5 areas in which to take care of ourselves from the month of January

We start the year 2023. It's a start, although for many of us that feeling is stronger in September.

In each beginning we have the opportunity to learn to take better care of ourselves than we have been able to before. Knowing how we situate ourselves in different aspects can serve as a basis from which to explore options that best fit our current vital moment.

• Related article: "How to set New Year's resolutions?"

Areas in which to promote self-care from the month of January

I propose here five areas around which to reflect on how we take care of ourselves:

1. The basics: food and rest

Is it easy for you to follow eating and rest guidelines that feel good to you? If not, what is it due to?

Sometimes it seems that it is as simple as deciding to eat better or rest more. However, the reality is usually somewhat more complex. For example, sometimes you don't rest, because worries don't allow it. These worries usually have to do with people you love or situations that are of great vital importance.

Another example can be when we do not eat as we would like. It is taken for granted that we will know how to shop and cook, that we will have the time and skills for this, as well as the necessary conditions to savor the food with the tranquility that we would like. In contemporary life, all these are assumptions that do not usually correspond to reality. However, we often feel guilty for not eating as we think we should.

2. The personal relationships

Actually, just as important as food and rest.

How do the people with whom we share life make us feel? Give us some time to explore how we meet those around us it can give us many clues about what is working well in our lives and what we keep even though it does us wrong.

Those relationships that we maintain have meaning for us and understand the depth of what unites us It is essential to decide the relationships we maintain and the ones we end.

• You may be interested in: "How to build healthy relationships: 10 keys to strengthen the bond"

3. physical environments

Where do you spend your life? How do you feel in them? What do you need the physical environments in which you spend most of your time to be?

There are people who find calm surrounded by people and with many sounds in the environment, that their restlessness is triggered in places with few people and sounds. At the other extreme are people who only feel comfortable being alone and in silence.

There are other dimensions to wonder about how we feel in different environments. Some examples are: natural or urban spaces, degree of order and cleanliness that I need or the impact of aspects such as the level of light and temperature.

In this beginning of the year: do you go to environments in which you feel comfortable?

4. The new and interesting

Do you allow yourself to live new experiences? What impact do they have on you? Is there a yearning to dare to experience something? What would help you do it?

The feeling of vitality is linked to the fact that the new and interesting is present in our lives. And this is different for each person. There are people who constantly need the new, without reaching a deeper level.

For other people, the new thing that attracts them has an infinite number of nuances, so there is a feeling of vitality as what is being known is deepened. Likewise, for other people, restlessness in the face of the unknown is unsustainable and stability and predictability become very important, sacrificing the feeling of vitality.

Do you identify with any of the above options? How do you take care of your way of relating to the new and unexpected, whatever that way is?

• Related article: "Self-actualization needs: what are they, according to Maslow?"

5. In the medium and long term

The life we ​​live happens in the present moment although, somehow, we are chasing a place (a way of being in life) that is in the future.

For some people that future is clearly defined and any change – inevitable in the course of life – makes them sink, because they feel they have lost the map.

On the other hand, for other people the future is something completely indefinite, although their way of being in the world it still has a certain direction anyway, that is, staying as it is is a direction in itself same.

Other people have a desired and relatively explicit future and, at the same time, there are a clarity in which that future will be changing at every moment.

How is it for you? With which of the options presented regarding how you live your future do you feel most identified?

Conclusion

These are five areas through which we can better understand how we are at this moment in our lives and, in its case, implement what is necessary to expand our ways of being in the world and feel more satisfied in this year than starts.