Name: 5 Self-Care Micro-Habits to be Unrecognisable in 2025
Uploaded: 2025-02-04T08:56:58.000Z
Duration: 13 min 50 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

When we google self-care, we're often shown an aesthetic, adorable array of green juices, bubble baths, manicures, but real, genuine, effective self-care has absolutely nothing to do with what it looks like on the outside and everything to do with what it feels like on the inside.

In this video, I'm going to go through some evidence-based, tried and tested, self-care micro-habits that you can do in less than five minutes.

These are things that have completely transformed my life and helped me to feel like a better version of myself and I hope it might be able to help you do the same too.

If you're new here, my name's Izzy, I'm a Cambridge graduate and a doctor working in London.

The words wellness and self-care have been highly commoditised and dominated by the capitalist world that we currently live in.

We're told that we need to buy this or buy that or pay for this expensive thing to be taking care of ourselves.

But actually, true self-care is a way of being, not a way of buying.

Holistic self-care encompasses physical, mental, emotional and spiritual practices which we engage in to keep ourselves healthy and balanced across all aspects of life.

The cost of neglecting balance and self-care is ultimately burnout, which none of us want and it's this sense of disconnection from both ourselves and others and our purpose.

So if you're a bit like me and you want to be productive, get a lot of things that matter done but you also want to do it with balance in your life, then this video was made for you.

I've also made a totally free 5 day email guide to accompany this video which will help take you through some more tips and tricks to integrate soft productivity and personal development in your life so feel free to check that out down below.

And I'm finally posting more on Instagram and actually getting engaged with that so feel free to follow me over there for even more.

The first habit I'd like to talk about is bringing in somatic pauses throughout our day.

Somatic pause means basically taking stock and checking in on how you're doing internally.

This might be that you notice some tightness or discomfort in some parts of your body or maybe even you're noticing ease and relaxation.

This can literally take less than 30 seconds to do.

All you need to do is take a moment, take stock internally, maybe take a deep breath, maybe do a little bit of stretching and then get back to whatever you were doing.

This practice does two really helpful things.

Firstly, it gives us a window to check in on how we're doing and maybe we have some physical or mental or psychological or spiritual needs that are currently not being met.

By checking in on this, we give ourselves the opportunity to actually notice them and then maybe address them or meet them slightly more.

This can help us to manage the stress and anxiety that we might have on the day to day.

So for example, let's say I was about to have a consultation with a patient that was particularly challenging or known to be a little bit difficult.

Beforehand, I might do a somatic pause and check in and notice that I'm holding a lot of tension in my shoulders and I'm breathing really high up in my chest and my belly is tense as well and I'm breathing quickly and shallowly.

So then by checking in, I can notice, okay, my body is actually reflecting my state of mind, which is slightly tense and stressed.

So by working on releasing that tension in my body, that helps my mind to also release that tension as well.

This can help to reduce the cortisol levels in our body and just foster this sense of really taking care of ourselves deeply.

The second thing that somatic pauses are really helpful for is developing our interoception, our ability to understand what's going on internally as well as externally.

Often in today's world, we're so busy rushing about doing things very externally that we sometimes can neglect our internal experience.

By strengthening this mental muscle of checking in with yourself, you become much more able to understand what your body and your mind are telling you in terms of its needs and how you're doing and that self-understanding can help us to move through the world with a bit more self-compassion and additionally, this mental muscle of interoception can help us with our emotional regulation because the body and mind really affect each other.

When I'm feeling angry, let's say, my body does this and this is what I feel in my body.

Maybe my face goes hot, I feel this beating sense in my chest, there's a lump in my throat and so by noticing that about ourselves and having that self-knowledge, we might recognise, oh, I'm actually quite angry right now by focusing on the body and letting go of those sensations but also on the mind as well.

The next habit is taking micro-nature breaks.

This is based in the concept of biophilia.

The biophilia hypothesis suggests that humans possess an innate tendency to seek connection with nature and other forms of life.

This was introduced by Edward Wilson in his popular book, Biophilia in 1984.

If we allow ourselves to have this connection with nature, there are studies that show that even brief walks in nature can significantly lift our mood and increase our overall happiness, which is pretty amazing for something as simple as just spending a little bit of time in nature.

Beyond just feeling good, this actually has an impact on our productivity and our focus and concentration because there are actually studies that have shown that exposure to nature actually has physiological and psychological benefits.

For example, one study found that people who spend more time in green spaces have reduced levels of cortisol, along with a bunch of other studies that show that interacting with nature can improve our attention, our memory, our cognitive flexibility.

A series of studies by Kaplan and Kaplan on attention restoration theory supports this, showing that natural settings can help to restore that focus and concentration after mental fatigue.

An example of using the somatic pause and also this micro-nature exposure is right before filming this video, I did a somatic pause body scan.

I noticed that I was feeling kind of tense because I'd spent all day inside and I had been planning out some points for this video that I wanted to talk about and so I took a spontaneous short walk around a nearby park.

Immediately, I felt my body and mind soften and gain a sense of perspective and my mood just improved.

So even just going for a five minute walk can completely change your mindset.

Even just stepping out into your garden or taking a moment to take care of the plants in your room, so I have a bunch of plants in my room, which also create this sense of connection with nature and life.

The next tip is probably something that you need to hear because it's definitely something that I need to hear, probably every day.

So if I'm in a period where I'm not super on top of things, I have maybe fallen behind on some of my tasks or I've not been getting to the gym super consistently, I then set myself a very strict schedule where I try to cram in all the things that I've not been doing to try to catch up.

But then actually that is a kind of impossible task and I set myself up to fail.

When I inevitably fail, then I often end up with feeling really bad about myself.

I will judge myself, I will feel ashamed of myself, I'll feel guilty for not doing all these things and doing right by myself, whatever that means, and essentially inflict all this self-hatred on myself and all this negative self-talk.

I think this often stems from this narrative that is really common and I definitely have this in my head, which is this thought that I only deserve love and compassion if I'm perfect or if I'm doing a good job.

So if I'm doing a bad job or if I'm not perfect or if I've done something wrong, then I will feel like I don't deserve that love and compassion and that's how I operated for the majority of my life until I realised that this was some kind of weird psychological trap that I always put myself in.

Unfortunately, messing up and falling short sometimes is part of the whole experience and messing up simply means that we are actually human beings.

One reframe that I find has really helped with this psychological cycle that I often get into is to remind myself that I should treat myself like somebody that I love because if it was a friend or a family member or even let's say if it was a little dog and it accidentally makes a mistake one day and doesn't make it to the doggy toilet in time, often on dog's faces you can almost see the sense of shame or embarrassment, they seem like, they look like they know they've done something wrong.

But you won't judge your adorable pet as a wholesale failure or as undeserving of love or compassion or kindness, in fact probably the opposite, you'll kind of feel like, oh, poor thing, let's get this cleared up and continue loving your pet just as you did the whole time.

So why can't we treat ourselves the same way?

Why do we set ourselves a different standard for deserving love and compassion and kindness?

Why am I getting emotional even talking about this?

And this reminds me a lot of when I first did a meditation cycle called the Metta Bhavna and the Metta Bhavna essentially translates to the cultivation of love and kindness and one key part of doing the Metta Bhavna meditation is generating a sense of love and kindness for yourself.

I remember the first time I did this meditation and I got to the stage where I was trying to generate a sense of love and kindness for myself, this was a couple of years ago now, maybe three or four years ago, I suddenly noticed that this blockage was there and I was like, wait, I'd not noticed that there was this thing inside my psychology before where I don't accept love and kindness for myself, I don't generate that for myself and I immediately broke down crying during that meditation because I realised I don't give myself the same compassion and love that I would give to anyone else on earth.

So this habit is all about checking in on are we giving ourselves the same kindness and love and compassion that we would give to any other being on this planet.

In this day and age it's so easy to be really self-critical but actually we, just like every other being on the planet, are deserving of kindness and compassion just for existing.

We don't need to achieve anything or do anything or complete our morning routine perfectly or finish off our to-do list or be hyper-productive to be worthy of self-compassion.

This is an invitation to give yourself that gift as much as you can and let go of black and white, all or nothing thinking in terms of being able to accept self-love and self-compassion.

So now if I feel like I've done something wrong, maybe I've been a bad friend or I've been bad to myself or I've not achieved certain goals, I've started to tell myself instead, I can just choose to take this as a lesson.

I am trying my best and I am human so I will fail.

And I'd just like to leave you with a quote that I've been coming back to again and again around this.

Our greatest glory consists not in never falling but in rising every time we fall.

So pick yourself up every time with compassion and kindness and encouragement for yourself because you are trying your best and that's all that was ever needed of you.

The next tip is the two-minute tidy and this exactly is what it says on the tin, taking two minutes to tidy up your immediate surroundings and this can completely transform how we're feeling in our physical space.

Because physical clutter is not just physical clutter, it actually promotes mental clutter as well.

When our physical environment is cluttered and messy and visually chaotic, this actually adds more stimulation into our brain, resulting in us feeling less focused, less goal-directed and having reduced mental clarity.

So each day, spend just two minutes tidying up your immediate workspace or living area and if you do this in your break times between work sessions, your space will noticeably become much more enjoyable.

So try to only keep things around that really spark joy.

The next habit is cultivating gratitude on a daily basis.

Gratitude is not just about saying thank you, it's actually a profound internal tool that we can use to develop a more positive relationship with our external world and internal world.

There's actually a lot of evidence that shows that a gratitude practice can boost our mood, help us be more psychologically resilient and overall improve our mental fitness.

It can even improve your physical health.

There are some studies which are honestly a bit mind-blowing where they show that a gratitude practice can result in reporting fewer physical symptoms such as pain or other physical issues, which might also be linked to if we do have a gratitude practice, we're more likely to do things to take care of ourselves and we're connecting more to a sense of enjoyment in life and health care.

The ways that I'd recommend doing this is either doing a gratitude journal where every single day you write down at least one, maybe three things that you're grateful for and really connect with that feeling of gratitude.

Or if you're feeling like going above and beyond, you could even use gratitude messaging where you send a nice text message or a cute thank you card to someone in your life to express gratitude to them.

And actually both the person who's receiving your note and you yourself will feel better psychologically for this happening.

So if you just take out a couple of minutes of your day to either write down a couple of things you're grateful for in your journal or just send a cute little message to someone saying thank you for something you appreciated about them, then this will help to integrate a gratitude practice into your daily life.

So before wrapping up the video, just take literally five seconds to decide on two action points you're going to take away from this and implement in your own life right now to actually make sure that you're putting this into practice, not just watching videos for entertainment, but actually watching videos on YouTube to actualize real positive change in your life.

So just write down two things that you want to do, whether that's downloading the free resources below or any of these habits, and either let me know down below in the comments or send me an email to let me know which things you're going to try out.

If you enjoyed this video, I think you might like this video over here where I talk about some evidence-based tips to improve your sleep.

Sleep is literally the foundation of everything else we do.

It's one of the key pillars of our health and well-being.

So I will go through a couple of tips for you to optimize your sleep to make the most of those, hopefully, eight hours in bed each night.

As always, take care of yourselves and I will see you in the next video.