Seven days of self-care

Learning how to maintain your mind during a global pandemic

Sitting on a park bench in despair.

The Oxford English dictionary defines despair as: the complete loss or absence of hope. I’ll tell you it means: sitting on a park bench in a matching tracksuit, four days into the first hair wash of the week, frantically scrolling on Spotify to find a podcast that will hopefully calm my nervous state.

Scrolling and finding nothing only adds fuel to the roaring fire pit of angst and doom burning in my gut. But it also leads to distraction. I begin to look around me, it’s March 2021 and finding yourself outside, caught in a moment of reflection, is more common now than perhaps it was a year ago.

Sure enough, as I study the benches, I see that each one is occupied by a single person, some with headphones in, some just staring at the nature around us. Weird? Maybe pre-pandemic, yes. But in a world where moments away from your home's four walls, Zoom meetings and the constant company of your entire household are few and far between, it’s not.

A nation's state of despair?

Four national lockdowns, a global pandemic, and almost a year of fragmented social interaction has pushed our minds to the brink. According to the Office for National Statistics, around one in five adults experienced some form of depression in early 2021, echoing the Centre of Mental Health’s warning back in October that as a result of Covid-19, up to 10 million people will need mental health support this year.

Realising that most of those bums sat on benches belonged to other people just needing to take a minute prompted me to start thinking about coping mechanisms.

According to sociologist and senior fellow at the Greater Good Science Center at the University of California, Christine Carter, PhD, practising self-care is essential when it comes to taking care of emotional health and well-being during this pandemic. Dr. Carter told Everyday Health this month, “This is a time of incredible anxiety and stress. Focusing on what makes us feel nourished, is part of easing those feelings and giving us a more solid foundation.”

After some research I compiled a list of five self-care disciplines that each tackled a feeling I was struggling with; angst, paranoia, pressure, exhaustion and brain fog. I decided to spend a whole week committed to self-care, hoping this could remedy my feelings.

Some of these practices have been used for decades, others are bits of advice or tips from experts in the field. I knew one week wasn’t going to make a long-term difference, but would it change how I felt?

Most of all, I wanted to get out of the matching tracksuit I’d been sporting for four days on the trot.

Practice one: Meditation

My bedroom ceiling is filthy, I should definitely clean it.

Wait, how do you clean a ceiling?

Last April, searches for ‘meditation’ reached their peak around the globe according to Google trends. As we adjusted to lockdowns and living without our usual escapes of socialising and the outdoors, people started trying meditation as an alternative form of escapism.

Meditation has been practiced for thousands of years and according to leading mindfulness app Headspace, just a few minutes of meditation a day can, “help people stress less, focus more and sleep better.”

But what if you tried to find this peak of sanctity every single day?

There I am, day one, led on my bed, candle on, the calming voice of a random women telling me to relax my body and close my eyes playing in the background.

I was not concentrating, I was obsessing over the weird splodges on my ceiling. Something about the meditation series I had chosen on the Calm app really had me tuning out. The distractions continued and halfway through the week, having had no huge life realisation yet, I decided to change up location.

I moved to the living room in the mornings but still found myself drifting into trains of thought unrelated to my ‘intention’. On Sunday, I took advantage of the weather and attempted my meditation mid-walk.

Sat looking at the sky, I chose not to have the lady in my ear this time. I took some advice from the Little Buddha website and lowered my expectations. It worked. For 10 minutes I found some calm.

Practice two: Exercise

Make it stop. That has to have been the third bug to land on my sweaty face in the last 10 minutes.

The Mayo Clinic claims that, “Physical activity stimulates various brain chemicals that may leave you feeling happier, more relaxed and less anxious.” I knew I couldn’t pull off one run a day for seven days of the week, but I was curious to see if increasing my level of physical activity would improve my mood.

With gyming out of the question, I took to the road. Having been a couch potato for the majority the pandemic, the first run definitely hit the hardest. I downloaded fitness app Strava and got to work tracking my progress.

I chose the second most popular running route in my area. Was this because I wanted to see more of the landscape? Or because I didn’t want to risk bumping into anyone I knew?

We’ll never know.  Once I’d completed my first 3k I was exhausted. Having completed my first run in the evening, I learnt my first lesson of becoming a running bum. Time your runs well. After my shower I was ready to sleep and conked out by 10pm.

Feeling more tired before bed was something that increased throughout the week. Exercise does, in fact, help you fall asleep more quickly and heavily. Instead of staying awake until 1 am doom scrolling, I felt myself dozing off well before 12 most nights.

After my second run I seemingly lost momentum. I started to let the logistics of running prevent me from continuing. Do I have enough time to shower after? I don’t have anywhere to hold my phone. I can’t decide what music I want to listen to.

I was giving myself excuses to get out of the discipline I had committed to. To overcome this I reflected on when I’d reached 4k on my second run. This motivated me to get out and complete my third and final run of the week.

Three runs down, and some very sore legs later, I could genuinely say this practice challenged me in the best way

Practice three: Early mornings

Wow, that is so pretty. Shall I just stay in bed for another hour?

This past year I have tried to wake up early. But my kind of early is about 8 am. It is not 2.30 am like the likes of Mark Walberg or 5 am like author Robin Sharma as he preaches in his best-selling book The 5am Club.

Sharma believes that by owning your morning, you can elevate your life. By telling the story of two struggling strangers, beginning with one homeless man swearing by his early morning routine, Sharma helps you believe that waking up at 5 am, “upgrades happiness, helpfulness and feelings of aliveness.”

So, I set the alarm. Day 1. *wakes up at 8 am* I slept through my alarm (thanks a lot new-found love of sleep.) Day 2. wakes up to two alarms, is back asleep by 6 am. *cries*

OK. Day 3. I did wake up at 5 am this day, but I was exhausted by the end of it. The truth is, I failed to wake up at 5 am on any of these days and get anything productive done. All I had to show for my efforts were some pretty sunrise pictures I took from my window.

Here’s where another lesson of my week of self-help came in. A lesson that had been foreshadowed in the research I had done. Patience. Robin Sharma took four years to write his bible on elevating his mornings, so I decided that it may take me a little longer than a week to start embracing the 5 am life.

By accepting this and getting over the disappointment, I could look at the situation realistically. Maybe one day my life will call for 5 am wakeups, but for now, I’ll stick with my own version of an early morning.

Practice four: Caring for your houseplants

Oh my god, she’s resurrected

Looking after yourself is one short way of describing self-care. But what about looking after others? A 2015 study by PMC into the stresses felt by young people found that, ‘active interaction with indoor plants can reduce physiological and psychological stress.’

According to Marie Claire, tending to plants in the home can reduce tension in people by almost 40 percent, the links to nature remind us of a slower pace of life, which is instantly calming. So, for seven days of self -care I went full plant-mum.

Of course, there is only so much you can do here. I didn’t want to over water or over indulge any of my plants so I spent the week getting in touch with their deepest needs. I monitored how well they were reacting to their current position, making sure they didn’t have too much or too little sunlight.

This was a warm week, I was spending a lot of time moving plants from my study back to my bedroom window. This may seem excessive, but for one plant it made all the difference.

My housemates’ plant had been looking very sad, I told her that many of my plants had started to do better in our study attic room. She reluctantly let me look after her plant - she called her Susan - for the week. The change in location changed Susan’s life, she went from hugging herself, to standing up tall and noble.

When my housemate got back from work a couple of days later I was so excited to show her Susan’s new form. The serotonin we both got from witnessing little Susan’s journey was incredible.

Frankly, spending the time away from my own feelings, and concentrating on those of my plants genuinely gave me a fulfilling escape. Surrounding yourself with plants and tending to them makes you feel good about yourself and your ability to care for others.

I’m not sure I’d trust myself with a fish just yet. But we’re definitely on our way

Practice five: Yoga

Why am I still getting distracted by my ceiling?

The healing benefits of yoga have been practiced by ‘yogis’ for hundreds of years. The discipline is famous for its ability to cure the mind, body and soul. I felt yoga would be the perfect discipline to take on each day, to aid my sore muscles and focus my intentions.

I had always been curious as to the benefits of yoga, but felt after a year spent leant over a computer screen it was more needed than ever.

Writing in Yoga The Inyengar Way, B.K.S Iyengar points out the importance of yoga in a modern world. “Convenience and speed are obtained at some cost to physical health. Labouring saving devices minimize physical exertion, resulting in stiffness and muscular weakness.”

I had heard of a YouTube yoga guru, Yoga with Adriene who had a 30-day challenge on her channel. Adriene eases you into yoga and takes teaching at a slow pace. This was perfect for my seven days of self-care.

At times I felt like I was going through the motions, staring at the paint on the ceiling once again, but Adriene’s coaching brought me back in the room.

I found myself looking forward to the sessions each day and felt they helped me relax, I ended up doing most of the sessions in the evening which was a good exercise to de-stress from the day’s madness.

Lessons in self-love

Finishing this week shed light on what it truly means to practice self-care. I learnt that self-care doesn’t have to mean following the exact instructions of a self-help book, or exceeding your exercise goals, or being good at meditation. It is about having patience with yourself. I found that most of the positives came from the act of trying in the first place.

By attempting all of these things in one week I forced myself to break out of bad habits and commit to discipline's. Even if that meant failing on some of them, I still felt great about the ones I did complete.


Influencer Lauren Elizebeth believes self-care is the key to finding happiness in yourself. In her podcast MOOD she speaks on finding balance within self-care, focusing on small mood boosters that can improve your self-care routines. During my week of self-care, I stumbled across many of the lessons Lauren preaches.

Key Lessons

  • Don't pressure yourself
  • Set boundaries when it comes to exercise
  • Lower your expectations
  • Practice patience with yourself
  • Give yourself small disciplines to follow
  • Reward yourself