It is during times of struggle and difficulty that we absolutely must endeavour to tighten our commitment to ourselves and bring more attention to our need for self care. The urge to soldier on in the face of adversity or crisis is generally so strong that we will happily place our needs on the back burner and forge forward, often at the peril of our own wellness and sanity. It is a weakness that I too am guilty of, but when push comes to shove, we really aren't doing ourselves or anyone else any favours when we ignore the signals that our bodies are sending us for better self care by continually placing ourselves last. 
By learning about the different forms of self care, we can better arm ourselves with an ability to recognise when we are moving into personal crisis or neglect, and how to fill the voids in our self care routines when they do occur. 
A terrific article from tulipandsage.com categorizes self care into six main types: 
1. Physical Self Care
This is an awareness of your physical body and what it needs to thrive. Exercise, rest and clean food. It does not need to be vigorous or intense to be effective, aim for consistent and enjoyable long term activities, healthy diet choices and adequate sleep to improve your physical self care.
2. Emotional Self Care
Become mindful of your emotions, listen to your feelings and recognizing patterns, triggers or obstacles to your ability to remain calm, focused and happy. Writing in a journal, being artistic, dancing or being creative are just some ways that you can express and develop your emotional awareness and self care. 
3. Spiritual Self Care
This doesn't need to be religious or rigid to be meaningful. Anything that brings you closer to the essence of yourself is nourishing your spiritual self care. It could be doing charity work, being more mindful, taking up meditation, walking in nature; there are lots of ways to strive for more inner awareness. 
4. Intellectual Self Care
We all need new challenges to invigorate and nourish us mentally. Anything that will expand your knowledge and awareness falls into this category, from reading a book or watching a documentary to taking up a class or learning a new language, you'll be expanding yourself and meeting your intellectual needs. 
5. Social Self Care
Whether you're an introvert or an extrovert, people need people. You do need to spend time with other people and have meaningful connections with loved ones, so make plans to get together with people that you enjoy spending time with. Catching up, going out for dinner, meeting for coffee or going to the movies is not only an escape from the norm, it's social self care and it's important to your wellbeing. 
6. Sensory Self Care
Nourish your senses and send healing stimuli to your brain, sensory care is so deeply fulfilling. Through sight, smell, touch, sound and taste you can reinvigorate yourself. Listen to some soothing music, light a scented candle, eat a delicious meal, get a massage, go for a barefoot walk in the park and please don't forget to always stop and smell the roses!

All forms of self care are equally as important as each other and you should endeavour to not neglect your needs in any area. Listen to your body, listen to your soul, listen to your heart...it may sound corny but you are actually sending yourself small but not insignificant messages about your needs all of the time and you just need to be quiet enough to hear them. Self care matters because you matter, and it is neither selfish nor self indulgent to take care of yourself, so listen carefully to your self care needs and learn how to be kinder to yourself. 

You can take every precaution in the world, but no matter how well planned or prepared you may think you are, a head cold or some new strain of the flu will eventually track you down and smack you to the ground like a bad playground bully. Turns out that my health scare was just the flu, I say 'just the flu' very flippantly, but the alternative to that was far worse, so I am sticking to 'just the flu.' 
Of course, 'just the flu' has come with a plethora of discomfort and side effects that have today forced me to hide away from the world, not just for my benefit but also for everyone else's as well. Body aches, headaches, chest pains, severe joint pain, nausea, dizziness, a persistent dry hacking cough and the all so lovely night sweats have all made an appearance over the past five days and I have been left feeling drained, impatient, over-tired and frayed around the edges in ways that I have not felt for a very long time, and do not wish to feel again in a very long time. 
It is always the last couple of weeks of the Winter school term that really brings the 'shove over' for me every year. In fact, according to my journal entries, every year for the last 8 years in  a row I have had some kind of head cold or flu in the month of June. Thankfully, none of them have required anything more than a couple of days of rest, but still it would appear that 'tis the season for me to feel gross, wear out and generally feel like a slice of shit toast every year. 
In light of that, perhaps in the future June would be a fortuitous time for me to take a trip each year to Bahamas in order to escape the dark recesses of Winter and the dreaded lurgy that hunts me down and pounces on me at the same time every year. However, I doubt that my employer would share my enthusiasm for an annual winter retreat, so that idea will probably need to wait until I am retired. 
I swear that bears have the right idea when it comes to seasonal self adjustment though. Gorge yourself stupid on all of the deliciousness of an Autumnal harvest, find a comfy place to hide and sleep out the dead of Winter and then pop back into the world when the Spring blooms are just peaking their heads out of the soil. Sounds terrific to me!
I have always found the human need to maintain the status quo during the winter months both ridiculous and counter productive, because let's be honest we all need more rest in the winter time. It's darker, colder and completely uninviting outdoors most of the time. You just want to eat way too much comfort food for your trousers to manage! And getting out of bed in the mornings is often an impossible and monumentally unpleasant task. The writing is on the wall isn't it really? Let's make the months of June, July and August four day working weeks. Everyone gets an extra day off a week to be like a bear and roll about in bed, binge on Netflix and eat stoggy goodies! Hooray, Winter woes solved! Everyone gets more rest time, less cold exposure and a day to play every week. I think that I would actually look forward to Winter a lot more if that was going to happen every year.
And I honestly believe that my brilliant idea would mean that less people would get really sick as well. I mean you would have less exposure to other people and therefore less exposure to other people's germs, you would also be more rested and better fed therefore making you generally more resilient as well and you would be feeling a lot more job satisfaction because the work to life ratio would be more agreeable. We really do need to take a leaf out of the books of the hibernating and migrating creatures of the world because the animals clearly have their shit sorted out a lot better than we do. I'm pretty sure bears don't have to ring in sick or contend with hacking coughs all night during the winter do they? 

It always takes something serious to happen to your health to jump start you into action. Nothing like a surprise health scare to really force an unwelcome re-evaluation of your current physical status. Only days ago I was wandering about in blissful oblivion of my own physical shortcomings, and now I am suddenly reflecting with a terrifying and hyper critical eye about how I have really 'let myself go' and how I have probably rained all of this down on myself anyway.
I find that whenever something goes wrong with me physically I immediately thrust myself into this ridiculously harsh and deeply damning zone that forces me to take hard, cold stock of my physical make-up and my body flaws. It is not a friendly or self loving place to be, trust me, it's horrible.
Suddenly, I start to see every minor physical imperfection as a glaringly horrible obstacle that stands before my ability to thrive.  I begin to rapidly hate the failings of my body as I scrutinize every inch of my aging physique and every major health choice that I have made in the past, desperately searching for a logical reason for my body to fail me. I eat well, I take care of myself, I have a fulfilling lifestyle, I get adequate rest, I exercise...why is this happening to me? 
But the truth is, that sometimes bodies just fail. Even really healthy, sexy, slim and young ones fail, and it has nothing to do with years of abuse or sabotage, sometimes it is just the genetic hand that we are dealt that determines how things will play out and there is little or nothing that we can do about it. 
As you get older, you do start to notice that things on your body don't...how can I put this? Operate as well as they used to. Things start to head south rapidly and you find that you have new aches and pains that you never used to have. Weird ones, ones that just appear like unwanted hair in the wrong places or liver spots on the backs of your hands, but more annoying and sometimes more alarming than that. I personally find these annoying new arrivals extremely hard to analyse, because it is so damn difficult to decide if I should worry about them and consider any of them serious, or if I should just ignore them as normal signs of aging. No-one tells you, so you don't know for sure. And at my age, you still feel way too young to have any serious health complications so you generally dismiss all of the unwelcomed weird stuff as nothing, but this may not always be the wisest thing to do. 
Ignoring any health complications, no matter how small they may seem, is definitely not a smart thing to do. And having those honest and scrutinizing assessments with yourself, although uncomfortable, are also at times completely necessary. I wish that I was bulletproof, but I am not, I am human, which sometimes makes me fallible and fragile and susceptible to illness and disease. And as much as I really don't like going to see the GP, I think that a professionals opinion may be important for me right now.
There really is nothing like a health scare to boot your thinking back to those things that you hold in the highest esteem in your life, and how much you would hate to jeopardise your chances of making the most of your time. It is unfortunate that we as humans aren't made a little more resilient than we are, but perhaps it is our fragility that make us all the more precious and special, and also so utterly worth fighting to preserve.  

Spicywatch.com has just turned 5, hip hip hooray Spicywatch! Apart from my family and friends, I don't think that I have poured this much of my spare time and energy consistently into anything before, and for as long as I can remember, I don't feel like I have loved or enjoyed pouring my spare time into anything as much as I have loved sharing Spicywatch with all of you wonderful readers. 
Watching and reviewing movies is not just a hobby for me anymore, it is an important part of my life now. For five years I have shared my thoughts, my opinions and my passion for cinema with you all, and so far I have managed to review 790 movies that I honestly believe are worthy of your time and effort to view. I look forward to one day having 1,000 movies on my Spicywatch genre lists that are worthy of your time, but it will take me quite a few more years to get that far. 
Last nights celebrations were focused on the Best Music Moments in Cinema, which is a broad topic, but extremely fun one to investigate. Musicals were most welcome, but not mandatory, and as it turned out, there are actually a huge number of movies that have very significant and memorable music scenes in them that are actually completely non-musical movies. 
My wonderful and supportive friends and family gathered in Enfield to share a drink and their cinematic loves with me; and we laughed, sang and got our groove on to some of the most unexpected (but mostly excellent) musical moments that we could find.
And here is the extensive list of best music moments in cinema (from every genre) as chosen by my nearest and dearest, that made it to the Spicywatch 5th Birthday celebration screening in my living room last night:
Baby Driver (Bellbottoms) 
Pulp Fiction (You Never Can Tell) 
Beetlejuice (Banana Boat Song) 
The Skeleton Twins (Nothings Gonna Stop Us Now) 
Ferris Bueller's Day Off (Twist and Shout) 
Coraline (Garden Scene composed by Peter Corrigan) 
Pretty in Pink (If You Leave) 
The Perks of Being  a Wallflower (Heroes) 
Napoleon Dynamite (Canned Heat) 
Little Miss Sunshine (Super Freak)
Straight Outta Compton (Boyz N Da Hood) 
The Blues Brothers (Shake Your Tail Feather) 
Two Hands (These Days) 
American Psycho (Hip to be Square) 
The Lion King (Circle of Life) 
The Secret Life of Walter Mitty (Space Oddity) 
The Hunt for the Wilderpeople (Ricky's Birthday Song) 
Guardians of the Galaxy (Mr Blue Sky) 
Moulin Rouge (Come What May) 
Mean Girls (Jingle Bell Rock) 
Trainspotting (Lust for Life) 
Sound of Music (Edelweiss) 
Reservoir Dogs (Stuck in the Middle) 
O Brother Where Art Thou? (I Am a Man of Constant Sorrow)
Risky Business (Old Time Rock and Roll) 
Easy A (A Pocketful of Sunshine) 
The Mask (Cuban Pete)
Nacho Libre (Encarnacion) 
Hedwig and the Angry Inch (Origins of Love) 
The Big Lebowski (Just Dropped In) 
Pitch Perfect (Riff off) 
Purple Rain (Title Track) 
Love Actually (Jump) 
Bridesmaids (Hold on) 
Little Fish (Flame Trees) 
Slumdog Millionaire (Jai Ho)
Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (Anything Goes) 
Singing in the Rain (Title track)
And one of my all time favourites: Mulholland Drive (Llorando/ Crying) 

Every year I change my personal boundaries. That probably sounds super sloppy, but it really isn't, it is the exact opposite of sloppy if the truth be told. My boundaries alter because I take the time to assess where I have placed them in the past and why I even placed them to begin with. And I do this regularly.
As I get older, the line between what I will and what I will not tolerate or lose sleep over has altered quite substantially, so it's always wise to have a revisit and reassess to make sure that I am being true to myself, my life goals and my enjoyment levels. 
Most of the boundaries that I have created for myself over the last few years look nothing like the ones that I had for myself in my twenties and thirties. I used to set a lot of boundaries around what I would allow myself to do or what I expected of others, but now I set my boundaries purely around my tolerance, my ability to self love and my general peace of mind.
What does that mean exactly? Well, here is a list of what I think good boundaries look like. Adopting these kinds of personal boundaries is a really liberating thing to do for yourself, and I have found that I have become a lot more peaceful and accepting as I have learnt to incorporate them into my daily life. 

1. It's not my job to fix others.
Let other people do them, and you just do you. 
2. It's okay for other people to get angry with me. 
Anger is fine and normal and also fleeting, there is no need to get hung up on it. 
3. Sometimes no is the best answer. 
Odds are people won't want to hear it, but that doesn't make it wrong. Setting limits for yourself is wise. 
4. It's not my job to be responsible for others.
Let people own their own shit, you have no power to control others so don't bother. 
5. I am responsible for my own happiness.
My happiness is my job, not anyone else's. To make it anyone else's is selfish and stupid. 
6. It's okay if we don't agree.
Agree to disagree. Fighting over anything gets no-one anywhere. 
7. I have the right to my feelings.
Everyone has the right to get angry, upset and annoyed, and that's okay. 
8. I can put me first.
It is not selfish or mean to put yourself first sometimes.
9. I can let go.
Don't dwell on bad things or hold resentments because it feels like shit. 
10. I am enough.
You don't need to change who you are to please others. You're all good! 

So, there they are, a healthy 10 commandments of boundaries to set your dial to. I guarantee that if you set yourself better personal boundaries based on your genuine emotional needs then you will definitely worry  a lot less and enjoy your life a lot more, and that's gotta be better for your stress levels in the long run!

Every woman knows that when you become a mother you have to relinquish some of your...how can I put this....firmness? I know that with each child that I had things on my body got more saggy, a lot more stripy (stretch marks - the untold horror of pregnancy) and generally a lot softer and plumper. I put on around 5 kilos with each of my children that I have never been able to lose and I have a caesarean scar from my second pregnancy that an Ob Gyn once called 'distressingly large' and even encouraged me to sue for malpractice over, so yeah I have sacrificed some of my youthful suppleness and beauty for my children. And I suppose that I always knew that there would be physical sacrifices that came with being pregnant, that much I was ready for. 
What I wasn't as prepared for was something that seems to happen to women around 45 years of age when they just suddenly become completely invisible to everyone. I am not even kidding, this shit really does happen and unless you look like Michelle Pfeiffer or some other waif like middle aged hottness, then odds are that it will happen to you too. You literally become unseen by everyone, not just men, everyone. Women, children and men will no longer see you unless you instigate the exchange and even then their interest will wane much faster than it did when you were young. 
Thankfully, this is not just a phenomenon that I alone have experienced but in recent polls 43% of women around 45 years of age claim to experience the same effect, a feeling of being invisible. So even though women are generally looking fitter and more youthful in their 40's and 50's than they ever have before in history, they are still falling victim to the dreaded 'ghost' effect that occurs around 45.
Well, it turns out that there is some research being done around this very topic, and there does appear to be contributing factors to these feelings of invisibility that women seem to experience. An analysis was completed that looked at 414 popular scripted movies and TV shows that aired during one year (from September 2014 to August 2015). From that data it was found that men made up 80% of the characters over 40, leaving only 20% to females, and many of those women were significantly older than 40. It was also noted that nearly all of the love interest female parts were filled by women in their 20's (often partnered up with men in their 40's) and that the women over 40 that were cast usually got roles as hags, shrews, witches, nags, struggling mothers or grandmothers.
This form of media profiling certainly appears to be part of the problem and not part of a solution, and by only casting twenty somethings or insanely hot thirty somethings in romantic roles, the media is stereotyping what it means to be sexy or physically viable, but it even goes much further than that. When women were asked about attractiveness, over 80% of them said that youth was akin to attractiveness and that they knew that once they were over 40 years old that men would not find them as interesting! How grim is that?  And even worse are the findings that women also admitted that they do not pay as much attention to or go out of their way for women over 40 unless they are seeking advise or selling them a product, which basically means that young women see me as either a counselor or a big misshapen money sack, any bloody wonders I feel like I am invisible! 
This dreadful feeling of invisibility is also why millions of women are now turning to surgery in an attempt to turn back the clocks and be seen again, which is just so sad when you really think about it.  In fact, now that I really think about it, I actually think that it just depends on who you are spending your time with when it comes to being seen. Women around my own age never make we feel invisible and men that are 10-15 years older than me seem pretty damn keen for a chat, so I suppose that it just depends where you are looking for that attention.
​A 40 something women is never going to stand out in a nightclub full of skimpy-dressed hotties and that kind of invisible is fine with me anyway. Who knows? Perhaps being invisible to young people and middle aged men is a really a super-power and something to be enjoyed, maybe being unseen to leary eyes or unwanted attentions is a blessing. I mean I am not looking for wolf whistles or uninspired conversations with twenty somethings anyway, so I probably shouldn't be complaining. Being unseen and generally unthreatening can certainly be used to one's advantage. Everyone knows that you can get away with almost anything if no-one is ever actually looking at you, and maybe that is not such a bad thing at all!