You know you need to take care of yourself, now you’re wondering how to fit self-care goals into your daily routines. Here’s how!

During my younger years, I had a vague sense I needed to eat healthfully, exercise, and spend time with God. Forty or fifty years ago, no one talked about self-care or setting self-care goals. I also heard vague numbers for how long I should exercise each day and spend in prayer. For both of those, experts seemed to agree 60 minutes a day should suffice. Who has time for that when you work full-time and have a young family to care for? I did what I could.

For the first thirty years of my life, I got away with exercising occasionally, eating just about whatever I wanted, and spending time with God most days. But when Pedro got non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma with central nervous system involvement in our mid-thirties, the fallacy of my casual attitude about self-care caught up with me. I gained 60 pounds, suffered from depression (after Pedro’s miraculous recovery), and suffered from random health problems that took twenty years to figure out.

In today’s podcast episode, I’ll share what I’ve learned about setting self-care goals over the past twenty years. You don’t have to set huge goals, but you do need to form small habits. Sure, you can get away with not caring for yourself for years, decades, even. But if you set self-care goals, you’ll discover you have more energy, better health, and healthier relationships with yourself and others.

You can find research on how long it takes to form a habit here.

You can download a free self-care checklist here.

Next week we’ll get a head start on mental health month!

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