113 - 7 Self-Care Routines that are GIVING ME LIFE

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Summary

In this episode, you’re going to get an insight into my recent self-care changes. If you’ve been following along at all on Instagram, you know that I’m in a season where I’m super focused on my self-care and really approaching self-care differently. In this episode, I want to show you 7 self-care routines that have been giving me LIFE and that I have been loving, plus some of the mindset shifts that have come along with those self-care routines!

For show notes, head to⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠coachellyn.com/podcast⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠, and, of course, follow me on ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Instagram ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠OR check out my ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠YouTube Channel⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ for more!

Takeaways

• Implementing phone-free mornings can help create a more intentional and focused start to the day.

• Making the bed and opening the blinds in the morning can contribute to a sense of organization and well-being.

• Morning walks and movement breaks throughout the day can help increase movement and exposure to sunlight.

• Creating a morning mocktail with greens, vitamin D drops, and magnesium can provide hydration and nourishment.

• A morning power hour can be a dedicated time for focused work on important goals.

• A simple bedtime routine, such as reading fiction before bed, can help wind down and promote better sleep.

Sound Bites

"Not making my phone my alarm."

"Making my bed immediately and opening up my blinds."

"Morning walks have been really, really important."

Resources

• Check out the Burnout-Proof Business Bootcamp for help with these things!

• Check out my NEW program Burnout-Proof Business!

Do you have anything to add?
Drop a comment below…

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TRANSCRIPT:

Ellyn Schinke (00:01.73)

Hello my friends and welcome to another kick ass new episode of the Burnout Proof Podcast. I am running a little bit late today with releasing this one this week, not too late, so I'm not super mad at myself. But I apologize if this is usually something you listen to on your commute because we are coming out a little bit late today. But I am still very excited to talk about today's topic because if you've been following me at all on Instagram or anything like that, you know that self care has been a massive.

focus of mine this year. I had an aha earlier this year just about the ways in which I've been taking care of myself, the ways in which I've been approaching self -care. It's been really enlightening and it's been really, really fun to get back to a place where self -care feels good again. It doesn't feel like another box I have to check. It doesn't feel like another thing that's on my plate. I want to share with you a little bit today about seven self -care routines that are giving me life right now.

that have been things that I've been really prioritizing and that have been really making an impact on me. So that is where we're going today. You can still join my Burnout Proof Business program if that is something that you were interested in joining. We had a whole boot camp last week. I hope you were able to plug into it. If you haven't been able to, the information is still in my subscriber hub. You can head to coachellen .com slash challenge, join that.

and get all of that information and all the stuff that we went over because we definitely, it probably felt a little bit like you were drinking from a fire hose last week, but I wanted to give you a picture of where you could go with the sustainable self -care framework and all of the different things that we talked about last week. So definitely get plugged into that. And if you've got any questions about burnout -proof business, feel free to let me know, reach out, DM me on Instagram. I'm at CoachEllen again, E -L -L -Y -N. But with that, let's go ahead and let's dive into.

the seven self -care routines that are giving me life right now. So the first one is phone -free mornings. And I will be completely honest when I say this is a new implementation, hit or miss over the last month, but really, really locked in over the last 10 days. And this is what made a really, really big difference for me when it came to implementing phone -free mornings for me. It really made, the thing that made the difference was,

Ellyn Schinke (02:16.994)

not making my phone my alarm. And now here's the caveat of this. My phone is actually has not been on my alarm for years. Now I have a hatch alarm clock, which I love. It's one of those alarm clocks that does like a morning sunrise kind of thing. And you can program it to have really relaxing sounds play as you fall asleep.

really relaxing sounds play as you wake up in the morning. And I have gotten to the point where I literally can't sleep without like sounds. So it plays sounds entire night, like white noise the entire night to help keep me engaged and or not engaged to help keep me to help keep me asleep for lack of a better way to say it. So I have a hatch restore, but what I also have and you've probably heard me make fun of this notion for a couple of times now. My bedroom is dialed in like.

I don't even know how I sleep when I go to other places. I genuinely struggle to sleep when I go other places because my bedroom is so dialed in. So I have my hatch alarm clock, but I also have an eight sleep. Eight sleep is a, it's basically like a fitted sheet that you put over your mattress, but what it does is it is cooling and heating to help you better temperature regulate when you sleep. Probably the best purchase that I ever got. I bought it about a year ago and I'm paying it off over the course of several years. I basically took the longest payment plan I could without interest.

And the thing with that, I love my eight sleep. I absolutely love it. But the thing that I don't like about the eight sleep is it has alarms that are built into it. It has a temperature alarm and it has a vibrating alarm to help wake you up in the morning. I've been using the alarm that kind of pulse vibrates to in addition to my hatch alarm to wake me up in the morning. And the only way you can turn that alarm off is with your phone. And I finally realized several weeks ago that.

That was the issue for me in the morning. And the reason why I was getting on my phone in the morning and wasting time in the morning was because I had to grab my phone to turn off that vibrating alarm, that eight sleep vibrating alarm. So I frankly recently just decided, screw it. I've been waking up well enough, do with just my hatch. I'm not going to use that alarm anymore. And making that decision has been a game changer for my mornings in terms of me being able to actually do the self care activities I wanna do.

Ellyn Schinke (04:28.002)

not getting distracted by my phone and not immediately opening my phone first thing in the morning to check email or social media or whatever it is the impulse is to do. So my phone now lives over on my desk and I can literally see it right now. It's still on the, it's still on the charging stand right now. It lives over there until I get to the point where I do some of my later routines which we're gonna talk about in just a second. So that is self -care routine number one. It's been phone free mornings and disconnecting every aspect of,

My wake up from my phone has been a game changer with that. The other one for me is making my bed immediately and opening up my blinds. These two usually happen in conjunction, which is why I included them together. This is something that I also feel like has been giving me life because I live in a studio. So I am the kind of person that if I don't have kind of a relatively clean, decluttered area, it really makes me feel like I'm living in chaos.

And a part of that is, since I can see my bed basically at all times during the day, if I can see my bed and I can see my bed that's unmade, it feels like my environment isn't put together. It feels like there's chaos in my environment, which is funny that simply having an unmade bed could feel like chaos, but it does. So relatively quickly after I wake up in the morning, I make my bed just because I want that little corner to look put together. It makes me feel like my day is more organized. It makes me feel more aligned.

to have that one little corner of my apartment be put together. And I do think environment can absolutely contribute to stress and feeling overwhelmed. And so any little thing I find that I can do to help my environment not feel that way is a benefit. So I make my bed, but then what I also do is I open up my blinds. And the reason why I do this is because I know for our circadian rhythms, which is kind of like the normal hormonal and energetic patterns we experience over the course of a day,

our circadian rhythms really, really depend upon sunlight exposure and getting exposed to sun as soon as possible in the morning. Now, I don't necessarily get sunlight exposure as soon as I should, probably every day. I think I've heard that you should get sunlight exposure within 90 minutes of waking up. That's hard for me because I usually am trying to do other things. And, you know, especially in the winter in the Pacific Northwest, it is dark until very late in the morning. So I don't usually get sunlight exposure.

Ellyn Schinke (06:46.978)

within 90 minutes, probably within the first couple hours of the day, but not within 90 minutes. And so something I try to do to at least help with that and support that is to not have my blinds closed. I try to open up all of my blinds so that at least whatever sunlight is outside, I can experience and I can be exposed to. So those two things together kind of help me with how I'm feeling about my environment, but they also help me by opening the blinds to get that sunlight in the morning. The third self -care routine that's been giving me life recently has been morning walks.

If you've been following me on social media, you know that I am in a stage right now where I am just focusing on getting more movement in my life. And what that has looked like and what that's meant is I feel like I've kind of had to hit the reset button with how I approach movement. So I actually have not been to the gym to get like a full -blown weightlifting workout in in a while because my focus has been on walks. My focus has been on getting my butt out of the house, getting that sunlight exposure and getting steps in.

because, and I'm trying to do that over like throughout my day, not just concentrated into any one part of my day. So morning walks have been really, really important for that. They've get me out of the house, which I find I need because I work from home in a studio, getting me out of the house and getting me my sunlight, which doesn't happen all the times of year, but it's been beautiful recently in the PNW. So I'm enjoying it. And it's been helping me get those steps in. Now in the off chance that it is really, really crappy outside because I do live in the Pacific Northwest and it is like that for sure.

What I do is if I don't go for a walk outside, I will either stretch. I might go to my rooftop and do like my journaling out there so I still get that sunlight exposure or I might just go to the gym and walk on the treadmill in the morning. So I have kind of some backup strategies to help still get me that movement in the morning and hopefully get me that sun. In my gym at my apartment building, we have really, really big windows in our gym and I can go ahead and open the blind so I can still get some of that sunlight exposure. So,

This is one that there's a lot of variation to because it really depends upon the weather, the day, how late I wake up. But the goal is a morning walk. And I have about a 30 to 45 minute loop. It depends on how much I meander on my loop. I have a loop that I do every morning that really, really helps me get those steps in. And I love it. So that is routine number four that has been giving me life. And my goal is to get back to the point where I'm doing my bookending my day with movement. So the goal is that I want to either walk or stretch in the morning.

Ellyn Schinke (09:13.122)

walk or stretch in the evening and then work out sometime in the afternoon. But I want to aim for working out like maybe three or four days a week. I'm no longer aiming for like six days a week of working out. I'm not a fitness competitor. I'm not a fitness coach even. I just need to focus on self care as opposed to exercise and working out and weight loss. Hopefully the weight loss will come with that and my body will just feel healthier with doing these things.

but the focus is more just on movement. And that's kind of the goal that I'm working up to, but right now the foundation of that is morning walks. Now, number four is my morning mocktail. I have been doing this, if you've seen this on Instagram, this is something that I started doing a couple of weeks ago. And I got the idea on Gutpersonal. So Gutpersonal is a supplement brand that is very much about helping you with your gut health. And I recently became an affiliate for Gutpersonal, full disclosure.

because I really, really like their products. I previously only used their Miracle Worker, which is a magnesium supplement that I drink before I go to bed. It really helps with regularity and with sleep. I do very much enjoy it. But what I've been doing recently for the morning mocktail is I have been doing greens because I generally know that I probably don't eat enough greens. So I've been doing a greens and then I've been doing vitamin D drops because I definitely don't feel like I get enough vitamin D. I live in the Pacific Northwest.

and we are just emerging from our dark and gloomy time of the year. So I do greens, I do vitamin D drops, and then I do magnesium. And that magnesium up until recently has been like an electrolyte mixture from Element, which contains magnesium. But what I'm gonna start doing probably is I'm gonna start putting that miracle worker into my morning mocktail. And it's really the idea behind it I feel like is to start off my day with hydration, start off my day with getting some good things in my body and start off my day by, you know,

quenching whatever dehydration I might have experienced overnight. That's the magnesium and the electrolyte mixtures do that. Not scientifically based, but what I will say is I feel like it just, it feels good and it feels like I'm putting good things in my body in the morning and it's hydrating. And I just really, really like that. That's been a simple one that I've been really, really enjoying as well. So that's kind of my, the self -care waking up parts of my routine.

Ellyn Schinke (11:31.746)

The next part of my routine, and I wouldn't necessarily call this a, it might not be conventionally what you would think of as a self -care routine, but it is an aspect of my routine that I do feel has been really, really helping me in terms of just kind of how fulfilled I feel, how on track I feel with my overwhelm. So in a lot of ways, I feel like this is a self -care routine because I feel like in the grand scheme of things, it really, really does make me feel like I'm taking care of myself. And that is my morning power hour.

This is something I've also been doing several weeks at this point in time and it's not perfect. I do not do it every single day. But the idea behind this is it gives me an hour of concentrated focus work to knock out the things that are the most important to moving the needle on my goals. If you are a high achiever, I do truly believe that one of the biggest things all of us as high achievers need to do and need to prioritize, especially when it comes to our habits, is we need to make sure we are constantly moving the needle on the things that are important to us, on our goals. And if we don't, that is when we start to feel unfulfilled.

And that is how I've been doing is with this morning power hour. So what I did recently is I looked at my, you know, I have an hour every morning and I looked at my goals for this quarter and I broke out that power hour to include things that would help move me and drive me toward that goal. So like, for example, one of the things that is one of my goals is to get my financial shit together this month. And so I have been really pivoting my morning to spend at least a little bit of time.

where I am checking in on my finances and I am plugging in recent expenditures and income into my tracker. So that is something that I've been doing in my power hours. I've also been doing podcast pitching because I want to get myself out there more and get more people exposed to my message and I wanna do that by getting on more podcasts. So that's something I've been doing on my power hour. So this is more business focused but what I really feel like it does in the grand scheme of things is I feel like it...

makes me as a high achiever feel like I am moving the needle on my goals. That is super, super important to me. The next self -care routine that has been giving me life is a mid afternoon movement break. This varies very much depending upon the day and in terms of when it happens. It might happen at two one day, it might happen at four another day, but sometime in the afternoon I am getting in a little movement break and it is not a big movement break by any stretch. Eventually I want to work up to this being the time when I work out.

Ellyn Schinke (13:51.49)

is in that mid afternoon movement break. But for now, what it's really been looked like is, you know, maybe while I make some food, I listen to a playlist and I like dance around my apartment, or it might include a short walk or a stretch. It is a little pause button in the course of my day for movement. And that is, you know, simply all that it is. It is really something I try to not make very complicated. I have a tendency to complicate things when it comes to.

when it comes to how I approach self care and whatnot. So I've been really, really intentionally trying not to over complicate this one. It's really, what do I have time for? What feels good? What feels like what I need on this day? And I try to create that little pause button in my day to give myself that. That's it. That is really what it boils down to.

So that is a, and at the mindset shift, I feel like a lot of us need to make when it comes to movement. Let's uncomplicate it, let's make it simpler. And that's kind of what my mid -afternoon movement breaks have become. And then routine number seven, as you might expect, since we've been kind of chronologically covering the day, routine number seven is my bedtime routine. And what this has really constituted, again, I'm not an over -complicated person anymore when it comes to routines. I think that's something that I had to call BS on myself for.

over the years is I used to be. I was very much an overcomplicate your routine, kind of human. My morning routines have gotten simpler, but my bedtime routine in particular has gotten simpler. I brush my teeth, I take out my contacts. I don't have an overcomplicated like face routine. I wash my face. I put on this serum that I've got from ClearStem, which is another place I'm affiliated with. I really, really like their products. I put on a serum from them. I let the serum soak in. I put on a moisturizer.

And then I crawl into bed and I read fiction before I go to bed. I've been working my way through the Harry Potter series, Slowly But Surely. Occasionally I take a break from Harry Potter and I read other fiction, but fiction is a way that I've started to wind down at the end of the day. And, you know, it depends on the day, but I do tend to go to bed between 10 to 10 .30. Last night, I literally crawled in bed at, I think, 9 .15 and I read for like 45 minutes before I went to bed. So I've been really, really enjoying this.

Ellyn Schinke (16:05.346)

routine because I think it's like everything, like everything I'm trying to do, it's training me to wind down. It's training me to not have my brain be so wired all the way up until I go to bed, to not be working all the way up until I go to bed. It's been really, really training me of how well I can rest and how good I feel in the morning when I do stuff like this. So these are my seven self -care routines that have been giving me life. I would love to know which routine do you feel like?

you would benefit from implementing. Which routines are you implementing? Do you have routines of your own? I would love to hear, go ahead and head on over to Instagram and DM me. And if you're listening to this going, wow, I like these, but I struggle with this. I struggle with consistent self -care. Again, a lot of these things I am imperfect at right now. Like this podcast, I am still becoming burnout proof. It is not something that has been established as of now.

Probably the only time it will be, and that's honestly a TBD in and of itself, is once I am no longer working a second job. I'm just focusing on my business. It is a process. There is progress to be made and progress to be had. And maybe the thing that you need to take from this isn't, oh my God, I need to get my shit together and get my routines going. Maybe the takeaway that you needed from this is that mindset shift of realizing, hmm, maybe I do need more slowdowns. Maybe I do need, you know,

to simplify my routines. Maybe that is what's not working for me. Maybe that was the mindset shift that you needed. And if it was, again, reach out to me, take a screenshot, tag me on Instagram, shoot me a DM. Again, I'm at Coach Ellen, E -L -L -Y -N. I would love to hear from you. I'd love to know what resonated with you. And with that, my friend, I will talk to you next time. Bye.