A new generation of young adults are about to enter the world in a few short days! This time brings great excitement, elation, and of course, confusion. With this new chapter beginning, comes new habits to adapt and build for optimal wellness. But the truth of the matter is, most college students didn’t have a proper opportunity to learn about wellness and well-being. What is that, self-care? For many, it meant skipping meals, pulling all nighters, rushing to meet deadlines, imbalance in social and school life, and generally no real habits of wellness. Even worse, no one probably even had a conversation with most college students to prioritize wellness and well-being.
Do you remember the type of wellness skillsets you had in the average college grad age – your early 20s? For me, I definitely didn’t have any of the tools that I do now. I remember insomnia, poor eating habits, questionable sleep schedules, stressed body, and a general imbalance that showed up in very destructive health ways in my physical body.
After graduation, you get thrown into a world where you’re navigating perhaps a new job, career, maybe the first time ever being by yourself and supporting ourselves financially, socially, and all the ways. You are all of a sudden met with a conundrum where you spend so much time building up an expertise in your study habits and being able to produce, but not having developed any kind of real habits that let us take care of ourselves.
Although these tips are for recent college grads who have little to no experience in wellness habits, anyone can apply these concepts, especially if you feel like you missed out on building these habits for yourself earlier on in your life.
1. First rule of thumb is to have a holistic approach to your health.
Your health is not just your physical body, it’s your emotional, mental, spiritual, financial, social, and energetic bodies. For a lot of us, we are really good at taking care of one aspect of ourselves while we neglect or don’t acknowledge that there are multi dimensional parts of us that also need support. A great way to notice where attention may be lacking is to do an audit of all these different categories and see where it is that you are spending your energy and where there is a some avoidance. For example, perhaps financial health as a recent college grad, feels like somethings super easy to avoid!
2. The second way to build a wellness practice for yourself is to start small and build on stop.
When we add too many habits at the same time, all we’ve done is overwhelm ourselves with more things to do that we are probably not going to do. When you pick one or two things that you can really stick to, for example drinking enough water during the day, or remembering to do five minutes of breathwork, you are training yourself to build habits that will be sustainable in the long run. As you get consistent with these habits, you can practice adding in one or two more new things that become a part of your normal routine.
But as soon as I said routine…
3. To look at yourself from a holistic perspective, is to be okay with your routine changing.
You will have different needs at different times of your life. Your body and energy will ask for different things during different seasons. It is okay that your routine changes and it is okay that some of the beautiful habits that you’ve been building want to now take a backseat while other habits just make more sense for this time in your life. Being adaptable is a very powerful skillset that not only helps you out in building your holistic approach to wellness, but in everything else that you do.
There you go! Even if we didn’t have a change to build these foundations of health from a young age, it’s never too late to start!