The Crystal Euphorium

Self-Care Activity Experiences

In our Becoming an Accountable Professional course this semester, we were assigned the task of completing a different self-care activity every week for the course of the semester. Out of the six distinctive self-care activities that tried, the one that I found to be the most positive and impactful on my day to day life and wellbeing was saying a positive affirmation to myself each day.

In order to help myself complete this task; I chose to use two different positive affirmations that I felt resonated the most with my current maladaptive thoughts. I then took those two affirmations, I typed them up, drew up an aesthetically pleasing background, I then printed the two affirmations and pinned them to my wall beside my mirror in my bedroom. Each morning when I woke up and each night before I went to bed, I stood in front of the body length mirror in my bedroom, looked myself in the eye, and said my affirmation of choosing out loud.

My morning affirmation:

I thank the food I eat for giving my body nourishment

I am a masterpiece and a work in progress simultaneously

My body will carry me wherever I want to go

I am allowed to take up space

My body radiated beauty and strength

I deserve to feel comfortable and confident

My bedtime affirmation:

Every breath I inhale calms me and every breath I exhale takes away tension

Anxiety is a visitor passing through

Whatever I did today was enough and so am I

I can take things one step at a time

I accept myself and the anxiety

I have everything I need to overcome this challenge; I believe in myself and my abilities

I won’t lie, I regularly struggle with maladaptive thinking and often negative, self-sabotaging thoughts and views of myself. This being said, I found that looking myself in the eye every day and saying something positive and uplifting, out loud in my own voice for myself to hear definitely had an impact on my life. When I began experimenting with this self-care activity, talking to myself out loud felt a little unnatural and uncomfortable, however, after about a week of this I began to feel more at ease with the sound of my own voice.

I found that this self-care activity made helped me to begin feeling more confident in myself and have more of a positive outlook on the future. This self-care method is most definitely something that I am going to be putting in my back pocket to use with future clients as I really feel that it can help with all aspects of the biopsychosocial+ model depends on what a person chooses to say in their daily affirmations.

A few more self-care activities that I have found to be personally effective are:

 Drawing/painting  Breathing exercises (i.e. diaphragmatic breathing, Lion’s Breath breathing, alternate nostril breathing, humming breathing, etc.)

 Reading

 Yoga/stretching

I tried really hard to come up with an original name for my blog but every name I came up with was taken, which I half expected. So, in the end, I decided to name my blog after my Etsy shop; welcome to The Crystal Euphorium!

Here is where I’ll share my healthy(?) obsessions with plants, crystals, vulture culture, entomology, and whatever else my brain decides to attach itself to. I am a 22-year-old mental wellness and addictions student and a part time artist. I will be using this platform as a means of not only sharing the things that I love with the world, but also as a means of advertising my Etsy shop and sharing my unique art style with others that may find it as enjoyable as I do.

To be entirely honest, I found the process of starting to design and put this blog together very frustrating. I tried a number of different platforms before I finally settled on this one, the one that felt the most comfortable. I spent a rather embarrassing number of hours on tumblr during my teenage years, so it appeared the least daunting to me. While during my previous time on tumblr, I was posting more pictures than words, I did become mostly familiar with how the website works, so I felt like this would be the method that would make me pull out the least amount of hair. This being said, I think that for myself, being able to come up with long winded blog posts, rambling about everything and nothing at the same time, rather than simply sharing pictures and quotes, might turn out to be a little bit of struggle for me, I have never been a very good creative writer. I was able to quickly and comfortably type out 150 words, a number in which I would typically feel to be the right amount of words for an easily readable blog post. This being said, I did have a really hard time scraping together the 500 words that I needed to hit the minimum word count for this blog post.