Self Care

The WHO defines self-care as “the ability of individuals, families, and communities to promote health, prevent disease, maintain health, and cope with illness and disability, with or without the support of a healthcare provider.”

But at its core, self-care is as simple as taking care of yourself. It’s something that you do simply because it makes you feel good, and helps you to recharge: without pressure, and free of guilt. Just as we nurture our physical health through sleeping properly and exercising regularly, self-care looks after our mental wellbeing.

Everyone’s version of self-care – how it looks in practise, and the specific tools and techniques they use – will be different. That’s why it’s called self-care, and why it varies for each of us – why it’s such a deeply personal thing. Yet many of us don’t do it enough.

So what does self-care mean to you? How do you shut out the stresses of the wider world for a moment? How do you switch off the guilt, and silence that voice that says “I should be doing something else first”, or tells you that “there are more important things to do right now”?

If you’re struggling to practise self-care right now – whether that’s down to something earth-shattering, like a bereavement, or more commonplace, such as a busy schedule – it can be useful to be reminded of the routes via which we can all practise self-care every day. Here are some of the different ways our staff look after themselves with self-care techniques – we hope you can take inspiration from whichever ones are applicable to you.

Whether it’s poetry, piano, or PlayStation, self-care can provide a vital passage to mindfulness – grounding you in a moment, and giving you back what the rigours of daily life strip away. But, as the tips demonstrate, it can also be a way of not only caring for yourself, but caring for others – for your family and friends.

And self-care doesn’t always have to be about the here and now, but the future. About having those conversations that get you and your family on the same page when it comes to what’s ahead. That could be entering into a dialogue about planning for a relative’s future care, or what to do should they become too unwell to make decisions for themselves.

For bereaved people – or patients and families living with life-limiting illnesses – self-care is both especially important and all-too-hard to make the mental or physical time for. That’s why talking about death, dying, and grief – breaking down the taboos, and starting those difficult conversations – is more important than ever.