How Self Care Can Help You Heal
- Dawn Limbu
- May 17, 2017
- 3 min read
Let's talk about what exactly self-care is. There’s a lot of misunderstood information about self-care on the internet, often shared on websites such as Tumblr, where people try and glorify the idea of mental illness. I’ve seen countless of posts talking about how a low mood should be treated by curling up in bed with Netflix, whilst consuming your entire body weight in calories and junk food.
Or how we should sit in solitude whilst listening to the most depressing and potentially triggering songs.
I must say that I have to disagree with this. I spent many years of my depression doing these things and they got me absolutely nowhere. This is not self-care, this is digging you further into a pit of despair.
Understandably, when we are depressed it can be extremely difficult to find the will to do anything else apart from these things. But it’s time we stop advertising these things as self-care and begin to focus on the more proactive activities that will reap fulfilling results.
Self-care should be about doing things that will benefit the body, allowing our bodies to run at an optimal level, in order to feel great about ourselves.
Self-care should be the important tasks that we were unable to do whilst stuck in a bad period of depression, such as taking a shower, brushing our teeth or tidying our living spaces. During our vulnerable moments in life, we should be focussing on healing ourselves from the inside out, hydrating ourselves and fueling our bodies with nutritious food. After all, when we eat well, we feel even better.
It’s amazing how a little self-maintenance can do wonders for lifting our mood. Brushing our teeth after a day spent lying in bed feeling miserable refreshes us, removing the evidence of stagnation after a negative period.
Taking a shower after potentially spending days festering in our own sweat is revitalising and therapeutic. Washing our dishes after days of pretending they didn’t exist, or tidying a chaotic bedroom can make us feel as though we’re finally getting our shit together. Grooming ourselves can almost feel like shedding the skin of our former melancholic selves, revealing a brighter, happier individual.
Grooming is one of my favourite methods of practising self-care. I genuinely enjoy taking care of my physical appearance, not just for aesthetic purposes, but mostly for how fantastic it makes me feel. When I know that I’ve put effort into smelling good and looking great, it truly radiates throughout me, lifting my mood and raising my vibrational energy.
Depression doesn’t want us to take care of ourselves. It WANTS us to suffer and it wants us to sink as low as we possibly can. It’s time to start fighting back. We will no longer give into the shameful demands of this distressing illness.
If I've learnt anything over the past few years, it’s that we need to be proactive in order to overcome depression. No one is able to save us apart from ourselves, and although wallowing in self-pity may be the only thing we feel like doing, it won’t get us anywhere.
It may take a while, but eventually, when the time is right, we will all stumble upon something that will give us the extra push to fight our battles. For now, let’s all keep on trying. It’s okay to stumble and fall back - it’s part of the journey after all. The key is to never give up the fight.
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