I made a video to share some of my ideas about self-care, and to encourage you to get thinking about your own plan for maintaining self-care. Check out the video!

What is a self-care plan? A self-care plan lists out, or provides guidance and tools to keep self-care a priority during time of stress. A self-care routine can be used as a regular practice to help manage stress.

A few things to keep in mind about how to practice self care:

Mindfully: Intentionally focusing on doing one-thing at a time, or mindfulness, has a lot of great scientific research behind it, as far as benefits like relaxation and stress reduction, even help toward coping with pain. Mindfully practicing self-care means focusing on your self-care moment by moment and just doing one thing at a time.

Personally: Self care can incorporate lots of different tools that should be personal to you-it will work better that way! See if you can incorporate special knowledge from your culture about how to manage stress, include skills you knew as a child or that were passed down in your family. You may have try out and change different tools around to find what really works best for you.

Creatively: We all have creative ways of expressing ourselves-even if we aren’t master artists! Expressing ourselves creatively (through writing, poetry, music, dance, visual art, etc) can help us take a step toward empowerment, speak up, or stand up for our rights, we can feel energized. Giving back by sharing your creative work is also a great way to connect to the bigger picture- someone may hear your message and remember that they are not alone!

Keep it going: Self-care routines are more effective when we commit to them, and when they happen regularly, so following through is important, not only for you, but so you can be there for other people too and stay true to yourself.

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