Self-care & relaxation

The focus is on wellness rather than on illness

Mental wellbeing can be cared for in many different ways. You can choose what could help you — and what helps you will often help the people around you too.

Sleep

Sleep is one of the basic human needs. We spend about a third of our lives sleeping, and our health, energy level, and overall life satisfaction depend on its quality.1

Habit is sleep’s best friend. The first step is to make consistency a priority.

How to find your sleep window

  1. Pick a bedtime and a wake time which you can stick to, and which will allow you to have sufficient time of sleep.
  2. To find out how many hours of sleep you need, keep a sleep diary for a couple of weeks.
  3. After waking up in the morning, write down when you went to bed, how long it took you to fall asleep (just an estimation), how long you were awake during the night, and when you woke up in the morning to get up from the bed.
  4. Calculate your average sleep duration per night and add approximately 30 minutes to define the ideal time of your new “sleep window”. Most of the adult population needs 7 to 9 hours of sleep.

The most important and challenging part is to stick to the new sleep schedule, ideally during both working days and free days. You may find it hard to adjust to this new sleep schedule at the beginning — it’s normal. If it is not possible to follow your new sleep routine seven days a week, at least four days a week is likely to make some difference.

Exercise

Physical activity is necessary for both our physical and mental health. Taking care of your body affects your overall well-being and it is important for reducing the risk of burn-out.

Regular exercise leads to improved overall well-being and quality of life. It can increase your energy and mood, improve concentration and sleep, and decrease stress and depression symptoms. Just 30 minutes of exercise per day can lead to improved well-being.2

Tips and recommendations

  • Get your body moving this week.
  • Pick three days that you will spend getting your body moving with at least 30 minutes of exercise.
  • Set aside a location and time — you can write it in your calendar. This isn’t supposed to be a marathon level of activity; it’s just about getting your body moving a bit more than usual.
  • Try to find an activity that you do, or you’d like to try: running, dancing, yoga, exercising, swimming, or just walking.
  • The most important thing is to create a routine that works for you — and to take a moment to notice how much better you feel after getting some exercise in.

Breathing and grounding

When anxiety rises, breathing becomes fast and shallow without our noticing, and that alone keeps the body in an alarmed state. Slowing the out-breath is one of the few things you can do deliberately that changes how the body feels within a minute or two.

Slow breathing

Sit with both feet on the floor. Breathe in through your nose for a count of four, then out through your mouth for a count of six. The out-breath being longer than the in-breath is the part that matters. Continue for two to three minutes. If counting makes you tense, just make the out-breath slower than the in-breath and stop counting.

Grounding — 5, 4, 3, 2, 1

When your mind is somewhere you do not want it to be, name, silently or out loud:

  • five things you can see
  • four things you can feel touching your body
  • three things you can hear
  • two things you can smell
  • one thing you can taste

This is not a trick to make distress disappear. It is a way of bringing attention back into the present, which is usually enough to let the wave pass.

Added by the site team

The project brief listed a relaxation section but supplied only sleep and exercise. This part was written to make the section practically useful and is awaiting clinical review.

Meditation

Content pending “Meditation” appears as a heading in the project brief with no text beneath it. Given how much meditation practice varies across the traditions present in the Northern Province, this section should be written locally rather than adapted from a generic source. The section is ready for that content.

Where to go next

References

  1. Quality of sleep, health and well-being in a population-based study. ResearchGate ↩
  2. Thirty minutes of exercise and well-being. PubMed 30099000 ↩