The importance of seasonal self-care check-ins

In this week's podcast episode we use our 4 C’s framework to walk you through aquick and easy self-care check-in and offer some simple self-care experiment ideas that can get you started on making small but meaningful shifts to your self-care. We also share how we’ve used our own self-care check-ins to help us identify and implement some specific self-care activities.

From our perspective, incorporating regularly occurring “self-care check-ins” is, in fact, foundational to ensuring our self-care strategies continue to meet our existing needs. One easy way to do this is to incorporate our self-care check-ins into our existing seasonal routines.

If you think about it, the changing seasons typically prompt us to engage in a variety of predictable behaviours aimed at helping us transition into the next season. Depending on where you live, that might mean things like switching out your season-specific clothing, completing season-specific yard work, completing season-specific vehicle maintenance, planning summer activities for our children, buying new school supplies for our children (and/or ourselves!), and the list goes on and on.

Many of these behaviours almost become automatic and we simply find space in our lives to complete these essential seasonal tasks and activities.

Adding self-care check-ins into our seasonal routines can be a wonderful way to keep our self-care in the forefront of our minds and to help us prepare for the changes in our personal and professional lives that also often occur around seasonal changes.

We’re sure you’d agree that your well-being is definitely worth the limited time it takes (i.e., 40–60 minutes per year, at 10–15 minutes, four times per year) to complete seasonal self-care check-ins.

And as helpful as seasonal self-care check-ins can be in keeping our self-care on track, it’s important to highlight that there will inevitably be other times in your life when it will be equally incredibly important to complete self-care check-ins: times when there are significant changes to your personal or professional life. These might include transitioning to a new job or to retirement, changes to your family circumstances and responsibilities, changes to your health or that of a loved one, etc.

Unfortunately, the all-too-common response we have to these life changes is to automatically reduce or eliminate self-care strategies in order to make space for the additional responsibilities that typically come with changes to our personal or professional lives. And, if you think about it that response is very understandable, as it is fuelled by all the factors that negatively influence female mental health therapists’ self-care (e.g., gender socialization, our training, our wiring, unrelenting standards, etc.). But, of course, just because it's understandable, that does not mean it's helpful or that it’s a pattern that we cannot change.

So, as you prepare for the upcoming Fall season, or try to adjust to any notable change in your personal or professional life, set aside 10 to 15 minutes to do a self-care check-in and use that information to start taking small but meaningful steps towards an individualized and meaningful self-care plan.

Because YOU ARE WORTH IT!

Where will your reflactions take you?