In our modern self-care, it is ironic that you know you should do it, but you hardly prioritise it for yourself. Self-care is not just a buzzword (Did you know that the online searches for “self-care” has soared over 250% during the pandemic) or the usual spa, facial, and shopping therapy that could be pretty hefty on your wallet? Depending on the individual, self-care could be anything that meets your physical, mental, social or emotional needs while prioritising yourself in your busy lifestyle, even without costing a cent! With 2023 approaching, we believe it’s important to include self-care in your new year plans!

Self-care comes in different forms

Self-care, as the name suggests, is caring for oneself. It could also be loosely defined as the time taken by an individual to focus on prioritising their physical and mental health. It may look different for everyone, but these are some aspects you can consider:

• Physical Self-Care
  These are activities that improve your physical health such as exercising, not skipping meals, and watching your diet intake. Not forgetting to take the time to rest when needed, or visit the doctor when you’re feeling unwell are also ways that you care for yourself physically. Instead of focusing on temporal indulgence, physical self-care is the daily effort that you already do today to take care of yourself.

• Mental Self-Care
  The idea of mental self-care focuses on activities to help you declutter and reduce your stress level, these include practising mindfulness, reading a book, journaling and reflecting. On the other spectrum, it also includes taking the necessary break you need when you are mentally tired. Staying attuned to your own energy levels could be helpful, that’s why breaks are important!

• **Social Self-care
  **To improve energy, increase happiness and even reduce stress, cultivating the connection with others, such as touching base with your loved ones such as family, friends, or significant others over a meetup, a call or even fun activities is critical to our mental health. This connectedness is necessary for the innately social creatures humans are, including introverts. Healthy social connections yield benefits to your overall health and are helpful to tide you through unexpected difficult times.

• **Emotional Self-care
  **Care for your emotional health and well-being often drives you at checking in with yourself. Emotional self-care is important to be attuned to what you actually need and what could actually help you. It could be staying connected to others, or asking for help when you need it. Similar to mental self-care, meditation, writing in journals and practising gratitude are great ways to start caring for your emotional health.

As you can see, taking care of your physical and mental health is already something you can do day-to-day, while some of the activities such as socialising and journalling meet more than one aspect of self-care. Today, self-care is a lifestyle choice propagated by social media often conceptualised as a spa, facials, maybe a staycation or splurging on your wish list, but with the main idea of putting yourself first. Beyond these tangible and money-costing activities that boost your happy hormones, there are other types of self-care that are wallet-friendly and equally beneficial. To name a few, spending time with your loved ones, making time for your favourite pastimes and even catching up on your latest drama is just as helpful.

”You do not find a happy life. You make it”, Camilla E. Kimball wisely advised the importance of the self in self-care where oneself is the best person to know their needs, thus popularly coined as “me-time”.

Why self-care matters more than you think

Self-care time does make you happy, but more importantly, boosts your general well-being including mental health. In fact, this prioritisation of self-care to boost mental health is recognised on an international scale, where World Health Organisation (WHO) had designated a full Self-Care month (24 June — 24 July) and International Self-Care Day (24 July) to emphasise the need to prioritise one’s self. Even locally, there has been a growing spotlight on mental health focus initiatives and support in Singapore of various organisations, workplaces and in schools. It was announced earlier in 2022 that the Government is considering setting up a national mental well-being office.

Therefore beyond your typical shopping therapy, spa and facial time, self-care is recognised as an important factor for our physical and mental health while achieving better overall well-being. Instead of focusing on the price tag of indulging in self-care activities, the absence of self-care could cost more on your well-being eventually. Therefore, we’ve included 5 easy ways that you can get started.

5 Ways to Get started on Self-Care (Wallet-friendly ideas)

1. **Invest in your best sleep.
   **Often termed sleep hygiene, these are daily routines that intentionally help you to get your well-rested sleep. This could be drinking warm chamomile tea before sleep, listening to audiobooks, or even reducing your digital device use an hour before sleep. Focus on creating the activities that will help you get your best and well-rested sleep!

2. **Make time to do something you really enjoy.
   **Create that fun you love regularly. It could be dancing, rock climbing, reading the latest book or catching the latest shows. For any activities that really make you happy, opt to allocate more of these fun times into your schedules even if it’s once a month. If you’ve yet to discover what it is, it may be a good time to discover what really brings you joy!

3. **Journal or Reflect
   **Experts have revealed that journaling and reflection help with stress relief while boosting health and well-being benefits. There are many well-known successful people such as Tim Ferris, Oprah Winfrey and Emma Watson who kept journaling as their non-negotiable self-care activity. Whether through a physical pen and paper or a digital notebook, penning down your thoughts is advised as a daily habit to help create space in busy lives. For busy bees, one option is to consider journal prompts. Start by noting down, something that you are grateful for today or what would make today even better.

4. Create a morning routine
   Whether you’re a night owl or an early bird, morning routines are the defined steps to start your day. It could be your non-negotiable Kopi-O or Teh-bing with your favourite toast, or that 10-min yoga before you start your day. It’s basically your first me-time of the day, and you would already have a couple of minutes of prioritising yourself!

5. (Our personal recommendation) Create your self-love fund
   We are huge advocates of self-care, such that we’ve included it in our own monthly/weekly budgeting! We spoke about the reasons and benefits in this post, and this could start at your comfortable budget to you but is strictly meant for you to dip into when you need to indulge in self-care. The main idea is to hold yourself accountable for consistent care with an allocated fund and feel less guilty about indulging!

Be your own New year resolution

In your life of adulting, busyness is inevitable, but between the blurred lines of commitments, rat races and achieving, it is still important to dedicate time and money to your own self-care.

As we are approaching 2023, there will be many uncertainties and exciting opportunities as you walk alongside Dare to Finance. However, one thing that we hope will be certain, will be inspiring you to prioritise self-care in 2023 because you deserve it!