Postnatal self care
How to prioritise self care as a new mama
Have you ever thought about creating a postnatal self-care toolkit? The aim of this toolkit is to have a mixture of different activities at your disposal to help restore balance physically, mentally or emotionally.
Everyday examples could include activities that we might be familiar associating with self-care, such as having a relaxing bath using essential oils or booking a massage. But our intention is for this toolkit to be holistic and prioritise your individual health goals.
Think a little deeper about what postnatal self-care means to you in relation to your values.
Using myself (360 team member Chloe) as an example, my top two values are my families health and having fun. So my toolkit involves activities that fulfil these values. My weekly self-care includes meal planning and batch cooking, so that our meals are nutritious, fulfilling my health value, while also creating more time for my family and me to have fun together.
This may seem like really boring self-care! But in the grand scheme of things, they make the most significant difference in how I feel every day. Sure I still like to make time for a relaxing bath and book into a spa when I can, but the danger of relying on these (often infrequent and inconsistent activities for many) is that self-care gets forgotten in the meantime and your health and well-being suffer.
Here are our 7 steps to creating your self-care toolkit:
List out your values. Examples can include health, fun, money, travelling, career, community, friends, family, alone time, nature, fitness.
Prioritise your values.
Brainstorm all the activities, tasks and behaviours that you associate with your top value. E.g. eating healthy meals every day, having a monthly massage to help with back pain, going to a weekly pilates class.
Think about which of these activities you can do every day, week or month and schedule them into your diary. We recommend starting small and working with one new self-care activity you can do in the next 5 days and build from there.
Communicate with your partner about what your self-care means to you and any help you might need to fulfil it, e.g. watch the baby while you go to pilates.
Once you have done that first self-care activity, introduce another activity, so you start building your toolkit.
Once you have a few self-care activities fulfilling your top value, repeat with your second value and so on.
This is the approach we have found to work well, but have fun with it and be open to trying new things.
A client recently told us that she was going fishing with a friend as a trip that they had organised for her to get some ‘me time’, but she was dreading it! Not an activity she associated with self-care, but she ended up having the most amazing day! It ticked all the boxes for her - time to decompress away from the hustle and bustle of her home, immersed in nature, and she was able to catch up with a friend — the perfect self-care day for her.
If you feel a little lost when it comes to self-care, or struggle fitting it in, our course provides all the self-care you need to facilitate your postnatal recovery in sized bite chunks of information, so you never feel overwhelmed.
Find out more information here.
