1. Take the pledge – Make a commitment to yourself to practice a little more self-care in May. When you sign up below, we will send you a weekly email with encouragement and ideas to keep you going! 
2. Post your digital badge – When you sign up, you will receive your #HappyCamper digital badge in your email. Save the image and post in your social media and tag us @CampFireNHQ! You will inspire others to take time for themselves.
3. Keep us updated – We want to know how your self-care journey is going! Tag us in photos of you practicing self-care. You got this. Enjoy the journey.

#HappyCamper  Challenge @CampFireNHQ

Already doing some self-care? Now is a good time to reflect:

1. Take an inventory of your current self-care practices. Do they still work for you? Are there some that no longer serve you that you need to quit or replace?
2. Examine what you need with our current situation. Are your normal self-care practices what you need right now during all the changes and uncertainty brought by COVID-19? Do you need to adjust or add a few for the time being? Do you need to do them more or less frequently?
3. Remind yourself to be consistent. Many people refer to self-care practices as the “boring life things” that actually keep you going. Are there practices that you have stopped being consistent about that need to be recentered in your life?
4. Who can you share this with? Who can you invite to join you? This kind of thing is always more fun with someone else. You are also more likely to stick to it with an “accountability buddy” or someone you are pursuing a goal with.

New to self-care? Here are some things to think about:

1. Take an inventory of your physical health. How are you feeling? Do you have chronic health needs that need to be accommodated? Have your eating and sleeping habits changed? Once you’ve taken an inventory, what practices might you put in place to help correct or prevent those things?
2. Identify the things that matter to you. Who are the people you want around you that give you good energy? What makes you feel joy? What makes you relax? What things are you currently doing that do not bring peace, security, or joy into your life?
3. Get comfortable with the word no. What boundaries have you set for yourself at work, at home, and with yourself? What boundaries do you feel you don’t currently have but need to start creating?
4. Have you ever told yourself you love yourself? Have you felt gratitude for all it’s carried you through in life? How do you view yourself? Do you feel you deserve time for yourself?

Stress is a word everyone is familiar with. Simply living as a human on this planet requires some levels of stress – feeding ourselves, getting the kids to practice, finishing a term paper. Generally, our healthy minds and bodies can manage these daily stresses and continue to function at a high level. We may not even realize we are experiencing stress because our bodies are able to adapt well and can return back to a neutral state once the stress has been alleviated. 

I felt like, for the most part, my body and mind handled stress pretty well. Obviously there were times when I felt stress more than others, and I had to work a little harder to adapt. But generally, I could trust my mind and body to do what I needed them to do – keep me going. 

Then COVID-19 came. 

Stress has a whole new feeling and definition for me now. My workflow was abruptly changed. My daily routine halted. People in my house lost their jobs. Everything about my life changed and very quickly. 

Pretty soon after, my appetite and sleep schedule started fluctuating. Then came the anxiety, depression, disassociation, intense joy, moments of clarity, and then an inability to concentrate. My mood was all over the place (and still is).

For a lot of us, we don’t realize we are experiencing stress until it starts to affect our minds: our mood, our ability to concentrate, the presence of anxiety. However, a lot of the time, our bodies actually react first, often in small ways that we tend not to notice. When we did the relaxation exercise at the beginning of this post, were you surprised to realize that you had been clenching your jaw all day? Or that your shoulders had slowly been tensing and rising closer to your ears? I find myself having to unclench multiple times a day. Our bodies hold on to stress just like our minds do. 

So how do we manage stress, when so often it doesn’t come to our attention until it starts affecting our ability to function at our best, or, in the era of COVID-19, our ability to maintain a relatively healthy mental and physical life while so much is unknown?

A good place to start is beginning to create habits of self-care.