Self-Care Strategies for Your Body

Four Ways to Nurture Your Body's Physical Needs

Keeping your physical health in check is important. It can affect how you feel and can carry over into affecting your mental health. However, people typically only think of one or two ways to keep their physical health in good shape.

In reality, there are a multitude of ways that you can and should keep yourself healthy in order to live a better, longer life. First, you need to maintain good nutrition. This doesn't mean you have to eat strictly healthy and bland foods, but rather you shouldn't be having fast food for every meal.

You should be mixing things up, learning how to cook at home, and making some better dishes. When it comes to nutrition, you also need to learn portion control. It's fine to have something unhealthy now and then, but if you eat a ton of that unhealthy item in one sitting, you're going to run into some health issues.

Maintaining a good diet can help you lose weight, clear up your skin, make you more energized, and ensure that your heart is healthy. One often overlooked part of physical needs is sleep.

Getting the right amount of sleep is so critically important. Lack of sleep can lead to fatigue, stress, and an array of other negative effects. You need to get a proper amount of sleep each night.

If you can function on only 5 hours of sleep, that's good for a one-off occasion, but if you only get 5 hours of sleep per night for a whole week, you're missing out on 21 hours of sleep a week compared to someone who gets a full 8 hours each night.

You also need to consistently go to sleep and wake up at the same times each night, so that you're not getting thrown off of your schedule. Exercise is probably the most well-known part of keeping up with your physical health.

Doing cardio exercises is important so that you'll maintain a healthy heart and respiratory system. You can also lift weights to get stronger and continue burning fat after your routine ends.

Finally, you should try to get some massages whenever possible to relax your body. Proper massages, stretching, and yoga ensure that your muscles aren't twisted up incorrectly and that your whole body is working well, which can prevent issues down the line related to flexibility and joint movements.

Your Legs Support You So Return the Favor

You might often go through life underestimating just how important your legs are for you, up until a certain point. Usually, this is when your joints start to hurt, and moving around isn't as nice or easy as it used to be.

Depending on how well you take care of your legs, they will last you a lot longer in life than if you neglect their care and put a lot of stress and wear and tear on them. First, you need to understand how to take care of your joints.

Your joints are typically the first parts of your legs that will fail you, such as your ankles, knees, and your hips or pelvis. To maintain good care of your joints, you want to have a more active lifestyle.

Sedentary lifestyles can lead to your joints becoming weak due to a lack of use. You're definitely going to want to remain active if you want your joints to stay strong. Another important aspect of taking care of your legs is, of course, regular exercise.

Not only does this keep your joints strong, but it also increases blood flow and circulation in your legs, ensuring that they stay healthy. Running and jogging will keep good circulation running through your legs, decreasing the chances of any possible injuries or anything like that in the future.

Working out your legs can also help increase their longevity, but you have to be careful. If you work out with your legs incorrectly or push them too hard, you can actually end up damaging your joints or muscles.

But as long as everything is done correctly, you'll be fine. There are tons of exercises that you can do to make your legs stronger and more toned. For example, many people like to do squats.

This develops a ton of muscle around your quadriceps and glutes, making it a very efficient method of building muscle on your legs. There are also a ton of machines that you can find at gyms to help you work out your calves, hamstrings, and even your hip abductors and adductors.

Whatever you choose to do, you're going to want to make sure that you're regularly taking care of your legs by rolling them out after an exercise using a foam roller, and even possibly getting leg massages. This helps decrease the amount of soreness you feel afterwards.

Treat Your Torso Right with a Strategic Self Care Routine

Your torso is an extremely important part of your body. So much important stuff is harbored here: your heart, your lungs, your digestive organs, your arms, and so on. There's a lot going on in this part of the body, so you really need to treat it right in order to maintain a long, healthy life.

This includes internal organs as well as things like muscles and bones. First, you need to take care of your heart and everything involved with it, also known as your cardiovascular system.

When you exercise this part of your body to keep it functioning, this is simply known as cardio. If you're not already aware, cardio involves getting your blood pumping and heart rate up, usually by running.

Cardio can be absolutely necessary to maintaining a good and healthy heart. It can help you avoid running out of breath as easily and can also help your lungs. Another important component of the torso is your digestive system.

This includes your stomach, intestines, and more. In general, we tend not to think about our digestive systems, but you should certainly be paying attention to yours. Without proper diet, not only will you gain weight excessively, but you'll also end up having trouble with bowel movements, also known simply as constipation.

This can be a minor annoyance when you're a young adult, but as time goes on, it can be a serious complication. One part of your body that you might be prone to having problems with is your back.

Your back is one of the more sensitive, but also important parts of your body. A bad back can completely immobilize someone, so maintaining a healthy back is very important.

Most notably, you should be maintaining good posture and stretching regularly to avoid the chance of any potential injuries. Of course, there are a lot of muscles in your upper body.

Your chest, biceps, triceps, deltoids, laterals, and more are all housed here. While it's not expected for everyone to be all bulky like a bodybuilder, working these muscles out definitely helps maintain your body in the long run.

If they don't go to use, then before you know it you might be struggling with things like lifting up slightly heavy objects. In general, it's just a good rule of thumb to use parts of your body regularly to help them avoid getting stale and out of shape.

Working on Your Body and Mind Has Immediate Health Benefits

If your health is something that you tend to struggle with, then self-help strategies can help you faster than you may have ever imagined. Something that may have put you off from starting a self-care routine is that you feel as though it's going to take forever to see any notable results.

This is very similar to when you start a workout routine and then don't feel as though you're doing anything worthwhile. What you might not have realized is that by starting a self-care routine, you're going to be seeing results almost immediately.

This isn't to be confused with reaching your goals immediately, but you're going to see progress nonetheless. This applies to your physical health as well as your mental health.

In terms of physical health, while there are immediate results, it might not always be something visible to you. For example, one of the best results you might not be able to see is a reduction in blood pressure.

High blood pressure is a very serious danger brought on by stress, and it can lead to heart problems and a variety of other issues that could be life threatening. By lowering your blood pressure, you're helping your body immensely right off the bat - even if you can't necessarily see it or feel it right away.

There are also many immediate mental health benefits that come along with starting a self-care routine. First, you'll feel calm. This sounds very simple for some, but for others, this is a world of change.

To finally feel genuinely calm after you've been living in a world of stress for a long time is amazing. It can honestly be the first step towards turning your life around. Another mental health benefit you'll feel almost immediately is a sense of accomplishment and worth.

If you've been putting off self-care for a long time now, finally taking the plunge and taking that first step is amazing. You feel empowered, as if you're suddenly able to do things you thought were too difficult before. Combined with the calmness you'll feel, it'll be almost Zen-like.

Just because a lot of the benefits from self-care come with time doesn't mean they all do. By starting sooner rather than later, you're not only receiving all of those immediate benefits, but also building up a foundation that you'll be able to use in the future as you nurture your own needs. 

Your Self-Care Should Be Pleasant, Not Painful

Overdoing things is a common mistake that many people make whenever they're tackling a new challenge in life. Doing too much self care right off the bat can cause you to burn out and not continue with your efforts, which ends up being more harmful and stressful to you later on.

Some people try too hard to get themselves where they want to be in terms of self care, and end up doing more harm than good. One example of this could be in terms of physical fitness and self-care.

While it's certainly good to have a regular workout routine that caters to your health, you need to ease yourself into it. If you've hardly worked out in the last decade, and suddenly decide to work out almost every day of the week, your body is going to take to it poorly.

You can't just suddenly go from sedentary to lifting weights almost every day. Your body will likely get more exhausted than you'd like, and you might even end up doing damage to certain tendons or nerves that you over-used too suddenly.

If you end up getting injured during a workout, chances are that you're not going to go back any time soon, doing more long term damage than anything. This same idea applies to mental health, as well.

It's good to take time to yourself for the sake of your emotional well being, but it's not good to have too much free time. If you end up isolating yourself for longer periods of time, you'll start to feel distant and will be more susceptible to things like depression.

You need to operate within reason, taking a day or two to yourself and then continuing as you normally would and socialize. You should also be wary of whose advice you choose to take in terms of your mental health.

If you try to listen to every person's options for what to do to improve your mental health, you'll probably be getting a lot of conflicting opinions and won't make a whole lot of progress.

You need to be independent and think about what option sounds the best for you instead of trying so many different things and ending up frustrated. Additionally, you could come up with something yourself that you think would work well.

Don't get caught up in trying to please everyone, or you may end up taking some bad advice and set yourself back even further. Don't overdo it right out of the gate and cause yourself needless anxiety.