A self-care strategy is analysing what parts of yourself you need to work on to support your wellbeing.
Your strategy doesn’t have to be complex. It’s a simple list of things you know may impact your wellbeing and your ideas for how to address them.
What makes a good self-care strategy
A good self-care strategy looks at what impacts your wellbeing and what helps to address those impacts.
You can help your thinking by breaking it up into:
- Prevention: things you can do to avoid or minimise negative impacts on your wellbeing
- Boundaries: rules or limits you can put in place to support your wellbeing
Examples of prevention
- You have a bad back when you sit for a long time, so you prevent this by standing up a lot
- You get meeting fatigue from back-to-back meetings, so you block out time in your diary to stop this from happening
Examples of boundaries
- You make it clear to everyone when you’re available and working
- You let everyone know about a topic that triggers you so they avoid it
Template to write your own simple self-care strategy
Use this table as a starting point for coming up with your own self-care strategy.
Start off slow and try one or two things.
If they work, keep doing more. If you find some strategies aren’t working, refine them or analyse them again.
| Issue | Strategy type to use | Self-care strategy |
| I’m in back-to-back meetings too much | Prevention | Block out time in my diary every second day |
| I’m always late home for dinner | Boundary | On Mondays and Fridays, I’m finishing work at 5pm |