Your mental health deserves the same attention as your finances.

We explore how investing in your health through proactive self-care builds resilience similar to saving money for future needs. Our brain's stress pathways are well-developed while pleasure pathways need intentional strengthening to help us genuinely recover from stress rather than just numbing out.

• Numbing stress with TV and comfort food is like taking painkillers for a fracture—temporary relief while the problem persists
• Quality sleep, nutritious meals, and 30 minutes of daily exercise form the foundation of effective self-care
• Each self-care action strengthens neural pathways for stress recovery, like deposits into a wellness savings account
• Start building self-care habits by noticing current patterns and celebrating small improvements
• Speaking to yourself by name tricks your brain into receiving encouragement as if from someone else

Take care of yourselves and know that every little thing you do to take care of yourselves, I'll definitely be cheering you on.

Opening Music by Jeremiah Alves from Pixabay

Closing Music by Aleksandr Karabanov from Pixabay

Chapters

• 0:42 Welcome to Wellness Minutes
• 1:20 Understanding Stress and Pleasure Pathways
• 2:03 Self-Care: Your Proactive Health Investment
• 2:55 Building Your Self-Care Regime
• 4:59 Final Encouragement and Sign-off

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:24

Hello, welcome to another episode of Wellness Minutes. This is just a friendly reminder to pause and take a deep breath. Have you noticed how often we are reminded to plan for our future, either by saving money or getting our immigration paperwork in order, or even planning our next holiday? What if we brought the same amount of energy into our health? In this episode, I encourage you to think about your self-care, just like money you put into your savings account.

Speaker 1: 1:01

I've said something like this before. I'll just say it again, you know, because repetition is the key to learning. So there are pathways in our brain that respond to stress and those pathways are extremely well developed, you know, thanks to our brain's natural attunement to stress and also because our everyday life can expose us to a lot of different kinds of stress, can expose us to a lot of different kinds of stress. So our relaxation and pleasure pathways, on the other hand, they do exist, but they light up mainly in response to things that are strong enough to stand against our stress pathways. So if we want the pleasure pathways to actually help us cope with stress, we have to activate those pleasure pathways using something that is already pleasurable enough that it can override the stress pathways that we have. For example, a lot of folks talk about how they watch a lot of TV, maybe even eat comfort food, because they're looking for some kind of pleasure. And this pleasure is actually helping you numb out that constant stress that you're experiencing. And when we numb out, we deal with the stress at a very superficial level and the chronic stress continues to eat away at us. It's a bit like eating a painkiller while dealing with a fracture the pain goes away, but the underlying fracture remains. That's where self-care comes in.

Speaker 1: 2:25

Self-care refers to any activity that you proactively do to promote health. Instead of responding only to stress, you proactively do something that helps you feel good in your mind and body. Good sleep, good meals and at least 30 minutes of exercise every day are really the pillars of self-care. The better your sleep, meals and exercise routines, the better is your mind and body's capacity to be resilient against stress. Our body's natural capacity to bounce back from stress improves when we build a proactive self-care regime, improves when we build a proactive self-care regime, just like trying to save money for a rainy day. Every action we take towards our self-care helps us deepen the pathways of our brain that naturally help us recover from stress. So if you're trying to develop a self-care regime, start by noticing how well you already sleep, eat and commit to exercise. By exercise I really mean 30 minutes of heart rate elevation from doing something physical. For me, that's going for a walk while listening to a podcast.

Speaker 1: 3:33

Please compliment yourself for every tiny step you take towards committing to better sleep, meals and exercise. Committing to all three of these things can be hard, I know, but please know the first step is always the hardest. Start small and be your own encouraging friend. Do you know? When you take your own name and say something to yourself, your brain actually thinks somebody else is talking to you and it actually gets influenced by what you say. So good job. Githaka is nearly as encouraging as a friend saying this to me. So you know what. Go ahead, compliment yourself for everything you're doing to improve your sleep, meals and exercise. Part of our long-term goal needs to be to identify ways to increase our ability to encourage ourselves, but you know more of that on a different episode. But you know more of that on a different episode. Until we meet again, take care of yourselves and know that every little thing you do to take care of yourselves, I'll definitely be cheering you on.