Self-care makes me think of being happy and content with myself. I’m not where I want to be right now in regard to confidence, but as I practice self-care, I can work towards personal growth. Self-care makes me think of doing things that make me happy like pampering myself, playing the guitar, or exercising. Most importantly, self-care amplifies my metacognition – being aware of my thoughts.
When I think about loving myself, I feel hindered. Social media and my toxic relationship with it is hindering me from fully loving myself. I know I’m capable of loving myself and am working on removing the things that are preventing me from doing so. I’ve started a social media cleanse with Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, and Facebook – the main accounts that have become a daily bad habit. I always observe myself and I’ve noticed I spend most of my days on my phone just surfing social media apps. This in turn started making me compare myself to others, waste my full day by being on my phone, and become unproductive.
It takes 21 days for a new habit to form so I’m giving myself that much time to develop healthy social media habits. Although I’m going on a social media cleanse, I want to be real with myself and in the past, purging has never worked for me whether it be purging of social media or purging of junk food, it has NEVER worked. I end up giving in within a few days and end up returning to my bad habits. What I’ve learned about myself is that I have to start small in order to reach the bigger goal. As I experiment with this social media cleanse I’ve given myself 3 days out of the week to go on it – only for a set amount of time, though! Remember: healthy habits! This is also the most reasonable social media cleanse for me as I blog, YouTube, and post photos on Instagram about fashion and beauty. Gotta be real with myself! The end goal is to just create a healthy relationship with social media outlets.
I went on a social media hiatus yesterday and it felt so liberating being disconnected from my phone. I was able to read 50 pages of a book, journal, clean my room, do laundry, watch some Youtube, clean the house, go to sleep early, and other small things that made me feel good… all while still going to work. It was definitely hard to not think of social media, but at the end of the night, I went to sleep feeling good about myself.
The reason I wasn’t caring for myself as well as I could have was because I wasn’t making self-care a priority. That’s changing! As I said in my previous post, my mom has always tried to instill self-care habits when we were growing up so I’m constantly trying to find ways of how I can grow. Sometimes I neglect self-care, but no one’s perfect and personal growth is a constant journey.
I was inspired to write this blog because I almost beat myself up earlier because I went on social media today, but I took a step back and figured out what would work best for me (the cleanse plan I mentioned earlier). Instead of beating myself up for going on social media today, I gave myself kudos for going on a hiatus yesterday.
I could love and value myself more by focusing on me! If you read through this whole post, thank you for reading. It feels good to know I can be raw on my blog. I want to grow a genuine community of loving people who are on their own journey as well. You just have to find what’s right for you and if your initial plan doesn’t work out, it’s ok! That’s what personal growth is about – experimenting and finding what works for you.
Everything is as it should be.
P.S. I’m currently reading Money, a Love Story and in the book there are journal exercises. I wrote this in response to one of the prompts 😉
