Election Week Self-Care

Hi, how are you doing? This week (and election) is definitely feeling like a marathon, not a sprint.

I don’t know about you, but I’ve been leaning in hard to my favorite self-care, cozy, rituals to refill my own cup when it feels like it’s being depleted by everything going on right now.

I won’t pretend that the below will make everything fine and dandy, but I do think it’s important to take care of yourself this week. Here are some things I’m leaning into:

making my shower feel a tad more luxurious

After I taught yoga last night, I dimmed the lights in my bathroom and set up my essential oil diffuser with this lavendar-y diffuser blend. I don’t know why I hadn’t thought to run my diffuser while I shower before, it felt like a nice little luxury.

 

self-massage with a lacrosse ball

Anyone else wake up feeling like their body is a ball of stress. My upper back and jaw are SO tense right now. Later on today I’m going to spend some time rolling on a lacrosse ball to loosen up some of the knots in my upper back and my thumbs to massage around my jaw.

 

get outside

This isn’t a new ritual, but this week I’m giving myself some extra time to get outside and walk around. I find I feel a bit less jittery and more focused to sit down and work after the fresh air and being in motion.

 

reading a book I can’t put down

I don’t usually gravitate towards reading suspenseful, thrillers but I just read They Wish They Were Us which is a teen thriller and it totally sucked me in. Last night I started reading another thriller, You Are Not Alone as a distraction before I turned on the news. Hopefully my excitement for reading this book will overpower my desire to watch endless hours of CNN tonight.

 

Rupaul’s Drag Race marathon

Drag Race is always my comfort TV show. I rewatched all of season 7 in the last week. Oops.

 

Phone-free hour

Okay this is one I *should* do today. Give yourself 1 hour phone-free. Put it on Airplane mode, stash it in a far away drawer and walk away. You don’t even need to spend that hour being productive, but give yourself permission to spend an hour away from social media and doom scrolling.

 

Turn. It. Off.

I don’t know about you, but I couldn’t turn off the TV and drag myself off the couch to go to bed last night. Around midnight I reminded myself: you’re going to feel SO much better if you turn off the TV and go to sleep. Just a friendly PSA that if watching the news right now is causing more harm than good, you have permission to turn it off. If anything big happens, you will know soon enough.

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