Last spring our family went through an incredibly stressful season, so today I want to share with you 5 practical tips for self-care during survival mode. What does self-care look like when the storm keeps raging and you feel like your whole world is spinning? These are things you can implement in your home today.
This past spring, navigating life felt like troughing through one storm after another as so many heavy decisions and big things kept hitting our family. It truly was one of the most stressful seasons I can remember, and I could physically feel it. Emotional health and wellbeing effects our whole body. I am honestly still processing, recovering, and putting one foot cautiously in front of the other.
That being said, I thought I would share with you 5 practical self-care tips for a stressful season that I implemented to ease the burden and keep treading water through the storm. Once the storm has passed, these tips helped me to recover a little more before coming up for air.
Simplify your meal plan
First, simplify your meal plan! I have been a proponent of meal planning for a long time, but it looks different during a stressful season. Keep it simple, keep it quick, and remove as much mental decision making as possible. Here are a few ways that I simplify during stressful seasons.
- Use frozen veggies for almost every meal. Preheat the oven to 425°F, add a drizzle of avocado oil and sprinkle of salt and pepper, and roast for 20-25 minutes. All done!
- Use the slow cooker. Use quick, easy recipes you can throw the ingredients in and forget about it, like this slow cooker drip beef.
- Use healthy, clean prepacked foods when possible. My nutritional template is autoimmune paleo protocol (AIP) with reintroductions and our household is paleo. So, finding convenience foods is more challenging but here are a few: prosciutto, Applegate lunch meats, Zora bars, Epic bars, Chomps meat sticks, Simple Mills Crackers, plantain chips, etc. I purchase most of the non-perishables via Thrive Market.
- Use a regular meal plan rotation (whether that’s weekly, bi-weekly, or monthly). Reduce the mental energy required to meal plan, prep, and cook.
- Use the paper plates and plastic utensils (this was especially relevant for us because our dishwasher was broken for over two months – smack in the middle of this stormy season).
- Use easy meat preparation methods: pretty much everything can be oven roasted with the veggies or thrown in the slow cooker.
Of course, you still want to focus on nutrient dense foods, especially when stressed. Play with your menu until you find the right balance of simplicity and nutrition.
Prioritize sleep
This one pretty much speaks for itself, but it’s important to prioritize sleep. Aim for 8 hours per night. Aim for regular hours, following more closely to natures circadian rhythm. Yes, this one is easier said than done for many of us, including myself. This is probably my biggest personal struggle. But when you are in an acutely stressful season, focusing on sleep can have a huge impact in terms of reward for your body and overall health. Better sleep is going to help keep cortisol levels and adrenals in check, and the benefits have a ripple effect on so many other areas.
Practically, what this means is turn off the screens and give yourself a bedtime. Use blue light blocking glasses or turn off the bright lights in your home after sunset. Install an app blocker on your phone to enforce boundaries with social media (or whatever other apps or platforms are zapping your attention and energy). Diffuse and use calming essential oils to promote restful sleep and diminish anxious feelings when your mind is racing. When you wake up in the morning, aim to get some natural sunlight as soon as possible, even if that is simply stepping outside on your patio.
Reevaluate your commitments
This one is hard for me as someone who values honoring my commitments. But this blog is a great example. This is one commitment I chose to pause during this last season. I also decided to step back from some other responsibilities during survival mode. When you are forced into a stormy season in life, you are forced to evaluate which obligations you will prioritize. Could I have kept making things happen? Sure, absolutely! But I would have been dissatisfied with the quality of my work and burnt my wick all the way to the ground. I was already trying to keep the flame from burning out as it was. If you are like me, you many have more things on your to-do list than is realistic and it’s alright to acknowledge that occasionally.
On the plus side (let’s look at the glass as half full for a moment), survival seasons can show you what is truly important to keep and what you can live without, so to speak.
Prioritize you – alone time
This. You must prioritize some you time to refill your own cup! This will look different for different people, of course. For me, an introvert, this means blocking off time for just myself to read, to plan and refigure out a path forward, to just relax, etc.
This can be challenging depending on your state in life. If you are a mother with young children, I know this can be a huge struggle. Easier said then done (I know), but even giving yourself a rest time during your infant’s nap time is a start. Or carve out some time before or after your children are awake. Communicate your needs with your spouse and come up with a plan. Be prepared to revaluate and adjust the plan as often as needed.
If your children are a little older, explain that you need some quiet time as well. You can use a visual timer (almost like putting yourself in timeout). This way the timer is for you, not for them. It will take patience and practice to implement, but if you stick with it, most children will eventually get it.
Create boundaries
A stressful season also provides another way to practice self-care by evaluating your boundaries and creating new ones where needed. This point can be related back to any one of the above, depending on where you need to implement better boundaries. Do you need to create some personal boundaries with alone time, sleep, or the content you are consuming? Do you need to create boundaries around stressful topics of conversation?
As you are reflecting and evaluating which areas of your life need a little boundary work, you may even discern that there are certain people in your life that you need to create boundaries with. Notice your energy after spending time with friends and family in your life or talking on the phone. Are you more stressed or more relaxed? There may also be certain accounts on social media that you decide to mute or unfollow, and that’s alright, too.
Final thoughts
There is more than usual that can be contributing to our stress these days. So I hope these five tips for self-care during a stressful season are helpful for you. Personally, I am trying to be very mindful of my stress levels and boundaries so as not to slip back into such an acutely stressful state. I would love to know which area you struggle with the most. Which area is your strong point? What else supports you through stressful seasons?
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