Self-Care Tips: How to Take Better Care of Your Brain Health

Self-care is such an important practice and yet so little of us actually engage in proper self-care. Most of us focus more time on other people’s needs that we neglect our own.

We often feel as though our friends and family deserve more care than we do ourselves. Well, you can’t pour water from an empty cup.

Our needs, health, and wellbeing are just as important as those of our loved ones. You deserve to take care of yourself. In fact, not engaging in self-care can actually be detrimental to your physical wellbeing too as mentioned in the British Journal of General Practice. Improve your brain health, focus and productivity by following these easy self-care tips.

Why Is Self-Care So Important?

As we discussed in the introduction, self-care is extremely important because by not doing it, you’re more likely to become ill, both physically and mentally. According to BMJ. 2007 study, self-care also helps to accelerate recovery times from things like brain injury and memory loss.

Self-care is so important not just for our general health but for our overall wellbeing. People who engage in self-care are more productive, focused and able to help others.

Do you need more of a reason to practice self-care?

Self-Care and Brain Power

Self-care improves focus. It allows you to be more productive and generally frees your mind for the more important things.

Can you imagine what you could achieve if you combined a decent self-care routine with brain-boosting supplements?

You’d be unstoppable.

Self-care is so important when it comes to productivity and focus that employers are even encouraging their workers to engage in proper self-care, according to Lifehack. By doing regular self-care you’re retraining your mind, strengthening your spirit and improving your all-round wellbeing.

So, now you’ve seen why self-care is so important and what benefits it has on your overall physical and mental wellbeing, let’s get onto the tips to start you off on your self-care journey.

1. Get Outside

Did you know that a lack of Vitamin D is linked to depression (source)?

You get most of your vitamin D from sunlight. If you find yourself going through periods of low mood analyze when you last spent much time in the sun.

In fact, Seasonal Effective Disorder, when people experience depression through the winter, is linked to lack of sunlight, according to the research published in the Depression Research and Treatment.

Going outside isn’t just important for getting our daily dose of sunlight. Studies have shown that being out in nature helps us to feel revitalized and improves our overall wellbeing. Being out in nature is good for our mental health and good for our souls.

2. Be Mindful

Mindfulness isn’t just the next self-help craze; it’s actually extremely beneficial for our brain health. Mindfulness teaches us to be “at the moment”. Being mindful is to appreciate the moment for what it is rather than thinking about what we have to do or what we have done.

Sitting and drinking a cup of tea and allowing yourself to breathe and take in the tastes and smells of the cup is a good example of how you can start to incorporate mindfulness into your everyday life.

As well as helping us to ground and center ourselves, mindfulness actually helps a lot for our mental health. According to the Clinical Psychol Review, mindfulness actually helps to improve brain function and emotional control making us more mind-healthy individuals. Try adding a few moments to be mindful of your day and see the improvement it has over your wellbeing.

3. Meditate

Meditation is another one of those self-help crazes that everyone seems to be following right now. The thing is, they are all following it for a good reason. Meditation has a number of different physical and mental health benefits.

According to the Ayu. 2015 study, practicing daily meditation can actually prevent overstimulation which causes cardiovascular problems as well as being able to help reduce cholesterol and prevent people from starting smoking.

Meditation can also help with mental health problems, helping to reduce the symptoms of anxiety and depression. It also helps you to deal with stress better and improves your focus and productivity.

4. Listen To Uplifting Music

Listening to music isn’t just fun, it’s actually super beneficial to your mental wellbeing as well. Studies have shown that listening to positive, uplifting music actually boosts the health of your brain. Of course, being in a positive mood also helps boost our productivity.

Finding the right music to listen to improves our sense of focus or calm. And, you know, dancing around the room to those 90’s classics is actually good for your cardiovascular health.

So listening to music is something you should be doing daily to improve your brain health.

5. Eat More Fruit and Veg

Eating more fruit and vegetables is amazing for your physical health. They are packed with good sugars and vitamins and minerals that you need to be a healthy person. Taking care of your body by eating enough fruit and veg actually helps our brain function too.

Eating healthy is just good sense for our brains. Our brains need vitamins and minerals to function normally just like the rest of our bodies. In fact, fruit and veg can do more to help our mental wellbeing as studies have shown that eating 7 portions of fruit and veg each day actually makes us happier individuals!

Fruit and vegetables and getting the correct nutrition is paramount to our brain health and increasing our overall focus and productivity.

Takeaway

Self-care is extremely important. To be able to keep our brains functioning normally we need to be engaging in a practice of self-care. Doing these little things on the list daily will make a great start to your self-care routine.

By caring for ourselves we become better people. When you’ve taken care of your own needs you’re able to care for the needs of your loved ones a lot better, work more efficiently and generally live a more fulfilled life.

What does your self-care routine look like? We’d love to hear what you do each day to care for yourself and your brain health.