Have Healthy Trauma Informed Care Routines for Sleeping, Eating, and Work
Creating healthy habits will help you to be more productive and focused. Now, this is easier said than done when you are dealing with cPTSD, which makes it even more important that you install these routines.
Let’s start:
Have your meals at regular times and make sure to eat a sufficient portion. Make the effort to prepare at least two, preferably three meals a day. Preparing meals will keep you away from snacking out of stress/comfort, will force you to eat healthier, and will keep your blood sugar—and hence your stress levels—more regulated.
Eat your meals at a table as opposed to on the sofa or in the kitchen.
Making food and consuming food is one of the simplest ways to ingrain the habit of taking better care of yourself, so it is crucial to give it time and attention and to not minimize the importance of it. Preparing food and eating at a table reinforces the importance of self-care.
The Importance of Regular Sleep Routines
Go to bed and get up at regular times.
Regular sleep habits help set your circadian rhythms, and can positively affect your hormonal system.
Again, sleep isn’t an easy one for many who are dealing with post-Traumatic Stress; nevertheless, it is of prime importance for self-care. Sleeping at night rather than during the day will help sync your biorhythms with the earth’s rhythms, which in turn will help you to stabilize and feel more energized.
+ Do You Want to Improve Your Sleep Related cPTSD – Learn More Here
Food and sleep are the basics, and they are likely to be messed up for you already due to hypo and hyperactivation of your mind and nervous system. Persistence wins the game though. Making small improvements towards creating healthy habits is key.
Next up are activity habits. Depressions, stagnation, chronic pain and wanting to move your energy into some form of addiction—be it your mobile, chocolate, joint or whatever—will keep you where you are.
Trauma Informed Care: Start With the Little Things!
If you spend time at home, dress up. Don’t stay in your comfies or pyjamas the whole day. (I cringe seeing people in their pyjamas on the street). I don’t mean that you should dress up as if you were going out to work or on a date, but that you need to put regular clothes on. This exercise is about changing your mindset. Dressing up more decently will assist in the “make a change” mindset and move you out of a stagnant state. Pyjamas reinforce the couch potato in you and blur the line between sleeping and waking hours.
Next up is to do little things to create small victories. Make your bed, clean your kitchen, your room, and your house every day. Start small and see what you can do, then ramp up. Sounds like I am doing a Jordan Peterson here, but the whole exercise is about making small, consistent and constructive changes that will become regular habits. Don’t do everything on one day and then nothing another day (or week). Start small, persist until each task has become habit, then add things to the mix until the routine becomes the norm.
Many of us come from dysfunctional families where the small things aren’t taught.
These habits above are achievable habits, and will create a constructive mindset. That constructive mindset will help you to address and persist in working through the emotional residue that makes up your Post-Traumatic Stress.
You need foundation and trauma informed care!
Exercise! Yes, No Excuses!
Movement is life. There is addiction in feeling shut down and depressed. That state draws you in and makes you wallow in it, even when another part of you hates it.
Movement pushes you out of self-pity. To stay depressed, you have to stay stagnant. Movement can assist in managing states of hypo and hyper activation and—in part—can help to digest excess emotion.
If movement is a challenge, start with ten minutes of walking a day. Then, slowly build it up to a minimum of thirty minutes a day, with an ideal end-goal of forty-five minutes of active moderate movement a day, minimum.
Getting in shape physically helps you to get in shape mentally/emotionally. One rubs off on the other. Choose an activity that is enjoyable for you. If you can tolerate people, do activity in a group so you have some sort of accountability.
To Conclude: Resolving cPTSD & Trauma Informed Care
All of the above suggestions are common sense suggestions for trauma informed care—nothing out of the ordinary, but their importance needs to be stressed.
When you overwhelmed by Post-Traumatic Stress, you will have to rebuild yourself again from the ground up. You will have to start with the basics over and over again in order to create a solid foundation.
That foundation can be your lifesaver, as it will hold you up when you fall back on it each time you are triggered or activated.
Start small, then build on each step; each step is a small victory.
To your recovery,
Roland