaining any. There are no rules or guidelines to self-care. The one unspoken rule is: your chosen method to relieve stress can be ANYTHING!
There are multiple ways to practice self-care, listing just a couple: sleep, skincare, exercise, and meditation. Sleep is probably the most important for your body on this list. Not getting proper rest can throw your entire day off and even change the hormone levels within your body. Lack of sleep usually induces people to consume unhealthy amounts of caffeine. The biggest benefit of sleep is an elevated mood, which can help prevent the symptoms or onset of anxiety and depression. Skincare is another great method, to reduce stress and elevate mood. This is a good practice because when you are doing skincare and you can stop for a moment and just focus on yourself and destress from your day. Performing your skincare routine not only has an effect on your mental health but also on your skin. It produces more collagen in the skin and reduces wrinkles and discoloration. Exercise is a more physical and rigorous type of self-care. Exercise has many benefits for the body and mind. Exercise can build and strengthen muscle, improve balance, mood, energy, and decrease health risks: high blood pressure, heart disease, and cholesterol levels. This is suggested to focus your mind and to reduce anxiety and stress. The last method is meditation. Meditation has so many great benefits and to some has been a really helpful tool in reducing stress. Meditation is about refocusing your attention and regrouping your thoughts into positive ones. The purpose of meditation is meant to help you disengage from negative thoughts and emotions to reduce stress, anxiety, or depression. The benefits of meditation are mental and physical. As mentioned meditation promotes emotional health, improved mood, and lower risk of depression. Meditation can enhance empathy, attention span, and memory by training your brain to regulate distractions. Physical benefits include lower inflammation, blood pressure, heart disease, and stroke risk.
Self-care is so important for your mental and physical health, taking care of yourself is the most important thing. You can not perform your best unless you take care of yourself, you have to find what best works for you to reduce stress. Even finding activities to do outside of mandated occupations is important to give yourself peace of mind. There are many forms of self-care, sometimes you do not realize that what you are doing is considered self-care. The takeaway of this blog is that any form of self-care that relaxes you and brings you inner peace is the best form of self-care.
