A Little Self Care in the New Year

I feel like the end of the year is always a good time to reflect a little. One of the things I’ve been focusing on more lately is self care and long term health. In case they help you too, here are a few recommendations I’d like to share.

Headspace App

I’ve found this meditation app to be a very approachable guide to clearing my mind and refreshing at the end of day. You can take it at your own pace and make it part of your daily routine.

Neuromuscular Massage Therapy

As someone who’s only recently started appreciating the benefits of massage, I’ve experimented with a few types to figure out what helps me best. So far, the most effective massage therapy that gets rid of my knots and pains longer term is neuromuscular massages. It’s also referred to as trigger point myotherapy or myofasical therapy. It’s different from your Swedish or deep tissue in that your therapist is highly skilled and knowledgeable about where the source of your pain is coming from and where to push or pull in concentrated areas to relieve it.

The Weight We Carry

Figure out what “weights” you carry and set boundaries to only include those that matter. As I was getting the knots in my shoulder and neck worked out yet again, my masseuse told me a lot of my stiffness and reoccurring knots were from the weight of everything I was carrying. And that on a deeper level, my muscles remember those weights and come back.

For someone who is a visual thinker, I thought her example of drawing two circles was very helpful in figuring out how to strike a balance between staying compassionate, but healthy as well. The inner circle contains the weights in your life that matter. The outer circle contains all the weights in your life that don’t matter. For me, the act of writing out all my weights in either circle help me acknowledge what I should care about and what I should let go of.

So I hope you spend a little time and self care on yourself before the year ends as well. Keep it going. Thanks for reading!