4 Ways to Add Self-Care to Your Routine

Believe it or not, a good sex life can have good health benefits, from reducing stress to improving your circulatory system. On the flip side, a good sex life becomes much easier to attain by incorporating healthy habits and self care into your daily life. Self-care can positively influence various aspects of your life, but it’s not always easy to suddenly work multiple new efforts for wellness into your existing routine. It can feel overwhelming to make changes to improve your overall wellbeing, especially in a post-COVID era, but here is a checklist to start with. Try to focus on one part of this list per week, then one of these each day, and take the approach of building habits exponentially, one small step at a time.

1. Move Your Body

Exercise supports heathy body functioning in plenty of ways, so it would only make sense that it can, unsurprisingly, help with your sex life too. Some of the main findings are the positive influence it has on blood flow and strengthening key body parts such as the pelvic floor. Blood flow is crucial as the more blood you have pumping through your body, the easier it’ll be to get or maintain sexual arousal.

Additionally, although the pelvic floor isn’t often talked about, it plays a significant role in sex. How? Because when your pelvic floor is weak, it can cause sexual dysfunctions, like erectile dysfunction or reduced libido. Some common workouts you can do to improve your pelvic floor and overall health are kegels, squats, and glute bridges. You can even incorporate some of these positions during sex! If you’re up for some light strength training to get started, try our 10-minute sexercise workout designed by our co-founder, Dr. Britney Blair, and San Francisco-based personal trainer Brian Thompson.

2. Indulge a Little

Pamper yourself; you deserve it! Get a haircut or style it yourself, buy yourself something you “want” more than you “need,” have a spa day at an actual spa or at home— whatever feels luxurious and makes you feel better than you did before. Confidence impacts your sex life. When you’re not feeling your best, this can prevent you from being present in the moment with a partner. You want to focus on the moment and enjoy yourself instead of worrying about how you look.

Gaining confidence in yourself doesn’t have to come from a salon or retail therapy, either. Saying nice things to yourself (like affirmations) on a daily basis can help. Even though it’s a small thing, telling yourself things like you are important and you are enough can change your mindset about yourself. Body mapping can also help increase self-esteem as it can help improve your comfortability with showing your partner your body while naked.

3. Prioritize Mental Health

The same way it can be hard to focus on sex when you’re facing self-esteem issues is the same thing that can happen if you’re struggling with your mental health problems like depression or anxiety. These mental health conditions can severely affect your libido by causing a lack of interest or energy to have sex.

This is why taking the proper measures to support good mental health, such as self-care, is vital on many levels. To help your mental well-being, consider looking for an online psychiatrist to help you work through things. Often they’ll recommend a variety of things for you to try— everything from joining support groups to practicing mindfulness in your free time.

4. Take on a Relaxing Hobby

When's the last time you did an activity that was just for the sake of pure fun? What about an activity that doesn't relate to goal-oriented self-improvement, or generating income? If you're not sure, this one's for you. Stress can wreak havoc on your sex life if you let it, causing various libido and performance issues. Picking up a stress-relieving hobby like dancing, painting, photography, or even board games can help you with this.

Relaxing hobbies or activities can serve as an outlet and a way to focus your energy in a meaningful way. That way, when you’re ready to have sex, your mind is clear of stressors. You can also use an activity like dancing as foreplay before having sex, that way you set the mood and kill two birds with one stone. Having sufficient foreplay can help improve some of those performance issues you may have been running into. For some more information on how to combat sexual health difficulties like ED, check here.

For more tips to prioritize your wellbeing and sexual health, start your 7-day free trial and talk to an expert on the Lover app.