The Three Stages of Self Care

Talking about self care might seem like a huge cliche these days, but there is a reason that it is so emphasized. Self care is somatic intelligence in action. Somatic intelligence is the understanding of how the body responds to stress and using that knowledge to inform our day to day choices, routines, and to make wellness interventions.

Even when you value self care, it can still be difficult to manage and prioritize caring for yourself in meaningful and effective ways when there is an emphasis on productivity and a pressure to constantly produce in our culture.

There is often a gap between understanding how the body feels and making an intervention to feel better. Furthermore, people mistake first aid self care with maintenance self care. 

I find it helpful to reframe our self care in terms of stages because it can help people be realistic about what they need to do, what they need to stop doing, and how long feeling good is going to take. 

The three stages of self care are

1. First Aid Stage

2. After Care Stage

3. Maintenance Stage

Knowing each stage of self care will help you take the right steps to not only listen to your body but to give it what it needs to truly rest and be cared for.

Hold up! Are you an auditory learner? LISTEN to this article in podcast format ⬇️⬇️⬇️⬇️

FIRST AID

The First aid stage of self care is about the immediate managing of some kind of injury whether it is mental, emotional, spiritual, or physical. First aid can also involve navigating some sort of crisis or emergency. 

First aid is the first and immediate assistance given to any person suffering from either a minor or serious illness or injury with care provided to preserve life, to prevent the condition from worsening, or to promote recovery.

First aid is usually relegated to injuries like cuts, scrapes, snake bites, and sprains. For the context of your life, however, start thinking of first aid as also relating to all parts of you, including mental, emotional, spiritual, and relational. It’s not just about what is happening to the body, but what is going on holistically. 

In the first aid stage, most of your energy is going to managing some sort of injury. This may look like

• A mother in the few weeks after birth

• A person who just lost a loved one, a job, or is going through a break up

• Someone who is having an active mental health crisiqs

• Tending to an injury like a broken bone, sprain, strain that impacts how they are able to navigate their daily life

• Anything that impacts our general functioning in our day

The first aid stage is acute. It may be a few days or one to two weeks long. Self care interventions may look like canceling plans, calling out of work, herbs or practices that immediately manage pain and symptoms, and so on. 

AFTER CARE

The after care stage is when you had an issue/injury, Now, we are post immediate care and working on active recovery.

Entering the after care stage of self care has the following characteristics.

• While in the after care stage, the injury or concern is still impacting us, but we don’t have an open wound. 

• Self care during the after care stage is key to preventing a concern from becoming chronic. 

• We are in the phase of an injury or illness or concern where we if we don’t start to implement specific interventions, an issue becomes ongoing. This might lead to chronic pain, deteriorating mental health, or relational wellness issues, and so on. 

An easily understandable example is getting a sprained ankle or a broken bone. As you recover, if you don’t do your physical therapy or mobility work to restore proper function, your injury can turn into an issue that impacts your ability to use that part of your body in its full capacity in the future. It’s like getting an injury and never being the same again. 

Self care in the aftercare stage is what you do in between immediate recovery and returning to normal/full functioning, and it is an incredibly important and often overlooked stage of self care. 

Many people have a tendency to think we should be able to go right from the first aid stage back into maintenance when, in reality, what we do in the aftercare stage will determine what the body and mind are able to do and whether we are able to return to full functioning or not.

MAINTENANCE STAGE

The maintenance stage is where we are in a state of ‘general’ full function, and we feel relatively balanced. In this stage, we are not in a recovery stage and are not dealing with immediate injuries or ailments. 

In the maintenance stage, how we feel can exist on a spectrum; we might feel really great or pretty badly. 

For example, you could be in chronic pain and suffering from ailments that you have just learned to live with that have become your new normal. However, you could be ready to take on new challenges because you have the mental and emotional space that comes with practicing the first aid and after care stages. 

This may be when our life feels steady and we are ready to take on deeper healing work to recover from past traumas, or we are interested in taking our wellness to a new level through developing new habits and practices.

In the maintenance stage, most ailments that are dealt with are chronic.

You may be suffering from chronic illness, or you might have that lower back issue that is keeping you from moving the way that you really want to. You also may be dealing with fairly debilitating mental health issues. 

Regardless of if your quality of life and health status is ideal or not, what distinguishes the maintenance stage is that you have the time and space in your life to implement more advanced or time consuming wellness interventions.

CONSIDERATIONS

• Interventions to recover from chronic issues

• Ab to take on more complicated wellness plans

• Introduce new wellness interventions like exercise programs or thorough education

• Exploration of performance

Understanding which stage you are in makes a difference in your self care practice, especially as it relates to how much time you should expect to tend to yourself. 

Above all, if you are going to emphasize caring for yourself, respecting where you are at without wishing you were in another stage is paramount. 

Self care should leave you feeling cared for. It’s not just a process of checking boxes, but a true tending to our emotional, physical, spiritual, and mental needs. It is birthed out of knowing ourselves and having a strong sense of wellness literacy. 

To implement all of this information, I find it really helpful to do a little bit of thought work. This is when you sit down and journal out some of your ideas and thoughts and beliefs about what stage you are in, what you are dealing with, and what ailments are coming up for you. 

Write about how you feel, what you think about how you feel and from there you can then ask yourself:

What do I need?

What would make me feel cared for? 

Then, remember that self care is what we do for ourselves, and it’s not always what is fun or is going to feel good. However, at the end of the day, it meets our needs and the balance is in favor of feeling cared for. 

As a final note, remember that asking for help is actually valid self care. Asking for someone to make you a meal or keep you company can be self care. Scheduling a massage or a doctors appointment can be self care. 

For more ideas, I have two free resources that you can check out. The first is a free herbalism course called The Seeds of Herbal Wellness which will teach you all about herbal medicine.

Drinking a cup of tea or taking a tincture can be a really good way to start self care practice because they introduce us to the process of noticing how we feel and then doing something to change how we feel (this is somatic awareness and intelligence).

Another resource is the DIY Mandala of Wellness which is a free course on creating your own wellness plan where I go into depth on the process of coming up with interventions to feel better and creating a self care plan. 

I find that creating new self care habits can be a little bit challenging, so creating self care systems that I implement is far easier so that course will teach you how to make that happen! The DIY Mandala of Wellness will help you see how your wellness is a systems practice, making it a little easier to manage. 

I hope that this helps you understand a little bit more about self care and how to help yourself feel better.

Remember that even though self care is often a solitary endeavor, some of the deepest healing comes from feeling close to community. If you are listening to this, it means that we are in community, and I would love to be a witness to your self care growth!

Listen to this post on the Herbs + Ease Podcast for a more detailed educational experience!

Kristen Prosen