July 24 is International Self-Care Day, and the Crisis Text Line has tips for free mental wellness
Self-care is a major buzzword for 2019, but there’s a sentiment that taking time for your mental health is too indulgent or expensive for the average person. While yes, massages and retail therapy require a good amount of cash, there are plenty of totally free ways to reduce stress.
That’s the message that the Crisis Text Line wants to send on July 24, International Self-Care Day. To mark the occasion, Crisis Text Line is encouraging people to take time for themselves, and sharing the tips that they give their texters every day.
Maggie Farrah, a former crisis counselor who now works in business development for the organization, came up with the idea to create an online resource with all of the counselor’s best ideas for inexpensive self-care.
“As crisis counselors, our goal is to help texters go from a hot moment to a cool calm, and a lot of what we’re talking about with the texters who are in crisis is a message of self-care, and things that make them feel safe and calm. That’s part of our training and our approach to handling conversations,” Farrah tells PEOPLE. “We found that we were teaching our texters that, and we wanted to teach the general public that as well.”
Farrah says that self-care shouldn’t been seen as unreachable.
“Self-care is something that we talk about every day when we’re volunteering, and we know on our end that it’s really important for mental health — it builds confidence, it’s a stress reliever, it lays a foundation for wellness — but we’ve found that some people have this idea that self-care is inaccessible,” she says. “That it’s fancy activities that are too expensive for most people. But it’s really something that we can all incorporate into our lives. You don’t need a ton of money to practice self-care and work on your mental health.”
From Julie Mazziotta, People
