Excerpt from How to Stay Calm in Chaos (Gentile): Your Self-Care Bucket: Fill It First

 


Your Self-Care Bucket: Fill It First 

Self-care is anything you intentionally do to nourish and renew your mind, body, and spirit. It’s not like you practice it once and then you’re good to go for the next two years. It’s the accumulation and constant replenishment of sustainable self-care practices that can help you stay well physically, emotionally, spiritually, and beyond. I often describe this accumulation in terms of a self-care bucket.

Visualize an empty bucket in your favorite color or pattern. We’ll call this your self-care bucket. Now visualize all the self-care practices you do every day or every week. Every self-care practice represents a drop that gets added to your bucket. For example, if you exercised today, add a drop to the bucket. If you got eight solid hours of sleep last night (way to go if that’s you!), sprinkle in another drop.

 Eventually, your bucket will be so full of drops of self-care that the accumulation of drops overflows, spilling out into every area of your life. You gave to yourself first, and now you are ready to give more to others. I feel it when my self-care bucket is full, and I feel it when it’s not. I know I need to fill up my self-care bucket so that I can do everything I did today again tomorrow.

 Use this visualization to measure how much self-care you currently have in your bucket. If it feels like it’s continuously empty, keep adding more self-care practices, including the practices in this book.

Build your self-care reserves with smart self-care strategies so that your whole being can stay well— during crisis mode or not. Dive deeper into more self-care with the practices in my book 108 Yoga and Self-Care Practices for Busy Mamas.



For most posts on Julie and her books, click HERE.

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