#5 Redefining Self-Care Beyond Aesthetics

Is your self-care helping you recover, or just helping you perform wellness for everyone else?

If self-care looks perfect on camera but feels empty in your body, this conversation is your reset. We trade ring lights and “aesthetic” routines for grounded practices that actually expand capacity—so you can think clearer, feel steadier, and move through the week with more agency. 

Along the way, we reframe self-care as maintenance, not a prize you earn after crisis. Preventative care beats crisis care, always, and even a bare-minimum checklist on hard days can make a real difference. We wrap with a journal prompt to help you personalize the shift: If I treated self-care as maintenance instead of a reward, what would I need more of right now?

Tune in for clear steps, simple language, and zero fluff. If this helped you rethink your routine, follow the show, share it with a friend who needs a nudge, and leave a quick review so more listeners can find us.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:07

Hello, my dear passengers, and welcome aboard to Self-Growth Train, a podcast that combines personal stories, opinions, and research in order to better guide you through your self-growth journey. My name is Frances Maria Tivera Pacheco and I am your guide. First, I just want to say thank you for tuning back for another episode. If you notice, I did not post any episodes in February. I know that this is supposed to be a weekly podcast, and I apologize. However, due to being sick for the last couple of weeks, I have not been able to record anything. I didn't have a voice. I just I have not been able to keep on track of things the way that I was supposed to. So today I'm going to be releasing four episodes, and I'm excited because then we're gonna be right on track for what I want to do for the month of March. So without further ado, here's today's episode. Welcome to my dear passengers. Today's episode title is Redefining Self-Care Beyond Aesthetics. My dear passengers, we hear about self-care on a day-to-day basis. Why? Because our social media feed is consistently showing us self-care in a quote unquote aesthetically pleasing way. Why? Because they want to entice us to stay there for the video's length and also to share it with our friends. And the reality is we like to show things that show progress and then at the end it shows perfection, it shows cleanliness, it shows aesthetically pleasing elements, right? But today what we're going to be doing is we're going to redefine and reshape our perspective when it comes to self-care. We're not going to be paying attention to the quote unquote aestheticness of it. We are going to be paying attention to the benefits of it. And I'm very excited to bring you on this journey because self-care is definitely something that I love to talk about any day and every day. And here's the bottom line: when you're doing performative self-care, meaning you are focusing on let me make sure that when I scrub my arms, it has the right lighting and it has the right angle for the camera, and it has all these right elements for my viewers. You are focusing on performative self-care, okay? And that misses the point. Like the whole point of self-care is to make us feel better about who we currently are while we're working towards the person that we're becoming, right? So I went online and I found an article that I thought would be perfect for this episode because it talks about the five types of self-care for every area of your life. And it was written by Dr. Elizabeth Scott, an author, workshop leader, educator, and award-winning blogger on stress management, positive psychology, relationships, and emotional well-being. Let's get started, y'all! Number one, physical self-care. Now, this is the one that everybody knows about. We're talking about manny patties, we're talking about getting enough sleep, drinking enough water, making sure that we're looting on sunscreen, putting on moisturizer, washing our face, washing our hair, scrubbing our skin, making sure that everything is nice and clean. That is physical self-care. Oh, and also obviously, if you have meds, you're taking your meds the way that they're supposed to be taken, and just making sure that you follow up with your doctor's appointments, especially those mental health appointments, because those are very, very, very important. And let's see, dieting, and I'm trying to think what else comes to mind, exercise, those are the types of physical self-care things you could be doing for yourself to make sure that you're taking care of yourself. Number two, mental self-care. We're talking about spending time in nature, enjoying your hobbies, trying new things, meditation, mindfulness, and even therapy. I know I mentioned therapy earlier when I was talking about physical needs, but that's also because it is slash physical, it is slash mental, and it is also emotional as well. So, yes, but when it comes to mental self-care, we're talking about what's going on on the mind and that you're taking time to be quiet and centered and present with your mind. Number three, we're talking about emotional self-care. I love emotional self-care because this is the one where you talk about expressing your feelings, stating your boundaries, maintaining those boundaries, and also making sure that you stand up for what feels right towards your emotional state of being. So that one is definitely a very important one that I want to actually spend a little more time on because I think something that is so important about your emotional self-care is alone time. And I'm gonna make a pause right here because I think again, this is so important. I am one of the most extroverted people that you will probably meet in your life, just because I absolutely adore, love, and enjoy being in the company of people in general. That's it, that's like my jam, okay. Having said that, the importance of having alone time or having time to recharge or recuperate all of the energy that you have spent throughout the week, all of the time that you have been non-stop, it's so important. So, when it comes to emotional self-care, I always say it's so important for you to have your alone time because we don't tend to lean towards that alone time because it can be scary being with our own thoughts and being with our own ideas. And I and I and I can admit that it can be scary at times because it's just kind of like you just go down rabbit holes of thoughts and feelings and whatever. But outside of that, like if you're able to have a relationship with yourself where you're able to be with yourself alone, that's amazing, and it's so good for your emotional self-care. Number four is social self-care. Now, this is what we're talking about: the people that you're keeping around you, your family, your friends, strangers, even. We want to make sure that you are curating your tribe, you are making sure that the people that you're adding to your circles are adding to your life and not draining away the energy, not draining away that ambition, that motivation, that desire to keep moving forward, right? And then not only that, in social self-care is also important to keep in mind your alone time because once again, that's how it is you're going to be able to recharge. But another thing that is very important with social self-care is saying no and upholding that no. Why? Because you cannot be saying yes to every single thing, every single thing that is happening in life does not necessarily add to your pot of gold. So make sure that you are discerning what areas you're saying yes to and what areas you're saying no to because you might be need to revisit those decisions because they're not guiding you the right way. So make sure that you are definitely taking care of your social self-care needs. Last but certainly not least, number five, we're talking about spiritual self-care. This is where you focus on finding your purpose, you focus on gratitude, you focus on religious practices if that's something that you're into, right? It's important for you to take care of those spiritual self-care needs because our soul is part of our body, right? It's an area of ourselves that we need to like tend to and take care of and help water so it can bloom within us, right? So, very, very important to keep in mind that when we're talking about self-care, again, at no point am I talking about aesthetics, at no point am I talking about angles that you're gonna use for your Instagram, your TikTok, your Facebook, your ex-like, nope, nope, nope, nope. We don't care about the aesthetics of it. We care about the benefits of all the things that these five different types of self-care areas can add to our self-growth and also add to our idea that we are worth taking care of, that we are worth celebrating by making sure that we are taken care of. So I just I love it, I love it so much, I love self-care talk. You see, my dear passengers, the main message today is that self-care isn't about indulgence, it's about capacity, boundaries, and also our nervous system regulation. And not only that, it's about understanding the difference between preventative self-care, which is ensuring that we're giving ourselves that maintenance that we need instead of relying on crisis self-care, which is those moments where we want to give up on everything and we think that, okay, well, if I get a manicured now, everything is gonna turn out to be better. And it's like, no, that's that's not how self-care works. Self-care is maintenance, it's not a reward, it's the foundation for self-worth. And not only that, it isn't something that you earn, it is something that you require. So make sure, make sure that you are taking self-care as a maintenance and not a reward, and that you are understanding that at the end of the day, even the bare minimum self-care list for hard days can make the biggest difference in how you feel at the end of that day. Well, my dear passengers, let me give you the journal prompt of the day. So here we go, grab your pencils, grab your pens, and grab your notebooks because this one it's a good one. So here we go. If I treated self-care as maintenance instead of a reward, what would I need more of right now? Let me say it again for the people on the back. If I treated self-care as maintenance instead of a reward, what would I need more of right now? Can I get a sh? Well, my dear passengers, that is the end of the episode, and I know exactly what you're thinking. Wow, Francis, that episode was amazing. I love talking about self-care. So, what do you have for me coming up next week? Well, or technically today, because I'm releasing the episodes today. Today, we're going to be talking about self-esteem. So stay tuned. It's coming up in a couple of minutes. As always, all the resources used today have been added to the episode's description. Well, until the next up, dear passengers, safe travels.

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Bye.