We understand that work excites you. It gives you a goal, a mission, a purpose and even a direction in life. But have you thought about how the same excitement can actually interfere with your work? In this blog, we help you understand self-care and why practicing it can stop from heading towards a disaster in your professional life.
What is self-care?
Simply speaking, self-care is caring for yourself. It means ensuring that your basic needs are taken care of, that you get enough sleep, that you eat well and so on.
At a deeper level, self-care is the need to give yourself some time and space away from the bother of the world around you. And since for most people, the bothersome world refers to work, self-care is particularly important for any grown-up and any child who finds something stressful because of prolonged exposure to the same activity.
And that includes everyone. You too.
Why is self-care important especially if you are working from home?
The blurred lines between work time and family-/me-time can make you feel lost. Your tasks will never end. But when it comes to work, you might think that you are only supposed to just finish this one task and then you’ll be done.
This feeling of “let me do just this one thing” before you call it a day is a trap. Precisely speaking, it’s a vicious cycle. The more you think about doing just one more thing, the more things you’ll end up doing.
While it sounds that you’d become super-productive if you do so, it is quite the contrary.
Becoming conscious about self-care can let you look at your to-do after a break and approach it afresh. It gives you a perspective that sitting on the problem for non-stop hours cannot.
How can you practice self-care if you’re working from home?
Self-care does not mean you have to sign up for retreats and detoxes (although these do help if you have the luxury of time). The problem with these retreats is that once you’re back from them, you end up in the same rut.
Good self-care is about developing habits, breaks, and stress-busting routines into your daily life. For example:
- Exercise regularly to stay fit.
- Take regular breaks from the screen throughout the day. This will help you relax your eyes and also acknowledge the presence of family (or nature) around you.
- Define your working hours.
- Make your work corner more comfortable with the help of ergonomic furnishing.
- Become mindful about your posture, the health of your vision, and the stretch of time for which you sit for very long.
Home can indeed be a wonderful, comfortable place to work from. After all, it saves you all the commute time and you don’t feel caged by any rules or by the presence of any nosy colleagues. But it can also be a danger to your identity. You are more than the work you do.
Practicing self-care can help you explore yourself in the long run and give you a much more peaceful life.
So how have you been practicing self-care while working from home?
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