Self-Care Corner – Sasha Says…

Brain Wave, Internet-Web Devt, Life in general, Self-Care Corner

De-stressing after a hard day at work.

September 28, 2023 No Comments

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We all experience tough days from time to time. I mean, personally speaking, 2020 to 2022 were tough years for me. I am pretty sure it was for a lot of people, too. Businesses were closing, jobs stalled for most, and sources of income were threatened. Those were truly stressful years.

One of the things that I did and have been doing until now is taking little breaks, here and there. I try online games when one catches my interest. On such game is the very engrossing Tap Supermarket game. It is a grocery store simulation game where you will be boss of a grocery store managing it, the stocks, customers, and basically making sure you use the profit of the store in expanding the product lines.

Let me tell you how the game works.

I started the game with only half of the store open, one cashier and two staffs refilling every section of the grocery store. All I needed to do was to make sure that the cashier works fast, every section of the store is filled with stocks, and whenever stocks are out, refill it. Make sure stocks are always available because customers will get mad and will walk out of the store.

Start-Tap-Supermarket — Start of the game with 1 cashier, 2 stockroom crew, and just half of the store open.

Everything is done with the tap of your mouse, thus the name of the game. It is so engrossing you will forget everything while playing. Your focus is on the challenge of keeping up with the demands of the customers who go in and out of the store! I tell you, the sound of the ka-ching every time a customer checks out will bring a smile to your face. And when you see your profits increasing by the minute…

Now, as your profits increase, you can start adding up a crew, cashier, and you can start opening other shelves. My tip: open the ones with the higher cost to open like the gadgets, fashion items, and dairies.

I promise you time will go by so fast because you will enjoy every minute of playing this game.

The only drawback that I observed is that there is no “pause” button so everyone can take a break from the very busy grocery store. You can stop playing the game for a minute or two, the game pauses somewhat. But when you go back and continue playing, you will notice a lot of angry customers with mad emojis on top of their heads. You really need to keep up with the demand to make them happy. Haha!

All in all, it is a very relaxing game to play after a tough day.

There are so many relaxing and engrossing games to play when you need to take little breaks from life. There are LEGO City Adventures Build And Protect, The Amazing World Of Gumball Tidy Up, Mahjong Solitaire. There is a Coffee Shop game for those who are dreaming of owning their own cafes. And so much more!

You know what they say about how short our lives are. It may not be all happiness but we can insert pockets of sunshine into our daily lives. Take breaks!

Brain Wave, Health and medicine, Self-Care Corner

The Science of Self-Care: Why You Need To Be Selfish To Be Well

June 1, 2023 No Comments

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Self-care is a buzzword that you might have heard a lot lately. But what does it really mean? And why is it so important for your health and happiness?

That’s what you’re about to find out. Weirdly, self-care isn’t something you should do after you’ve done everything else. Instead, it needs to be something you do before you commit to other activities. In other words, you should approach it selfishly so that you can give your best to the rest of the world.

What Does Self-Care Mean?

Essentially, self-care is the practice of taking your physical, mental, and emotional needs seriously. Instead of burying them under a pile of guilt, you accept them for what they are and act on them. In practice, it means prioritizing your well-being over other demands and obligations and, sometimes, not getting into destructive relationships that could harm you.

Many people view self-care as selfish or indulgent, but it’s actually the opposite. The more you practice self-care, the more service you can be to the people around you, helping them achieve the things they want to do in life.

The more self-care you practice, the more energy you have to offer those around you. Suddenly, you become a positive force for your local network, not someone who drains other people’s resources without thinking.

How To Practice Self-Care

As you might expect, self-care is not a one-size-fits-all concept. It can look different for everyone, depending on their lifestyle and personality. For some people, self-care is simple things, like going walking, while for others, it is more elaborate.

Here’s a list of self-care activities that fall into the category:

Celebrating your achievements and strengths
Setting healthy boundaries and limits
Expressing your feelings and thoughts
Asking for help when you need it
Saying no to things that drain you
Learning something new or pursuing a hobby
Spending time in nature or with animals
Taking a bath or getting a massage
Reading a book or listening to music
Meditating or practicing mindfulness
Exercising regularly
Drinking enough water

Hopefully, by now you get the picture. Self-care involves pretty much anything that enhances your life and health. Of course, it’s a fine balance. You don’t want to shut the world out entirely because then your life might get more challenging in the future. But, at the same time, you don’t want to spread yourself too thin or feel burned out.

Because of the definition of self-care, it can encompass a wide range of activities. For instance, if you’ve been watching breast augmentation surgery videos, you might decide that going under the knife is actually a form of self-care. You may come out the other side as a happier, healthier, and more confident person.

You might also view self-care as removing yourself from a particular line of work and doing something different with your time. You may find that quitting a high-paying job and doing something different could be the ultimate way to improve your lifestyle and enjoy your day-to-day existence more.

Brain Wave, Self-Care Corner, Shopping and Merchandise

Dressed up on a Friday night.

June 24, 2021 No Comments

dressed-up This pandemic has made us complacent, to say the least. We are now so used to being at home, dressed shabbily, and even with our hairs in disarray. Admit it, you are also guilty of slacking off and letting things slide when this pandemic hit.

But one thing hit me when I read something on Instagram lately… this is the period when we need to take care of ourselves even more!

One idea that popped in my head is to get dressed up on a Friday night. I mean, why not? There are Women’s Boutique Dresses online that we women can choose from. Let’s get dressed even if we will just be staying at home and will just be watching Netflix alone. Dress in one of those summer boutique dresses or those boutique maxi dresses from MySistersCloset-Boutique. Pop the bottle of wine in the fridge to get it cold. Set up that table for one with the pasta just off the stove. You can even set the mood by dimming the lights or completely turning it off to light some scented candles on the floor. Go ahead and do it. It is one form of self-love that we need to be espousing in order to stay sane in this tough period of our lives.

Love yourself. We need to start with ourselves before we give love to others around us. That’s one of the things that I have learned since this pandemic started. It can be simply eating something special on any given time or day. Dressing up on nights you normally reserve to going out and meeting friends. Or just opening a bottle of a special wine to sip a glass all by yourself.

Brain Wave, Self-Care Corner

3 Tips for Making Your Home Serve Your Well-Being

August 7, 2020 No Comments

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There are various roles that a home should serve, assuming everything is going well.

For one thing, your home should obviously be comfortable, and should help you to relax on your weekends or after a long day of work.

For another thing, your home should serve as a place where you can adequately and reasonably store your various belongings, without too much fuss.

Perhaps the most important function of the home, however – beyond keeping the rain from reaching your bed – is serving your overall sense of well-being and contentment.

Here are a few tips for making your home serve your well-being:

Invest in “ease of use” and accessibility features and tools

If you find that carrying out everyday tasks around your home is a lot more frustrating than you would like it to be – and that things seem to be “hard work” more often than not – this might be a good sign that it’s time to invest in some “ease-of-use” and “accessibility” features and tools, for your home.

These features might take the form of structural adaptations such as an ADA ramp, or they might take the form of smaller-scale things like a stable and convenient footstool for reaching the high shelves in your kitchen.

Whatever the particular situation, you should take steps to ensure that you can navigate your home with relative ease, and without putting yourself at risk, or straining yourself when carrying out everyday chores.

Keep the place as organised as possible – clutter and mess can significantly undermine your sense of well-being

If your home is a very chaotic and messy place, with a lot of clutter, and with things frequently being out of place, the overall effect is likely to be a significant undermining of your sense of well-being.

When your home environment is very messy and cluttered, it signals on a deep psychological level that you aren’t really in control of the place, and that everything is a bit haphazard, unpredictable, and distracting.

By contrast, if you’re able to give your home the “Marie Kondo treatment,” or something like it, and can do a good job of decluttering and organising it, you’ll likely find that you have far more mental space and energy, and a greater sense of calm, than you did before.

Make space for the hobbies and pastimes you want to engage in most, and make the unhealthy ones harder to access

It’s one thing to sit down and enjoy a film, or an episode of a TV show you enjoy, or to spend half an hour surfing the web.

But an issue with these sorts of activities is that they can very easily consume hours at a stretch, and are often explicitly designed to do this. For example, certain online streaming services automatically play the next episode in the series without you even having to get up off the sofa, largely so that you spend as much time as possible engaging with the service.

Your sense of well-being will probably not be in great shape if you feel that you waste a lot of your time each day.

So, make space in your home for the hobbies and pastimes you want to engage in the most – things like reading, or writing, exercising, or doing arts and crafts – and make the “unhealthy” ones harder to access. You could, for example, unplug your games console and pack it away in a cupboard when you’re not using it.

Brain Wave, Health and medicine, Self-Care Corner

These Daily Practices Support Your Wellbeing More Than You Think

June 2, 2020 No Comments

We all know that achieving wellbeing is a massive challenge. The world is full of things that seek to bring us down and get in the way of lasting happiness.

But it turns out that you can fight back using some pretty simple daily techniques. If you find your mental health is suffering, check out these ideas:

Prioritize Sleep

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According to the Sleep Health Foundation, sleep is one of the most important things that people can do to support wellness. The more shut-eye you get, the more able you feel to take on the challenges of the day and overcome them.

Being Mindful

Being mindful is a common practice these days, but nobody seems to know precisely what it means.

Fundamentally, mindfulness is an act of self-surveillance. Whenever you engage in it, you’re trying to observe yourself from the outside and become aware of the way you’re thinking.

Mindfulness, for instance, is helpful if you’re the type of person who has a habit of ruminating over your fears. If you find yourself playing over events in your mind again and again, the practice helps you intervene. You can step in and break the cycle, thereby improving your mental health.

Invest In Others

The root of suffering for many people is unfulfilled desire. There are all of these things that you want in your life – money, love, power – but you feel perpetually distanced from them. No matter how much cash you have in the bank or how far you progress in your career, it doesn’t feel like enough. There’s always another mountain to climb.

Investing in others, however, helps to reorientate your psyche. Instead of focusing on what you can get, you help other people achieve their goals. This change in focus is powerful because it undermines unfulfilled desires. You stop thinking about what life can give you, and instead focus on what you can give it.

Speak With A Counselor

As Carmel Psych Associates telehealth services make abundantly clear, speaking with a professional counselor is still possible, even during a pandemic. Today, there are more opportunities than ever to connect with experts through the internet. And doing so daily sessions can have a profound effect on your mental state. These people provide an anchor that you can use to pull yourself out of a mental health crisis and feel better about your situation.

Work On Something Creative

Life shouldn’t just be about solving problems. We should all have something creative that we do that makes it worthwhile getting out of bed in the morning. We need something that inspires us and pushes us forward.

If you’re an artist, then perhaps this is your calling. Creating music, painting, or coming up with a new dance are all things that can inject a little meaning and passion into your existence. Many of the most troubled people in the world turned to art in their time of need as a way to express how they felt.

Once you put daily practices in place, you can enhance your mental health tremendously.

Brain Wave, Self-Care Corner

3 Examples of What Self-Care May Look like at Home

May 2, 2020 No Comments

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If you feel chronically stressed as a rule, and worn down, worried, and irritated by the various obstacles presented by everyday life – one of the best things you can do is to take an active interest in “self-care” as a remedy to that.

Under normal circumstances, there are all sorts of things that people will tend to do in the name of self-care – including, perhaps, booking a medical cosmetic appointment with a company such as Med Spa.

As of this writing, however, much of the world is still under quarantine due to the COVID-19 Pandemic – which means that “self-care” is something that essentially has to take place primarily at home.

Here are a few suggestions on what self-care may look like at home.

Getting enough sleep

Sleep seems like a passive and potentially even aimless use of time – which is, no doubt, a big part of the reason why so many people these days are apparently chronically sleep deprived, ranging from entrepreneurs who work late into the night, to people who simply want to catch up on their Netflix viewing after work.

When push comes to shove, though, sleep is actually one of the most crucially important things you could possibly do for your own general well-being and physical and mental health.

In his book, “Why We Sleep“, the sleep scientist Matthew Walker looks at the consequences of not getting enough rest – and those consequences are severe. Even just getting an hour or so less sleep than you need each night to really feel rested, can result in your blood sugar regulation being so badly affected that you’d be classed as prediabetic following a blood test. Sleep deprivation will also cause you to age prematurely, feel dramatically more stressed, and be far more susceptible to all sorts of terrible diseases.

Getting more sleep really is potentially the best self-care tip you could ever take to heart.

Finding opportunities every day to do things that help you to feel in touch with a higher purpose

If your everyday life is just a series of chores and routines that you don’t find particularly meaningful, you are likely to feel unfulfilled, and to have the nervous sneaking suspicion that you are wasting your potential somehow.

One of the best things you can do for your overall sense of well-being, and your quality of life as a whole, is to find opportunities every day to do things that help you to feel in touch with a higher purpose – however you construe that.

These activities don’t have to be large and dramatic – especially not at first. Consider looking into the field of “Positive Psychology” for tips on where to start.

Taking some time each day for a bit of laughter and conversation

Finding regular opportunities for conversation – that is, conversation that involves actually speaking to people with your own voice, rather than texting them – has been shown to have a tremendously positive effect in terms of reducing stress levels, and promoting a general sense of well-being.

In fact, there’s even evidence that regular social interaction is one of the key human requirements for health and well-being – even for the most introverted of people.

A bit of laughter, too, can work wonders in terms of melting away stress and helping you to step into a more carefree mode of living.

Find moments each day for a bit of laughter and conversation – even if that means just calling up a friend or relative for a few minutes of phone conversation, and watching a funny movie or show.

Brain Wave, Self-Care Corner

Simple Tips For Self-Care Success

January 9, 2020 No Comments

To really make self-care worthwhile, then you have to learn what things you can do to nurture yourself. There are going to be things that make you feel good mentally, emotionally, physically, or spiritually. And, even with the best of intentions, you might find that you have a bad day where you don’t manage your meditation, you don’t brush your hair – or you just binge watch a new Netflix series all day.

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So here are a few tips that might help you get yourself in to healthy self-care mode.

Unplug

Although you can spend time curating your Instagram feeds, twitter, and facebook to only have positive people and posts on it. Sometimes you should unplug altogether for a while. It is one of the hardest things for people to do too. We are so used to having our mobile phones or a computer that we are allowing ourselves to be bombarded with all kinds of news and opinions. And sometimes, for the sake of sanity, we need to put our mobile phones in a drawer and leave them for a while. Messages and emails will still be there when you come back to it.

Stock Up

Headaches, stomach aches, sleeplessness, and a lack of a multivitamin can really be annoying. So, if you have a habit of leaving things until you need them and then needing to head out to find soothing tea bags, hearing aid batteries, band aids, and sanitary protection. Then make an effort to stock up on a few packets of each item. It is a small thing, but it means when you need to take a painkiller and rest, you can do so without worrying, you don’t have the right things.

Multivitamin

Most of us are deficient in a range of things. While you can get a lot from your diet, we don’t all get the balance right every day. You might not be able to avoid catching a cold or getting a tummy bug – but if you do catch one, your body is in a better position to fight it off. Not only that but the energy you truly need every day, and all of the functions that your body performs will be well supported.

If you feel like you have a deficiency that needs more than a multivitamin, then head to your doctor and ask them to take some blood and explain how you’re feeling. Big deficiencies in b12, iron, vitamin D can have disastrous impacts when not taken care of at the earliest possible time.

Walk

When you have a lot to do each day, it can be easy to say that you don’t have time to take a 10-minute walk in the day. However, if you really look at your schedule, there are probably a number of places you can fit in a short walk. It might be during your work lunch break you head out and get some fresh air. It might be arriving at school pick up and parking a little bit further away and giving you room to walk.

Sleep

Start to pay attention to how refreshed you are feeling after you’ve been to sleep at night. If you are waking up and still feeling tired or not feeling rested, then there are things you can do. When we get high-quality rest, our bodies are better able to make sure that they are repairing and renewing. If you have a shoddy bedtime routine, are going to bed late all the time, then you are going to start living in a sleep deficit.

This will impact your daily life and your health too. So, look at starting a new bedtime routine that begins at least an hour before you want to go to sleep. Plan to have a hot shower or warm bath, put on some breathable pajamas, and switch off the TV for a while. A warm tea like chamomile is a great option.

The Calm app has a range of sleep stories that can help you gently drift off to sleep. Try to be strict about the routine and start it at the same time every day if you can.

Cook For Yourself

Think of a meal that you had while on holiday, or something that you have fond memories of, and recreate it in your own kitchen just for yourself. The memory of the meal, the tasty, and taking the time to create it can bring real comfort. And, feeding yourself well is a form of self-care.

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