🍎 Maintaining a healthy lifestyle over a period of time gives us a good shot at extending life. A good quality of life depends on living with intention and practicing daily self-care.

What exactly is self-care?

Self-care protects our well-being.

It’s truly putting ourselves first and caring for our own mental, physical, spiritual, emotional and social health.

Not protecting our health can result in a very dissatisfying and unproductive life. Therefore, it’s crucial to focus on daily self-care habits such as:

• Eating nutrient rich foods
• Regular sleeping times
• Socializing with uplifting family and friends
• Cardio, resistance, and weight bearing exercises
• Hydrating
• Improving mindset
• Using empowering language
• Being productive and creative
• Trying new things

Another sometimes forgotten self-care habit is saying “yes” to only things we genuinely want to do and “no” to the things we don’t, no matter what others think.

Many times, we do the opposite and say “no” to ourselves and “yes” to others.

It’s tough to practice self-care if you’re constantly pushing your own needs to the back burner.

The sad thing is, if you’re known as the responsible person that always takes care of everybody else, some might recognize this and take advantage of your people-pleasing tendencies.

Just because someone asks for something, doesn’t mean you have to drop everything and make their issue your responsibility.

“It’s true that sometimes saying “no” will hurt someone else’s feelings—you may even disappoint someone you admire. But you are also fostering resentment and regret when you don’t honor yourself and your needs. This leads you to be even more critical of yourself and spirals into negative self-talk, which can lead to symptoms of anxiety and depression” according to Mindbodygreen.com.

What about kindness?

Yes, it’s OK to practice kindness and perfectly acceptable to do things for others if you genuinely want to. However, before agreeing to help, consider your intentions.

🙅 Are you sacrificing your own self-care, in order to help another?

🙅 Is bending over backwards for others’ creating joy and fulfillment, or is it creating resentment, especially if the kind act isn’t returned?

10 Common reasons you might be saying “yes” to others and “no” to yourself is because you:

1. Have no clear vision of your own goals and desires
2. Have nothing to do
3. Keep busy to fill time
4. Want something new to talk about
5. Rely on attention and validation from others
6. Believe that you deserve to suffer
7. Feel lonely
8. Haven’t dealt properly with unresolved past trauma
9. Believe others’ are responsible for your emotions
10. Place more importance and value on others’ needs, than you do for your own, and feel shame if you let them down

Sacrificing your own self-care and making others’ needs more important than your own, creates stress, overwhelm, worry, and can take a toll and lead to illness and disease.

Remember, saying no isn’t about depriving yourself or anybody else for that matter, it’s about making space for the things that really matter to you.

If your life doesn’t resemble what you’ve always imagined, maybe it’s finally time to focus on yourself, and envision what you want your future life to look like.

What do you want?

It’s easy to give airtime to things you don’t want, but do you actually know what you “do” want?

Here are some helpful prompts that might get you started:

• Do you want to learn a new skill, socialize more, travel, see movies, read books?
• What types of things are you already good at or proud of?
• Who inspires you?
• How can you improve your health?
• Are you living where you want to live, or do you want to live somewhere else?
• What stories do you tell yourself that keep you moving forward?
• Are you surrounded by things you enjoy?
• What kind of structure and daily routines would you like to create?

What baby steps can you put into action today to create the life you deserve?

Think about it, how can you create the best version of yourself, what could your life to look like in a year, and what steps do you need to take?

Please leave a comment!

TOPIC: Is People Pleasing Affecting Your Well-Being?

As a healthy living coach, I encourage and teach you to set healthy boundaries so you can focus on your own self care. If you’d like coaching around this, click the button below!

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