Weeks can feel long whatever you are doing. Whether its work, looking after your family, looking after yourself. Especially if struggling with mental or physical health, sometimes hours can feel long and stressful. People often struggle with de-stressing or sometimes termed "self care". Even those words can send people into overdrive thinking that they need to have hot baths everyday to feel better. This isn't the case, especially if you are someone that hates hot baths then below are some ways of thinking about looking after yourself after what has felt like a long week.
1. Invest - and I don't mean in financial terms. Take the time at the end of the week to consider what time have I invested into myself this week. Was it enough, was it effective. Did I stop to reflect on my feelings, thoughts or actions. If the answer is none then this needs to change! Whether it be 10 minutes a day reflecting on the day, doing something that was something you wanted to do, not dictated by others. It could be small or gigantic. But invest in you.
2. Saying no - not saying no can cause stress. Imagine saying yes to everything, what would happen. There are reasons why your gut or you mind think "NO!!" but the words that come out are "of course, no problem, yes I can do that". No, you can't because you are doing number 1.
3. Work/life balance - did the emails continue to ping through on all of the devices you own after you walk out of work. Did you read them. Yes you did. Did you reply, of course it wont take long. This behaviour encourages our mind to always be in work mode thus leaving us no downtime. Try turning the work phone off, or silencing the emails. Things CAN wait if you start to let them.
4. Shorten the to do list - if we have lists, for lists for lists, we get lost in our lists, feel overwhelmed then where do we start. Lets make them shorter, prioritise, with number 1 and number 3 being prevalent somewhere.
5. Do something fun. Remember that, fun. There will always be washing to do, tidying to do, emails to respond to, but making a choice to spend an hour with your children having fun, or chatting to a friend or whatever you call fun is so important. Go for that walk with the dog, get out in the fresh air, it will do you a world of good.