The four areas of self-care
What is self-care? That’s the question, Eli & me asked ourselves when we prepared for our Women’s Circle on the topic of self-care.
After Eli did some research about it, read more about the Blue Zones and their inhabitants’ behaviour, we narrowed self-care down to four areas of health:
Physical: eg the quality and quantity of your sleep, movement, touch, food etc.
Mental and Emotional: eg self-talk, management of stress, worries, fears and the inner critic, emotional maturity etc.
Spiritual: eg sense of usefulness, purpose and meaning etc.
Social: eg sense of belonging to a community, quality of relationships
Inspired by the Blue Zone practices, Model by Eloiza Savvidou & Melanie Kovacs
I find the last area, social, especially important. Many might view self-care as something you do alone. However, helping a neighbour can be self-care too, if at that moment it’s your need to connect with somebody and feel a sense of belonging.
Another way to see self-care is to look at four brain chemicals. We release them naturally when we practice self-care in one of the aforementioned four areas.
We release…
…Dopamine when we hit a goal, eg we set out to workout and once we’ve done it it’s like our brain congratulating and high-fiving us
…Oxytocin when we touch, eg hug, cuddle, or kiss someone or pet an animal. Interestingly, when we caress for example our own face or arm, oxytocin gets released too. The brain and skin can’t differentiate whether it’s somebody else or you.
…Serotonin when we are outside, get some sun, practice gratitude or feel belonging to a community
…Endorphines when our heart rate goes up, eg by working out
You can easily remember these four brain chemicals by the acronym of D.O.S.E. Thanks to Radha Agrawal who coined this term and explained it in her brilliant book “Belong”.
How do you get your D.O.S.E. of natural feel-good chemicals? Rsp how do you strenghten each area of self-care?
Which area are you neglecting?
