Quick Tip: How to Take Your Self-Care Practice to a Deeper Level

When you think about the concept of self-care, what immediately comes to your mind?

For many of us, it could be things like buying ourselves something nice, engaging in a hobby, reading a book, talking to a friend, taking a walk, essentially doing things that make us feel good in the moment. 

Those are all valid forms of self-care. We’re soothing ourselves when we feel unsettled. 

But there can be another layer to caring for ourselves that can sometimes get lost in the shuffle of life or may not even seem like a type of self-care because it’s not necessarily done in the moment, but it’s more of a long-term approach.

Values-Based Self-Care

This additional layer of self-care involves making choices that are aligned with our values. This can look like setting boundaries when we need to, caring for our environment, investing in relationships, setting and working toward goals that we care about.

These are things that resonate with who we are and who we want to be or who we want to show up as and how we want to live life. 

And when we make choices aligned with that, that’s us taking care of ourselves, or having our own back. 

This can sometimes be difficult if we’re under a lot of stress or things feel chaotic and uncertain.  During those times we might default to shorter-term solutions or not consider what our values are because it doesn’t feel like we have the bandwidth to do that. 

To be fair, more immediate forms of self-care have also become pretty popularized.

In a 2024 Vox.com article, the author Allie Volpe argued that as existential dread has increased over the last couple of decades, so too has the marketing of self-care as an antidote. 

She writes that self-care, in a lot of ways, has become synonymous with treating ourselves, which is not always a bad thing, but it reduces a pretty powerful concept into a commodity. 

Not to mention if we can’t afford some of these types of self-care—like getting a facial, going on vacation, buying a new gadget—we might feel bad about ourselves or make the assumption that if it’s out of our budget, then we can’t truly partake in self-care.

But that’s not true, and there is more to caring for ourselves than buying something.

Deeper Needs

This is where knowing and acting from your values can come into play. 

As an example, let’s say that you’ve been feeling stressed or run down, maybe you have more on your plate than you feel like you can handle and you feel like you’re running on empty. 

Most of us would reach for something that will help us to feel better in the moment, which could look like buying something, eating something, watching something. 

But if we can also go a level deeper and reflect on our core values, we might realize that one of them is connection, so in addition to the immediate remedy mentioned before, we could also make more of an intention to spend more meaningful time with loved ones. 

Or, maybe one of our values is freedom, and if we’re feeling bogged down by too many responsibilities, we might have to make a tough call to set some boundaries in order to take some of things off our plate. 

Both of those strategies are likely going to have a longer-term effect on your wellbeing as opposed to buying yourself something nice because you’re addressing your deeper needs, which are connection and freedom.

While this type of values-aligned self-care does sometimes require a little more time and effort to get to the bottom of what’s going on as well as what may help in the situation, it can pay large dividends, just like an investment account. 

The more you invest in yourself and understanding what you truly need, the better able you will be to address those needs and the better you will feel. You’ll also likely feel more confident because you’re showing up for yourself. 

Try It Out

To try this on your own, try and create a self-care practice that is tied to a value that you have. So if you have a value of freedom what can you do that would give you a sense of freedom even for a few minutes. 

Whatever you come up with, see if you can practice that for several days in a row or even a week. Again, it doesn’t have to be that long, only a few minutes a day.

If you are able to do the practice consistently, see what you notice by the of several days or a week. How did it make a difference?

*Disclaimer: The information contained in this podcast is for the sole purpose of being informative and is not considered complete.