Overview of Self-Care

Building sustainable financial margin in your life ensures you cover your bases regarding proper care. In this theme, we are going to cover mechanisms and habits that you need to put into place in order to lead a life that allows you to enjoy the journey of becoming your best for those in your life and what it is that you have set out to accomplish.

Building upon the last theme of what\’s essential to you, baseline care is necessary, especially in the affluence of the U.S., where we can easily ignore the care we really need in exchange for what the culture tells us we need. The U.S. tops the charts regarding substance abuse, prescription medication, and mental health issues, amongst a number of other aspects. This should be shocking, especially with the affluence of the U.S., but what is attributing to this?

In one of the first episodes I recorded, I stated that margin is the space outside the chaos. It\’s spare time and resources. It enables us to slow down, focus on the present, and observe the world around us. But it has been seemingly lost in the fast-paced, high-pressure, little-to-no-rest world we operate in, leaving people checked out, burned out, and mentally and emotionally exhausted.

Does that sound familiar?

So what are people feeling–hopeless. And what, then, is this causing people to do–check out. People are unmotivated to return to work, and those working are getting burnt out in record numbers causing them to leave and deepen the labor crisis. Alcohol and substance abuse has skyrocketed in the last couple of years as well as depression, anxiety, and resulting suicide rates.

People are feeling more and more hopeless and less and less motivated, and it\’s leading to so many issues in society. Now we could discuss the effects of people getting sick, the economic or the social and cultural issues we\’ve seen, but you all have seen this as well. Now, we should be involved in contributing to making this place better, which starts at home. It begins with you and me. It starts with us not allowing social media, technology, or the media to control our purpose. It starts with knowing how to disconnect properly, take in and process the information necessary for our day-to-day lives, and take time away to reset—then allowing that reset to set in new habits and behaviors.

I believe so many people are on edge; you see it in the way people relate with each other in communicating online or even in person; people are sick and tired and feel the need to self-medicate.

But as we know, medications are used to mask the issue at hand, not to prevent or heal the problem.

So what then needs to be done to heal the issue? It\’s not taking the exotic vacation and indulging in all that place and culture has to offer; it\’s not buying yet another new vehicle or the newest technology, and it\’s also not buying a bigger home with more amenities.

It\’s applying Webster\’s definition of Margin in our own lives; \”a spare amount or measure or degree allowed or given for contingencies or special situations.\” This lack of margin causes us to care less and less for our own long-term well-being causing a ripple effect in the families and organizations we are a part of.

Whether we admit it or not, we all have basic self-care needs that require we actually prioritize our time, talent, and energy to ensure those things are accomplished.

How often do we take something as important as care and overlook our needs for what may excite us and justify that? A new car, an expensive vacation, a private school, you name it. We justify a lot.

Now, I am not saying you don\’t treat yourself from time to time. But let\’s get back to defining where our focus should be daily so that we don\’t wait until we burnout in order to get rest, we don\’t jump from vacation to vacation in order to enjoy life, and we don\’t purchase more and more things to then be obligated to leaving us less and less time to be involved in what really matters to us.

CTA:

My call to action is to take note of where you think you are at in regard to your overall well-being. Simply write down a number 1-10 of how you are doing overall, and in the next blog, we will go through that in comparison to reality.