If you have come here because you are run down, exhausted, feeling like you are neglecting your needs and want to do something to change this…. welcome. This post is all about putting more self care into your daily routine.

Adding more self care into our routines is something that we can all benefit from doing. Looking after yourself through self care can help you feel better within yourself, allow you to have the energy to help others and enjoy your life. It is a fundamental part of meeting your basic needs and helping you remain functional in your busy life.

Self care should be a non-negotiable!

This post is full of tips that will help you create a self care routine that you will actually use and stick to. 

How To Create The Perfect Self Care Routine:

Understand why you need/want more self care in your routine

So, you have decided that you need to add more self care into your routine. That is awesome! You are one step closer to giving yourself the care you deserve!

Understanding why you want or need more self care in your life will be so important for creating a routine that you will actually stick to. Your reason for wanting more self care forms your intention (your aim). Your intention is personal and tailored to you. It can be anything from wanting to manage your stress and your emotions to wanting to simply take better care of yourself. Your intention is essential because it is what will guide the self care routine you create and the activities you choose to be a part of it.

Understanding your want for self care is also important because it is the reason behind your motivation. This is great because can fall back on using your motivation when the going gets tough. You can use it to remind yourself why what you are doing is important to you and encourage yourself to keep going. This is especially helpful when you are struggling to maintain consistency in your self care. 

So go ahead and ask yourself: “Why do I want more self care in my routine?”

Write it down 

You are more likely to do something if you write it down for yourself. When you write it down, it is a way of mentally committing to that task and you will therefore be more likely to do it. 

There are two ways in which you can create a better self care routine through this. The first is to create some goals for yourself of how you would like to see improvements in your self care. Write these down in an accessible place where you can go back and remind yourself of them, review them, or adjust them as needed. 

The second way is to physically write (or type) yourself out a daily schedule. This will allow you to time block. For those of you that don’t know what time blocking is, it is when you break your day up into specific chunks of time and allocate an activity to it. Doing this will help you get an overview of your day and see where you really have time to prioritise self care. Where there are gaps in your schedule, allocate those blocks of time to self care. That way when you get to that part of the day, you know you have the time to achieve self care and can actually commit to it. 

Use micro habits to add more self care into your routine.

When you don’t have a lot of self care already in your routine, it can feel like a lot to suddenly have to fit in, especially if you have a busy schedule. This is where micro habits come in handy. The goal of micro habits is to help you slowly introduce a behaviour in your life in a way that feels manageable and creates greater consistency over time. They are a way to easily start fitting things into an already busy routine, they can be combined with other tasks and they can form longer, greater habits over time if you choose. 

Additional note: In order to really achieve a great self care routine that you will actually stick to, it is best to keep it simple. This means that you need to start slowly. To turn your ideal self care routine into your actual routine, you need to do it one habit at a time. Start with one of your chosen self care activities and introduce it to your routine as a micro habit and focus on building it into a proper habit.

Only when it becomes a consistent habit and a manageable part of your schedule should you introduce another habit. This will stop it from feeling overwhelming, reduce your chances of burning out and make you less likely to abandon it altogether. Remember, Rome was not built in a day.

For more information on using micro habits to achieve your goals check out this post. 

Assign a reminder or associate your self care with a trigger

As life gets busy and activities pile up, it can be difficult to remember to do your self care activity you set a goal for. Here are two ways that can help you stay conscious of your self care goals. 

Assign a reminder

As mentioned above, time blocking can be a great way to fit more self care into your routine. However, life can get in the way, it is quite easy to busy ourselves, get absorbed in tasks and let other things get in the way. Help yourself out by creating reminders. You can do this by setting reminders on your phone to go off throughout the day. For example, if your goal was to stretch daily, you could set an alarm with a reminder to go off every hour to remind you to take a break and stretch. 

Match your goal with a trigger

Another way to really help you remember to add more self care into your routine is using triggers. The triggers you choose can be anything. You could choose a physical item, an activity, a particular emotion, whatever works for you.

Here is an example of how this might look for you if your goal was to focus more on your breathwork. You could say to yourself:

“Every time I walk through the front door to my house I need to stop, close my eyes, and focus on my breath for 5-10 breaths.” 

Associating your self care goals with triggers is great because it acts as a wonderful reminder in the early days, plus it can become an automatic habit over time.

Track your progress

Recognise your successes and adjust your plan as required

With any goal you set, tracking your progress is important. It is no different when it comes to self care. 

Tracking your progress in implementing your self care goals into your routine is unbelievably important. 

Firstly, tracking your progress allows you to see where and when things are going well. This is great because it will help you be able to recognise even the smallest of successes, like doing your self care activity on a day when you reeeally didn’t feel like it. Recognising these successes allows room for celebration, which is important in keeping you motivated and consistent with your goals. 

Tracking the progression of your self care goals is also important for understanding when things are not going so well. This is because it allows you to spot trends. Maybe there is a certain day of the week or time of the day that you are less committed to your goals. Becoming aware of things such as this will help you evaluate and readjust your goals and their implementation, so that they work better for you!

If you want a good goal tracker to help you keep track of your progress. Download the free self-improvement bundle below. 

Plan for things not to go to plan

Life isn’t perfect and humans are perfectly flawed (you included). This means that despite how good your intentions may be, how motivated and committed to your goal you are, there will be times where you simply cannot stick to your routine. 

This can be a make-or-break place for some people. This is a good thing to be aware of because it allows you to plan for it. If you have plans already in place it will allow you to overcome these situations much more easily and you will be able to continue your self care journey.

You need to start anticipating and planning for all of the following situations when creating your self care routine. Use these prompts to help you start thinking about these situations and add some ideas to your plan so you have them there, ready to go: 

• What barriers might you encounter that will stop you from actually starting your self care routine? How might you overcome this?
• What will happen if you break your routine once? Twice? More? What can you do help yourself get back on track?
• In what ways can you keep yourself motivated to complete your self care routine on days when you really don’t feel like it?
• What things might get in the way of you being consistent with your self care routine? How can you minimise the effects that these things might have on you being consistent with your self care routine?

Understand that you are not being selfish

You need to understand that “SELF CARE ISN’T SELFISH“. 

When implementing self care into your routine, it can lead to feelings of guilt. When there are so many demands on your time, it can be difficult to feel alright with pushing those things aside to look after yourself. 

You need to understand that you are not being selfish. Investing time into looking after yourself so that you can function at your best and get the most out of your life is not a selfish thing. You deserve to look after yourself. You deserve the investment of your own time and energy. So treat yourself to a self care day and put more self care into your everyday!

Don’t let these feelings of selfishness and guilt get in the way of creating a life for yourself that is full of self care. If you are experiencing self care guilt and would like to overcome it, check out this post. 

So now you know how to create a great self care routine. All that is left is for you to take action and commit to making your day-to-day life a more nurturing place to be. Happy self caring!