20 Self Care Tips For Entrepreneurs

Marequitta D. - Author

Marequitta has over 8 years of prior writing experience plus 6 years of customer service experience. She's successfully worked with many companies of all sizes.

Entrepreneurs who run their own ventures, due to their strong drive for success, almost always prioritize hard work over their own well-being. However, you can find a middle ground where you can manage and grow your business and also focus on your health & wellness. Are you looking for tips on how to care for yourself despite your busy schedule?

You’ve come to the right place.

You can take control back of your life even if you have a busy schedule and all you have to do is to implement effective time management. From simply sleeping more to managing your social interactions that sometimes take up too much of your precious time. All it takes is a little discipline and you will get the best life-work balance you never knew was possible.

What is Self-Care?

Self-care is a traditional term commonly used in health care which means actions a person can take to maintain good overall health, disease prevention, and manage long-term illnesses. It addresses both your physical needs (i.e. sleep, food, and water) as well as your emotional needs like interacting with other people to create a balanced social life.

When psychiatrists collectively discovered a pattern among ordinary employees, office executives, CEOs, and entrepreneurs that their health problems are directly connected to their work-related stress, self-care was coined. Corporate folks were advised to care more for themselves than just focus all their energy on work and making money.

Pampering one’s self by giving yourself more “me time,” traveling to freshen up your mind and meditation were highly recommended activities, while not neglecting your emotional needs and relationships is also another crucial aspect of self-care.

Below are 20 self-care tips for entrepreneurs.

1. Eat Healthily

Entrepreneurs are known to be notorious for putting all their efforts towards achieving their goals, having said that, they work so hard to the point where they neglect having a healthy diet, or worse – eat less than what is needed for the human body’s daily nutrient intake.

I highly recommend that you try the Mediterranean diet, as it’s affordable, the ingredients are widely available and the meals are easy to prepare. You don’t have to prepare the food yourself in case you’re too busy, you can go to any restaurant that serves Mediterranean food and get your healthy diet from them!

2. Stay Hydrated

Drink 8 glasses of water every day (you can drink more if you want). Spread them throughout the 24-hour period and drink Gatorade or eat fruits high in electrolytes as well, to stay hydrated all day, especially if there’s a heat wave going on.

3. Exercise During The Day

Getting enough sunlight in the morning between 6 am – 10 am will cause your skin to create vitamin D, which help the body absorb and retain calcium and phosphorus; both are critical for building bone. Another benefit is that exercise triggers your body to release endorphins – a naturally occurring hormone that makes you feel happy.

4. Practise Mindfulness

It has been known that mindfulness meditation helps remove stress and anxiety from your mind, so learn all about it and start making it a part of your busy daily routine.

5. Be Assertive

Bottling up your feelings can only have a negative impact on your mental health, psychiatrists say that it is good to release those feelings and be assertive every once in a while. You may think this is one of those odd self-care tips for entrepreneurs, but you will thank me later.

6. Reduce Your Stress

There have been reported cases where people suffering from stress developed pneumonia and had a mental breakdown, so based on this it’s not really healthy to keep stressing yourself over work, even if it helps boost your business profits. There are dozens of ways to cope with stress and a lot of them are surprisingly easy to do, plus they don’t take up too much time or effort to do. You can still have enough time to work on your business and keep those profits coming.

7. Learn to Relax ("Me Time")

I may not be a psychiatrist but I think stress comes from overthinking and anxiety and it’s only natural for entrepreneurs to think about their businesses endlessly. So what you must do as an entrepreneur is to find time for yourself to relax, watch a movie, read a book, go camping or pick up a hobby. These things are known as good stress relievers.

8. Know When to Say "No"

You only have 24 hours per day just like all of us do and you can only divide that time among things you prioritize in your life. Being the person who leads and manages your business essentially makes you a busy person, but if you don’t learn how to say “No,” you risk losing time for important matters and time for yourself. Say no to invitations that you think will not benefit you.

9. Accept (And Fix) Mistakes

People who are in leadership roles always have full responsibility not only for themselves but for their subordinates as well. If you blame others (I’m not saying that your subordinates did not contribute to your failure as a team), then you’re showing a sign of weakness as a leader.

Keep in mind that your team depends on your leadership, so if anything, their mistakes came from your plans and strategies which clearly did not work out like they were supposed to. So accept responsibility for your mistakes, move on, and improve yourself.

10. Delegate And Outsource

Let’s say that your team only has 10 people plus you the CEO. You know that there’s only so much your team can do, so if you’ve bitten more than what you can chew - delegate other projects and outsource them.

Attempting to do all the projects or contracts you’ve been awarded will only result in delays, poor quality of products or services, and ultimately your failure as a company. Just make sure that you get 60% of the income and 100% of the quality of service that the company you outsourced your clients to and you’ll see that you still win in the end. Wondering just how beneficial it is? Read here.

11. Prepare For The Day

There are many self-care tips for entrepreneurs on this list, but this is definitely my personal favorite! That’s because I do it myself and I have personally witnessed its effectiveness in accomplishing goals. So wake up early, have a morning routine, and plan a strategy for the day before you engage in your work.

12. Take Daily Breaks

If you’ve ever heard the phrase “walk it off,” then even if you’re not a health expert, you know, that this means to clear your head of “stuff.” This is because thinking too much can lead to stress and if you take a couple of brisk 15-minute walks throughout the course of your workday, you will create a better state of mind and have great mental health overall.

13. Develop Your Support Network

Include family and friends in this support network to help guide you in making decisions in life, especially when it comes to work-life balance. Adding your most trusted colleagues will help too but just make sure that they will support you on a personal level, your marriage (if you’re married), your wife and kids (if you already have a family), and other important details of your life. Your support network is a group of people with who you are comfortable talking about your daily life struggles, so you won’t feel alone in the world.

14. Develop Your Support Network

Who doesn’t, right? I tell you, if I had a job that lets me go on vacation 24/7, I wouldn’t hesitate for 1 second to sign up for it! Going on vacations will help put your mind at ease, so schedule at least one trip somewhere that you think you will enjoy like Thailand or the Philippines.

15. Plan Your Day (Work Smarter)

Plan your day out in advance. Schedule time for work and time for your personal life including family and friends. Ninety percent of entrepreneurs said that the reason for their messed up lifestyle is not managing their daily schedule.

16. Use Tools to Alleviate Stress

Google’s G-Suite is already a great business tool that saves you a lot of time when doing business making everything streamlined and efficient. But there are also tools that help you manage your team, finances, tasks assignment, milestones, and other things that are crucial in running a business. The better the tools you use, the more time you save and the less stressful your life will become.

17. Take Business Calls During Work Hours Only

The reason why it’s called work-life balance is that you don’t overlap the two. Accepting business calls while you’re supposed to spend time with your family will create tension and resentment, and you don’t want that. Trust me when I tell you, it’s not worth all the money in the world. Set aside time for work and set aside time for your personal life as it should be.

18. Get Enough Sleep

Lack of sleep has a lot of negative impacts on a person’s health according to recent studies. Among them include the shrinking of brain size, which may not only cause you to reduce your intelligence (very important when running a business) but may also lead to dementia or Alzheimer’s disease. Another health risk it causes is erectile dysfunction and I think I don’t need to elaborate on this. Get at least 6 hours of sleep per night, although 8 hours is much better.

19. Seek Human Interaction

We, humans, are created to have social interactions. In fact, NASA once conducted an experiment where the volunteers were subjected to solitary living inside a capsule for at least 30 days and the results were not very nice. The experiment was conducted with the aim of finding out how people will survive mostly alone in space for an extended period of time. The data showed that the test subjects developed stress, anxiety, depression and even bordering psychotic disorder. Do not alienate yourself for money. It just isn’t going to help.

20. Create a Workspace You Love

There’s a saying that goes, “Choose the job you love and you never have to work a day in your life.” Of course, the kind of business you decided to run is exactly the job that you love, so unless what you’re doing is not making you happy, then you need to change what you’re doing. Loving what you do aligns all your goals with the success of your business, so extend that enthusiasm to your team, in order for them to see the value of their contribution to building your business.