Tips for Caring For Yourself And Others

When people talk about healthy lifestyles, it often centers around food and exercise, but when it comes to overall wellbeing, these are just part of the picture.

In order to be truly healthy, you have to consider all areas of your life that contribute to wellbeing, and that includes your personal life, as well as your connections to your local community and the environment. In other words, health can’t be pinned down to just one area; instead, it has to be holistic. With this in mind, this guest post post suggests three tips on how to care for yourself and for others.

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1. Get enough exercise

Exercise is natural; we’re made to move, not sit down all day. Incorporating physical activity into your life doesn’t mean you have to go to the gym every day and power it up on the stair master for an hour. General recommended guidelines say you should engage in two and a half hours of moderate-intensity aerobic exercise a week. That’s only about 20 minutes a day, and who said you had to do it all at once? Break it up throughout the day by walking briskly to your destinations and taking the stairs.

2. Make time for yourself

At times, the list of things you have to think about can seem endless and overwhelming, even if many of them are positive – family, work, friends, eating right, financial concerns. However, there will always be one more thing to do, so if you don’t actively make time for yourself, you might find you’ve just been living for other people.

Nurse Bronnie Ware reminds us how important this is in her well-known book, The Top Five Regrets of the Dying. The top regret of the dying was not living a life true to themselves. People often postpone their personal desires and dreams for the good of everyone around them, but in the end, that’s not really in anyone’s benefit, especially if you’ll come to regret it later.

3. Don’t forget about your family or friends

Although this might seem obvious, it can be easy to take family and friends for granted. So many people put personal relationships aside to work over the weekend or glue themselves to their phone or computer without really engaging with their loved ones. However, in The Top Five Regrets of the Dying, Ware found that the second most common regret was having worked too hard while missing out on important family moments, and the fourth most common regret was not keeping in touch with old friends. Make sure these aren’t your regrets, by making time for those you care about.