Self-Care in Scary Times
Things are scary right now. Every day there are new headlines, new worries, or new policy changes that are either a direct attack on our rights or appeasement to previous ones.
This can result in increased stress and anxiety in our bodies. More tension and tightness in our muscles and jaw. Increased insomnia. More emotional dysregulation. Reduced appetite. Our bodies are constantly keeping score, and when there are increased stressors on a sociopolitical scale, our body will rack up points.
So how do we try and keep the score at a manageable level?
Self-care.
No, self-care won’t fix everything. It won’t make us less susceptible to giants making decisions that affect us without actually having to answer to us. It won’t get back the rights that are being eroded – that’s where social activism and collectivism come in.
But self-care can help us keep it together to do the things that will help. It can keep us from having anxiety and panic attacks, or help us recover from them. It can be stress relieving to move our body, do something creative, or escape into fiction. With the world trying to add stress to our everyday lives, it’s important that we release the stress when we can.
I aim to provide practical suggestions in each of my blog posts. So here’s today’s.
– Identify the areas of your self that currently need care. I personally love Virginia Satir’s Self-Care Rating Scale. It breaks up self-care into eight domains and asks you to rate how well you feel your needs in each domain are met. Once you rate yourself across all domains, identify 2 or 3 that you want to focus on.
– Once you’ve identified the 2 or 3 domains you want to focus on, create a Daily, Weekly, and Monthly Self-care activities chart. I like using a 4×5 note card and create a 3×3 table on it. Then I fill in each cell with an activity for each self-care domain, one daily, weekly, and monthly.
The world is particularly scary right now, and the first thing that may disappear is our ability or focus to care for ourselves. But we can’t let the world win. We’re too precious for that.
Until next time,
Dr. Riojas
