Six Steps to Self-Care Success for Stay-at-Home Moms

What does self-care mean to you? Is it something you want to do for you, or has it become just another “should” on your to-do list? Is the goal to enjoy being you for a few minutes a day, or is it purely to fill your own cup so you can turn right around and immediately start refilling other people’s?

Here are six simple steps to self-care success for moms who want to focus on themselves for their own sake - and have fun doing it! 

1. Decide to prioritize you

How would you describe your relationship with yourself? If you never take time out of your day for you, you may not be feeling all that great about it. This directly impacts the way you show up in the world - and the way you show up for yourself.

It is always possible to create time for you - it all comes down to your thinking. If you don’t see yourself as a priority or believe that you are worth investing in, then you simply won’t take the time to do it. And if you’re looking at your day through the lens of scarcity and lack, you will never see all the pockets of opportunity available to you.

You can decide right now to prioritize you - to treat yourself with kindness and compassion, to trust that you know what’s right for you, to feel confident in your capabilities and resourcefulness (and believe that you can know peace, too) - as the first step towards creating the life you want for yourself.

2. Carve out time in your day 

Making time for yourself is so much more simple than you might think - so simple in fact that you may want to dismiss it. But there’s a lot to be said for letting things be easy!

To create five minutes for yourself for self-care, simply cut out something that currently takes five minutes out of your day. That could be cutting out one scrolling session on your phone; it could be asking your kids to empty the dishwasher; it could be not browsing online for things you don’t urgently need; it could be choosing to click delete on unimportant emails.

And if you’re feeling inspired, you can also choose to erase many of the things on your to-do list entirely - chances are that if you’ve not done them in over a week, they are not that important anyway!

3. Let it be easy

Now you have five minutes for you, what are you going to do with it? Massages, manicures, baths, and bubbly are all great forms of looking after yourself, but I believe wholeheartedly in the power of PLAY - of doing something that lights you up every single day - to delight in being you.

You may feel resistant to any form of self-care at first (and dropping even just one of your usual to-dos can definitely feel horribly uncomfortable), which is why I like to let things be easy through play. The patterning of play already exists from our childhoods, so hijacking this feels pretty effortless because it comes naturally.  

This means you can quickly feel the lightness, joy, freedom and power you felt when you used to play when you were young, often without having to talk your brain into getting on board with the idea first. 

4. The power of play

So try it for five minutes today - skip across the room, dance to your favorite tune, doodle on a piece of paper, sing your favorite song or do whatever else you loved to do as a kid. 

When you’re truly playing you lose all sense of time passing, and are fully absorbed and focused. You show up as your true, authentic self - without caring about what anyone else thinks or needs in that moment - and fully experience the joy of being you, exactly as you are. 

In this way, play is a vehicle to start trusting in ourselves because we learn to know both what feels good to us and what it’s like to feel fully alive, without judgment or expectation. When you stop, you can’t wait to do it again!

5. Feel the joy

Finding what it is you love to play (which has no extrinsic goal and is done for its own sake) allows you to tap into unfettered joy.

This is an emotion we might not allow ourselves to feel often because, as Brené Brown says: “Joy is the most vulnerable emotion we experience”. When we feel it, we often then immediately imagine something bad is going to happen because the thought follows that it simply cannot last. And life is, after all, always going to be 50/50.

Building our capacity for joy is a skill we can practice, and when you do this through play for five minutes each day, you become more and more present in a life that feels vibrant and meaningful to you.

6. Share the joy

By doing something that lights you up and experiencing the lightness, freedom and power that being YOU brings, you naturally begin to radiate joy onto everyone around you too. But this is not about filling your cup so that you can better be of service to others; this is about being so full of love and joy that it naturally spills over and out onto anyone (or anything!) in its path. 

Experiencing this each and every day empowers you to acknowledge that you know exactly what you’re doing in YOUR life; that you know what’s best for YOUR family - and you easily find plenty of evidence to back that up.

It also naturally awakens the gratitude within you and opens your eyes to the beauty of the present moment, where there’s no need to dwell on a past you can’t change or to race and hustle towards a future that is - as yet - only imagined.

So when you’re feeling that joy, take an extra moment to note down three things that are amazing in your life right now.  We are used to giving our attention to the things we see as negative in our lives, and this provides an opportunity for us to give equal air time to the positive too.

And remember that, as Einstein said, “We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them". So if you approach self-care with the thinking that it’s just another thing to get done - and one you simply don’t have time for - you will continue to create that exact same experience for yourself over and over again. 

But when we think instead that we can’t wait to spend time on the things that light us up, and to get to know and love ourselves more deeply, we learn to resource ourselves from the inside, and - from there - begin to design a life we truly love.

If you’d like help with making self-care a part of your everyday, click the link below to sign up for a free coaching consultation.