When I hosted a mom’s group, our first topic was self-care. As I got thinking about the topic, I realized that to feel really cared for, I don’t just need the occasional bubble bath—I need so much more: good relationships, time to explore nature, an organized home life, and a vision for my future. All these things make me feel cared for by myself as if I were my own best parent.

As I thought more about the topic, I concluded that another way of describing self-care is self-compassion. Through self-compassion we recognize the fundamental needs we have in all aspects of our life—as well as our inabilities and limitations to meet those needs. It’s also not about competition and doing what others are doing, but about going at our own pace and doing what is possible in our different seasons of life.

The root of self-compassion is self-awareness. It takes maturity to recognize (and accept) what we have and what we may never be able to have in our life. The result of this acceptance is peace, which I believe is the ultimate aim of self-care. This is not the kind of peace that you feel when you step into a hot tub and have a good soak, but a quiet moment can give you a glimpse of the peace you are ultimately aiming for in your life.

I believe that all self-care falls into four major categories: body, heart, mind and soul. I list them in this order because this follows the natural progression of development. First, we learn to care for our bodies, this includes our most primitive needs. Then we learn to thrive in a social environment, especially with our primary caregivers. Eventually we educate and develop our mental faculties. And finally we move beyond the physical to satisfy our need for deeper meaning in our lives.

Four Aspects of Self-Care:

My husband likes to remind me of the benefits of exercise since he finds so much daily peace in working out his body. Exercising not only helps us manage our weight, but it also allows us to relate to our bodies in a more immediate and direct way. Since I am more of a “head” person, I can sometimes lose track of where my body is at, what I am feeling, and whether or not I’ve overdone it (again). When I was in university I struggled with anxiety and I found one of the most important ways of managing it was to regularly work out so that I could step away from my busy mind for a bit. For my husband, exercise is his rejuvenating outlet—it’s time away by himself, but it also boosts his mood, regulates his emotions, and has him coming back home feeling always more “like himself.”

There are other ways of taking care of our bodies that help us feel better and more ourselves. Once when I was living abroad, I stood at the window of my apartment looking out on yet another foggy day, feeling lonely and a bit melancholic. But, all of a sudden, out of the fog stepped a very classy looking lady walking with purpose and direction. Seeing her attitude on such a dismal day actually motivated me to shake off my mood and get going on my own day.

As a woman, have you ever noticed how putting on some makeup can improve the way you feel about yourself? Or as a man, how proud you feel donning a suit? I always like to make a bi-yearly blog post about fashion for moms because I feel strongly that dressing well not only helps us elevate our self-perception but it raises the level of civilization in our home and in our community. I know it can be challenging to find the time and energy to look good but looking good encourages the people around us to make an effort to look good as well. I think when high members of society show up to board rooms in sweats or a politician wears a hoodie to a conference, humanity has taken a hit. Their lack of effort in dress makes you wonder if they take their work and their colleagues seriously.

For those of us working in the home, dressing well can be an act of relationship when we choose pieces and items according to who we will see that day. I know my husband not only feels proud of me when I dress up, but he feels better about us as a couple. Seeing me make an attempt to look good tells him I am making an effort in our relationship to continue to attract him and it encourages him to keep making an effort in the relationship himself (see our earlier article on increasing intimacy in marriage here).

If it matters to him how I dress, it matters to me that he keeps regular hygiene. This is one of the aspects of bodily care that thankfully is still maintained by social pressures in our culture. But taking care of our hygiene even just for our own sake is also a gentle way of saying thank you to our body for the hard work it does.

One aspect of physical self-care that I find is getting increasingly overlooked (especially with the advent of self-celebrity on social media) is the issue of physical privacy. It is so common now to post a photo of somebody (friends, family or children) without even asking them permission. We don’t think about it, but we are each the curators of our own image. I want my children to know this and to respect their own privacy online and in person by being deliberate about what images they share, and with whom. I want to tell them that they can’t assume that everyone will put a “like” on their photo. I want them to think critically about what they are trying to get out of sharing aspects of their privacy—and whether they think it will help them connect with people in a way that builds them up and doesn’t open them up to greater scrutiny. That even if they are beautiful, their image is theirs and doesn’t need to be passed around to everyone for no good reason. I want them to know that modesty is personal privacy and an aspect of self-respect.

Another aspect of self-care related to the body is emotional health and regulation. Sleep is an important aspect of this (difficult as it is to be consistent). But generally being aware of our body in physical space, its emotions, its stresses, and stressors allows us to develop self-awareness that leads to self-compassion. The effect of sitting in the bubble bath is not only that our body relaxes, but that we suddenly give our body the space to simply “be.” In our high-paced and techy world, we may push our bodies to the limits and may even treat them like objects without consequences. When we push beyond our personal limitations, sometimes the first symptoms are a shift in mood. Self-care is about taking the time to recognize those emotions and learning to readjust in the wake of emotional dysregulation.

In summary, self-care of our body includes:

-diet
-sleep
-exercise
-hygiene
-relaxation (bathing)
-hair, nails, teeth
-makeup and skincare

-clothing
-emotional awareness

-physical awareness and appropriateness

-physical privacy (modesty)

I know that the heart usually refers to love, but I like to think of the heart as the social centre of our being. Self-care of the heart means growing in my ability to develop healthy relationships with family, friends, colleagues, neighbours, and the larger community. How I relate to others, whether these relationships are healthy or whether they are damaged, whether they promote growth or stymie it, affects my heart. I am not indifferent to the person who cut me off in the car, to the cashier who was kind at the checkout, or to how the date night went with my husband. I take better care of my heart as I increase in social skills such as setting boundaries, being kind and charitable, and learning to take an apology and to give one.

Before the pandemic, I wrote an article about loneliness in motherhood (you can read it here). In Canada, almost one-quarter of the population experiences “desolation”--a kind of loneliness which is derived from infrequent contact or poor relationships. In the US three in five Americans (61%) were lonely in 2019, up from 54% in 2018. More recent studies show that people are spending less time with friends than ever before and that this trend is not necessarily linked to the social isolation trends of the pandemic. As Jonathan Haidt argues, even before the forced lockdowns, people were moving their social lives online and were consequently feeling less satisfied in their relationships.

In an effort to increase the quality (rather than the quantity) of my friendships, I recently had an opportunity proposed to me when my phone died and I lost access to my Facebook account. Instead of trying to get back onto the platform or even start a new page, I decided to tell my contacts that I was no longer on social media. This proved challenging when I realized that my new phone could not send mass messages. So I slowly had to send individual messages to all the contacts on my phone. In this process, I found greater pleasure and more satisfaction in these one-to-one interactions than I had experienced when I posted information publicly and got generalized likes and comments.

We crave personal connection, and sometimes receiving a lot of attention from a lot of people at once can give us the feeling that we are connected or connecting with others. The danger of sourcing our social needs from a social media environment is that we often fall into a mob mentality when it comes to social issues. It happens again and again on social platforms: virtue signalling and posts that quell and then feed our insecurities about how we relate to others. The machinations of social media are unnatural because, in a one-on-one setting, I’m more likely to have a nuanced disagreement through conversation—where we can both take the time to understand each other—than when I am making a one-off post or disclaimer about what I believe or simply that I stand for such and such.

After the appearance of trolls on Twitter and other platforms, it makes us wonder if the people we encounter in our day-to-day life are just simmering with hatred under the surface for anyone who is different from them. Social media is a difficult place for anyone with a sensitive heart to survive, and perhaps it is not a way of perfecting and bringing to life meaningful and satisfying relationships that are based on vulnerability and trust.

Mind you, social media can have its uses. When I lived abroad, it was the only way I could relate to family and friends. But after living far from home for almost a year, the emails and messages I would get from family no longer satisfied my heart. I realized I needed to make a decision, to set down roots where I was living and make a new family and close relationships, or to return home and fulfill the responsibilities to the people I already called my family and friends. The scene from Le Petit Prince (The Little Prince) often came to my mind: the Prince, after having made friends with the fox, now has a responsibility towards it. We cannot take our friendships lightly, we really depend on each other, and as I discovered, we have a responsibility towards the people that have chosen and made our friends.

Now as a parent, the responsibilities I have towards my children are more obvious, but sometimes they can take effort. When my child wakes me up at night, for example, I have to make a choice sometimes to be pleasant with him, to see this as an opportunity to grow in relationship rather than just something “I have to do” or that the child is making me do through his persistent demands. When I see difficulties as opportunities to grow in relationship, it softens the hurdles of parenthood by creating meaningful relationship moments.

I take care of my heart when I care for the needs of those around me. I have mentioned friends and family, but we can also consider broader social engagements through volunteer work, donations to charity, and any kind of hospitality. We might have a passion for social work, or hospitality, or the poor. Small things go a long way. My husband volunteered at a soup kitchen when he was a student, just for 2h of the week. I argued with him that he could come and volunteer with me (we had four small children). But I agreed with him that it’s important to look beyond just our family’s needs and not become so focused only on ourselves.

There is a line, though, that we have to be careful not to cross when we consider placing our time and energy into the community, and I think we can assess it by checking in with our kids and spouse and seeing if our outside commitment has become a burden to them. We only have so much emotional energy, and it is only fair that we prioritize who gets what and how much. In my own family, my husband and kids know that they will come first before my other interests, but sometimes it can be hard not to resent all their needs. I know it may sound dramatic, but in these moments I think of my death. I remind myself, who will be with me when I die? And I recall my grandparents and how they died and the family that surrounded them. We make investments now in the present about the quality of life we will have in the future when all our social engagements forget us, but our children and friends remember the kindnesses we had towards them and return love for love.

The questions we need to ask our heart include: how do I present myself to others? How am I relating to others? Do my kids get enough attention from me? Are my closest friendships reciprocal and do they build me up or tear me down (see our article on Jordan Peterson and friendship here)? How is my husband/wife doing right now? Am I contributing to my community in meaningful ways? Do I welcome people into my home?

Ultimately, my own feelings of peace and satisfaction also depend on how I am relating to the people around me.

Summary of self-care of our heart:

-friendships

-marriage

-parenting relationship
-being aware of those around me
-volunteer work
-donations to charity
-hospitality

We take care of our mind when we develop it in such a way that it works efficiently in the field of work we have chosen. For example, as a teacher, I read up on the topic I will teach before I teach it so I can be prepared to answer students’ questions. But the same can be true for me as a parent: I can read and develop an understanding of child psychology through observation, books, or knowledge passed on from others so that I can better meet my children’s needs. We take good care of our minds when we make sure that our mind is prepared to meet the ordinary challenges of our day.

We also take care of our mind by offering it simple challenges in order to keep it sharp and prepared for real future challenges. We do this through hobbies, reading, studying, and engaging in intellectual conversations. I think it’s easy to forget but our mind, like our body, needs to be exercised regularly in order to stay healthy. More and more research in neurological development and ageing is showing that our minds need to be taken care of if we want to maintain our faculties into old age. But even when we are young, we can’t allow our brains to become dull.

Sometimes we don’t have to create new challenges, they just come to us. I went to the basement to pull out the winter clothes at the end of the summer and found that everything smelled like mildew. All of a sudden my simple task of switching out the clothes (mind you, an afternoon’s worth of work) transformed itself tenfold. After researching cause and prevention, I set myself to work. It ended up taking weeks to clean everything, sort, and refresh the bins. But in the end I finished and everything was much more organized (and better smelling) than before. And more importantly I felt the satisfaction of having won over the chaos.

We exercise our mind when we organize the world around us. Another great example of this is a garden. When I was a grad student, I used to sit near a window and watch the gardener below me pulling weeds. I would wish that instead of working on my research I could just apply my mind to something tangible. There’s a relief for intellectual workers to be able to put their minds into something seen and not abstract. Another example is when—if you’re having a chaotic day—you take a second and just tidy up your room. Or when you bring order to the demands coming at you by writing down your weekly schedule. Ordering the world around us brings relief to our minds.

A sharp mind that is well taken care of is also a disciplined mind. And by that I don’t mean work it harder. I feel like we are already bombarding our minds constantly with so much input it’s overwhelming. No, the opposite: we have to have to regularly “turn it off” and allow for silence and rest. In the practice of meditation, we can teach our mind to focus on one thing for a long period of time or alternatively to practice stillness and allow different stimuli to pass through our perception without our reacting. This development of mental awareness is in vogue today because don’t encounter a lot of silence naturally. Giving our mind time to rest and recover, just like we let our bodies recover after exercise, is more vital than ever. As a stay-at-home parent, the majority of my noise and stimulation comes from my own children. Though they are small, I am teaching them that mommy needs a break from demands at least once in the day (and not just at bedtime!) My “quiet time” is after I serve the kids lunch: I want to have a quiet lunch—by myself. I encourage them to play quietly, read, or go outside or in the basement to play. They’ve gotten used to this rhythm and are often quiet at this time without me having to tell them.

Other ways to care for our mind includes doing things that are different from our usual activities. This is a different kind of rest than sleep, meditation, and time away from others. Allowing our mind time for free play allows it to relax and become more creative. When we do something for our own enjoyment, like reading a book or listening to a podcast for pleasure, we tell our minds that there is space and time for it to expand and grow. When we are too rigid and only allow our minds to focus on productive tasks, we may find ourselves becoming bitter and resentful, and then consequently we procrastinate or delay chores—as if we were our own bad boss and were trying to escape the tyranny. Put a little fun into your day, every day. This is restful but also allows me to get excited about different ideas, and it provides conversation fodder with my husband or other people. In short, giving my mind time to “play” makes me a more interesting person.

Summary of self-care for our mind:

-Intellectual growth
-Professional growth (including homemaking skills for homemakers)
-knowledge of self
-Counselling for mental health
-Reading/podcasts
-taking an interest-based course
-gardening and home-care

-hobbies

-organizing and managing our home

There comes a moment in our life when we have satisfied our needs but still feel dissatisfied. We have things, but we want better things. We have relationships, but we want better ones.

When we start to become restless in this way and look beyond the usual things to satisfy us, there are two ways we could go—we could get rid of the present things we have and replace them with new ones, and separate from our relationships and find better ones. OR we could start to ask ourselves what makes a thing better? What makes a relationship better? This type of metacognitive thinking, or heightened awareness and discernment is actually an opening into the spiritual realm. That is, we start to broaden our horizons by considering the bigger picture of why we do any of this at all.

After the second world war, Viktor Frankl wrote Man’s Search for Meaning where he argued that finding deeper meaning helped him survive the horrors of the Nazi concentration camps. In one anecdote, he recalls seeing his wife’s face as he walked through the camp. It was the thought of having someone worth living for that helped him overcome despair. But in order to survive until he was freed, he realized he would not be able to focus only on surviving until he got out; he would have to imagine new possibilities of what his life could be after he was freed. He found meaning in dire circumstances through doing purposeful work or in a purposeful deed, in experiencing something or encountering love, and finally in the attitude he took towards unavoidable suffering (you can read more about Frankl here).

Like Frankl, when evil events enter into our life, instead of stopping in our tracks and giving up, we can come to a deeper understanding and life purpose that allows us to push through the barriers of oppression. We may not understand why we have to suffer, but as we create meaning from our suffering we can grow in hope and purpose in life. This was Frankl’s vision. Rather than being afraid of suffering and stress, he argues that we need difficulties to prove that we are moving towards a worthwhile goal and that we are free to attain it.

There are other ways of approaching the spiritual that don’t require so much intellectualization. This other way includes seeking out beauty. Art, music, theatre, masterpieces of literature, all of these can also bring some satisfaction to our soul and flood out lives with a new zest for life. One time a friend of mine had had a difficult day. I brought her to an art gallery and we sat for some time in front of a beautiful work of art. After some time she thanked me and told me that she felt better. But I have also found that you can get the same satisfaction from taking a walk in the woods in the fall or in having a jam session with friends or by reading a beautiful poem.

A third way of giving satisfaction to our soul is by leading a virtuous life. In other words, to be a good person we have to keep ourselves accountable to the ideals we have committed ourselves to, and in this way we are also taking care of our soul. This includes holding ourselves accountable to high standards in our marriage or parenting, or in the quality output of our work. Self-care in this area includes acquiring the virtues and character traits we need in order to meet those ideals. These learned and hard-earned traits include kindness, patience, industriousness, courage, and temperance.

Religions are a package deal, they take the problems of meaning, suffering, beauty, and leading a good life, put them together, and offer you a way to live it cohesively. And more than that: daily needs, worries, and sufferings all become ritualized and united with the cares of the people around us.

In Catholicism, the religion we practice, the encounter with God is the centre of our life. The liturgy of the Mass is both an act of memory, remembering stories of God’s goodness, but also a personal encounter with God himself in the Eucharist. Birth, death, coming of age, marriage and suffering, all these aspects of my life find their place, purpose, or redemption in my religion.

As a parent, I can incorporate my soul’s needs into my family’s routines and rhythms. For example, I take a day off every week to rest from work and focus on worship or religious practice. This weekly rhythm of life gives my soul space to express and maintain a spiritual depth at regular intervals of time. I also reserve daily times for prayer and even take a few days out of the year for a silent retreat.

Summary of self-care of our soul:

-adoration

-quiet reflection
-religion or special traditions
-time in nature

-beauty

-becoming a better parent or spouse
-keeping ourselves accountable to ideals or promises to ourselves or others
-character/virtue growth (eg growth in kindness or patience)

Taking Care of Your Self: Body, Heart, Soul and Mind

Four Aspects of Self-Care:

In summary, self-care of our body includes:

Summary of self-care of our heart:

Summary of self-care for our mind:

Summary of self-care of our soul: