Hi Hi,

If you know me personally or have followed my fitness page over the last 18 months you’ll know how much I advocate for having a self care routine!

Long story short, when I was in counselling my lovely counsellor Gillian explained the influential difference having a self care routine that you can fall back to when your feeling out of sorts or generally low! I can 100% attest to this!

It’s not to make you radically different in the moment but the theory behind it is that your surrounding yourself with things/ places/ people that you love, helps minimise feeling any worse and sometimes it will actually help you feel better (I’m just talking from my own personal experience don’t @ me pls)!

Now that you’ve got the gist of my reason why… Here’s my Winter Self Care Routine:

Puzzles… love me a good puzzle. It’s so random but it’s one of my favourite things to do when I want to tune out of life for some time and just put my focus on something that does not matter at all lol. Especially when it’s pouring with rain outside, or even glistening with snow and you just want to stay inside and chill. I often get my puzzles from ShopDisney on the end of season sale for less than £10!!! I know, what a steal! The best part of doing puzzles is that it literally forces to step away from your phone. I love my phone as much as the next person does, but when you look at your screen time and see how many hours per day your looking at a screen. It isn’t doing me any good, so puzzles it is!

Wrapping up and braving the winter weather. Contradictory to the last statement I made about wanting to avoid the cold and wet outdoors lol. Sometimes though I can feel trapped or cooped up at home when its really shitty weather outside. In these case the best thing to do is put some long socks on, wellies on & layer up until you look like a cute lil snowman! My favourite walk in the winter time is Portrush. Seeing the giant waves, smelling the freshest air and being in range of some of my favourite coffee shops, is a guarantee to make me feel more myself or at least better than what I was feeling like being stuck at home.

Crafting is another random hobby I picked up this year, since not being able to go to the gym as my main form of self care! Sometimes I’ll start crafting with an intention to make something and other time ill just have a scroll on YouTube and try something new! I bought a handful of paints from The Works a few months back and some other crafty bits that I can paint and design, think it cost all of £10? Best money I spent because I’ve crafted some personalised gift tags for Christmas, a lil halloween decoration, a crate to showcase nostalgic photographs in the living room and a few other bits! Maybe I should do a blog post on all the crafty bits I’ve made… definitely going to do this!

The classic hot bath, face mask and movie self care is hard to beat! I generally keep at least 2/3 bath bombs in the bathroom at all times. You never know when you might come home from a long day and just need to just drop. Not that anyone asked but my usually go to bath bombs are always ‘Butter Bear‘ and ‘Intergalactic‘ from lush! Go to face mask is the rich moisture masks from Simple and wintery comfort movie is usually either The Santa Claus or The Grinch (lol how polar opposite… no pun intended). But none of this is perfect until you have fresh jammies on and a big cup of tea in bed… perfection!

Write it down is one I’m really encouraging myself to do more often, especially in the winter time because I’m generally less social at this time of the year! Often I like going to a coffee shop, opening my laptop and writing… even if it is just bullet points. I need to debrief my mind because I am an avid over thinker, writing it down and reading it back helps me rationalise things. Writing things down also helps me see where I am making mistakes so I can start to work through them too!

With all this being said & as much as my self care routine makes a difference with how I can regulate and process my emotions on a day to day basis, if you are struggling to figure your own mind out talk to a professional! I’ve been to counselling, I’ve done alternative therapies including IET. I’ve had a great experience with both and I am a huge advocate for using resources like these to better yourself! I will say one thing, it’s not glamorous and not easy every session. Some sessions you walk away refreshed, others you are so drained that going to bed is the best thing to do. I’m not saying this to discourage you, but I’m just being honest! I’ll leave a few links below to some places that helped me out and some things you can do yourself:

*Counsellors*

*Journals*

*IET*

*Self Care App*

All in all, I really enjoyed putting all my favourite self care bits into one place and its made me feel really warm inside and very excited to go run a bath, put on a face mask and chill in bed watching a Christmas movie!!!

Let me know in the comments your favourite thing to do for self care!

CYA x