Resource of the week: Selftember 2024 calendar
For the second year in a row during the month of September, SARCC, staff and our followers on social media were invited to participate in a month-long self-care challenge. You can check out a summary of SELFTEMBER and download a copy of our calendar by checking out our early September blog post.
this year, many of our self-care challenges came from recommendations by Dr. Romie Mushtaq and her book and protocol titled “the busy brain cure”. One of the big focuses in helping to alleviate the symptoms of a busy brain, including anxiety, insomnia, and inability to focus, involved, diet, circadian, sleep cycles, and exploring underlying health issues that can contribute to a busy brain.
We didn’t do this challenge in isolation! Our staff had the opportunity to come together on a weekly basis and discuss the impact of integrating the strategies. here are just a few reflections that were shared during the month:
- I do think that a 21 day digital detox helped with my sleep. I’m on a more routine sleep and wake schedule and have found that I am sleeping deeper than I used to. If I wake up in the middle of the night, I can roll over and go back to sleep and I’m not caught up thinking about what happened yesterday or what will happen tomorrow.
- I realized that I needed to intentionally schedule rest days. I used the prompts to schedule time off and use my paid leave instead of squirreling it up.
- I have been dreaming! When I am asleep, it seems like I am having more dreams and remembering my dreams more than I used to. I’ve had visits from past friends, worked through constructed, fairytale challenges, and had interesting conversations with my kids in my dreams.
- Turning off the TV in the middle of an episode so that I can start my routine was hard. However, I found that I was reading more, doing less doom scrolling on social media, and had something to look forward to in my screen time.
- I made some diet changes. I realized that I wasn’t getting enough healthy fat in my diet. I also realized that the fats I was getting were not of the healthy variety. One of my biggest changes was adding healthy fats into some of my meal prepping during the month of September.
- Our staff really loved chair yoga. Taking just half an hour to do some simple stretching and breathing really makes a world of difference.
Even if you missed September and our self-care challenge, you can still try any of these strategies. Being intentional about our sleep, our processes, our diets, and our healthcare can help build the safe structure that we need to heal from the past and live our best lives moving forward.
