How to Build a Self-Care Routine for Mental Wellness
Do you ever feel mentally drained or overwhelmed? In the busy world that we live in, it’s easy to forget that you need to look after your mind and body. What if there was a simple way to hit the reset button and improve your well-being?
What Is Self-Care for Mental Wellness?
Self-care is anything you do that focuses on your well-being. When people mention self-care, your mind might automatically go to bubble baths or a day at a spa, but it’s much more than this. Taking care of your mental wellness involves looking after your physical, mental, emotional, and social needs.
Self-care looks different for everyone because we are all unique and have individual needs. This is why it’s important to create a self-care routine that works for you, not what you might see other people doing on social media.
Improving your mental wellness through self-care can be broken down into four different areas – emotional, social, mental, and physical.
Emotional Self-Care
Self-care for emotional health includes ways to improve self-awareness and manage emotions better, such as stress or anxiety. This could include activities like meditation, therapy, or journaling.
Social Self-Care
Mental Self-Care
Mental self-care involves activities that help your mental well-being, such as stress management or meditation.
Physical Self-Care
Physical self-care focuses on activities that are good for your body, like getting enough sleep, movement, and nutrition.
Benefits of Having a Routine for Mental Well-being
Neglecting self-care can have damaging effects on our health. Our stress levels can rise, we feel emotionally exhausted, and may even reach the point of burnout.3 Let’s look at some of the benefits of having a self-care routine:
Emotional well-being: Self-care for emotional well-being can reduce anxiety and depression, and bring a sense of calm and self-worth.4- How self-care helps with stress: Practising self-care has been shown to increase your resilience – your ability to bounce back from events that knock you.5 Building resilience can help you manage stress, which is important when a quarter of adults report feeling high levels of stress.6 Self-care strategies for stress include relaxation techniques, hobbies, and spending time in nature.
- Improves self-esteem: Self-care for your mental well-being involves activities that will naturally help you to feel more confident – spending time with friends, being physically active, picking up new skills or hobbies, having self-compassion, and learning to set healthy boundaries.7
- Better sleep: Roughly one in three adults don’t get enough sleep.8 However, good sleep is really important for your health. It helps your brain to work better, and your mood to improve, and is good for your health. Self-care practices such as exercise, sticking to sleep schedules, or avoiding electronics before heading to bed, can all have a positive effect on your sleep.9
It’s clear to see that self-care activities for mental wellness come with many benefits, but how do you create a self-care routine? Let’s dive into that next.
Building a Self-Care Routine
You are ready to make a routine for your well-being, but where do you start? How do you know what you should be doing? And do you need to make a timetable to fit it all in? It doesn’t need to be as rigid or complicated as that, so we’ve broken the planning down into four steps for you.
1. Look At Your Current Needs
Start by thinking about the four areas mentioned earlier – emotional, physical, mental, and social – and decide how satisfied you are with them in your life right now. Are there any specific issues you are facing?
For example, you want to exercise more but never find the time. Perhaps you have felt isolated recently and want to meet new people. Maybe you feel stressed at the end of each workday and can’t switch off or unwind. Having a self-care routine can help with all of these.
2. Choose Activities That Meet Your Needs
There are so many activities that you can do to look after your well-being that there’s bound to be something you can add to your daily routine. Here are some self-care activities for mental wellness, broken down into those four important areas to give you some starting ideas for your plan:
Physical Self-Care Activities
- Exercise: Any type of movement can help improve your physical well-being, and regular exercise can also help reduce symptoms of depression and anxiety.10 Think of activities like yoga, running, or dancing.
- Nutrition: Eating a balanced diet, having more fruit or vegetables each day, cooking a meal from scratch.
Emotional Self-Care Activities
- Therapy: If you struggle with your mental health, you may want to look at options for therapy, such as individual, online, or group therapy.
- Journaling: This is a great way to get your thoughts and feelings out of your head and onto a page, and only requires a pen and paper. Studies show that journaling can improve your mood and boost your overall well-being.11
Mental Self-Care Activities
- Mindfulness: This is an effective grounding technique to help you slow down your busy brain. It’s being aware and accepting of what’s happening in the present moment. Research shows that mindfulness can help reduce symptoms of depression, stress, and anxiety, as well as bring many other benefits.12 You can use breathing exercises, relaxation techniques, or meditation.
- Stress management: Stress can make you feel like you’re unable to cope with things life throws at you, so knowing how to manage stress is important for your well-being. Time management, relaxation, and prioritizing sleep can help you manage stress better.
Social Self-Care Activities
- Connections: Seeing friends for coffee, calling family for a chat, or going to an activity group like a knitting circle or running club can all provide that vital social connection we need for our well-being.
- Setting healthy boundaries: This can be a tough one for a lot of people, as it can feel difficult to say no to people. Setting boundaries might look like protecting your time to rest and relax, or learning to say ‘no’ when you don’t have the energy to do things other people want you to do.
3. Set Clear, Achievable Goals
Setting a clear goal helps to get you in the mindset for change, as you have an aim you are working towards. Remember that your goal needs to be specific and achievable, otherwise, you are setting yourself up for failure from the start which may make you feel worse. Here are two examples of making clear, achievable goals:
- “I want to start improving my physical health by going for a 15-minute walk three times a week and eating one piece of fruit each day.”
- “I want to feel more relaxed because I often feel stressed. I want to do a relaxing activity each day after work to help me unwind.”
Both of these state what they plan to do, how often to do it, and why they want to do it.
4. Make a Commitment
Decide that prioritizing your self-care is important to you. Whether you set a reminder on your phone, or write it down on your calendar, make sure that your goal is there for you to see, along with the activities you need to do it.
Your health and wellbeing matter and you deserve to look after yourself. Even if it’s just finding two minutes for a breathing exercise each day before bed, the little changes add up. Commit to yourself today.
How to Overcome Challenges
Even with the best intentions, obstacles can get in our way. If you want to pre-empt them, here are some of the most common challenges when it comes to starting a new self-care routine.
Time
We never have enough time, right? Maybe it’s a good moment to look over your plan again. Are your activities too long? If you want to incorporate relaxation, you could start with a one-minute breathing technique.
If you want to start walking for your health, you could begin by going around the block. Schedule when you are going to do your activity and see if you can stick to it with the help of reminders or alarms.
Consistency and Motivation
Some conditions can make self-care feel more challenging. Depression can steal your energy and leave you unable to get up in the morning, and anxiety can keep you awake all night worrying. Self-care can help ease these symptoms, but it might feel difficult to keep momentum going when you have these obstacles in the way.
Making a flexible self-care routine can help when it comes to consistency. Include activities that you can choose from on days when you’re stuck in bed or exhausted, such as progressive muscle relaxation exercises, or having a book to read by your bed or on your phone.
A routine doesn’t need to be rigidly scheduled – you can have a list of activities for ‘good’ days and a different list for days when you feel less good. Keep in mind the reason you are doing all of this – to improve your well-being.
Environmental Factors
Sometimes, we want to make changes, but it can be difficult to practically do. Take exercise, for example. You want to go for a run, but there aren’t any parks near you or the area where you live isn’t the safest to go running around.
This is a challenge, but you may be able to adjust your plan to help. What if you went for a walk instead? Perhaps you could buy a treadmill for your home, or find a cheap gym nearby where you could run? Perhaps you could run with a friend so that you feel safer.
Guilt
You might think that it all feels a bit too luxurious – why do you deserve to spend time on yourself? You might have other things that you should be doing instead – caring for people, or really important things.
If this is you, remember that your self-care is important for your well-being and that you can support others better if you are in a good place yourself. You are just as deserving of care and kindness as anybody else. If you had a friend telling you that they felt guilty looking after themselves, what would you say to them? Treat yourself with the same empathy that you would a loved one.
Getting Support for Your Mental Health
If you feel like you need some professional support alongside your self-care, we are here to help you. At Mission Connection, we know that you are facing unique challenges – that is why we provide a completely individualized treatment plan to help you feel like yourself again.
Whether you are looking for intensive help through an outpatient program or regular therapy sessions such as cognitive behavioral therapy or online therapy, we have something to suit your needs and circumstances.
Cost shouldn’t be a barrier to getting the help you need, which is why we have a range of payment options, including insurance plans, flexible private pay and financing plans, as well as sliding scale fees based on financial need.
If you’re ready to start feeling better, contact us today to find out how we can support you through your healing journey.
References
- National Alliance on Mental Illness. (2025, March 27). Mental health by the numbers. NAMI. https://www.nami.org/about-mental-illness/mental-health-by-the-numbers/
- Luo, Y., Hawkley, L. C., Waite, L. J., & Cacioppo, J. T. (2012). Loneliness, health, and mortality in old age: A national longitudinal study. Social Science & Medicine, 74(6), 907–914. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.socscimed.2011.11.028
- Reid, S. (2024, August 27). Self-care strategies to improve your overall mental health. HelpGuide.org. https://www.helpguide.org/mental-health/wellbeing/self-care-tips-to-prioritize-your-mental-health
- Pilkington, K., & Wieland, L. S. (2020). Self-care for anxiety and depression: A comparison of evidence from Cochrane reviews and practice to inform decision-making and priority-setting. BMC Complementary Medicine and Therapies, 20(1), Article 171. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12906-020-03038-8
- Ayala, E. E., Winseman, J. S., Johnsen, R. D., & Mason, H. R. C. (2018). U.S. medical students who engage in self-care report less stress and higher quality of life. BMC Medical Education, 18(1), Article 189. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12909-018-1296-x
- American Psychological Association. (n.d.). Stress in America 2023: A nation recovering from collective trauma. https://www.apa.org/news/press/releases/stress/2023/collective-trauma-recovery
- NHS. (2025, January 15). Raising low self-esteem. https://www.nhs.uk/mental-health/self-help/tips-and-support/raise-low-self-esteem/
- National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute. (2023, July 26). Sleep health. https://www.nhlbi.nih.gov/health-topics/education-and-awareness/sleep-health
- National Institutes of Health. (2024, June 18). Good sleep for good health. NIH News in Health. https://newsinhealth.nih.gov/2021/04/good-sleep-good-health
- Carek, P. J., Laibstain, S. E., & Carek, S. M. (2011). Exercise for the treatment of depression and anxiety. The International Journal of Psychiatry in Medicine, 41(1), 15–28. https://doi.org/10.2190/pm.41.1.c
- Baikie, K. A., & Wilhelm, K. (2005). Emotional and physical health benefits of expressive writing. Advances in Psychiatric Treatment, 11(5), 338–346. https://doi.org/10.1192/apt.11.5.338
- Li, P., Mao, L., Hu, M., Lu, Z., Yuan, X., Zhang, Y., & Hu, Z. (2022). Mindfulness on rumination in patients with depressive disorder: A systematic review and meta-analysis of randomized controlled trials. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 19(23), 16101. https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph192316101
