Forget the champagne bubble baths and gold-leaf facials. A new not-for-profit organization challenges you to adopt self-care habits that are simple, affordable, and sustainable for the long haul.
Before the COVID-19 pandemic arrived in 2020, friends Eddy Lecky and Matthew Chapman had been on parallel journeys to improve their physical and emotional wellbeing through self-care. But when the Greater Toronto Area (which they call home) went into lockdown, the two got to talking about what they could do to keep self-care going even as gyms and other resources shut down. They wagered that self-care was going to be more important than ever during this challenging time.
Lecky and Chapman focused on brainstorming strategies for self-care that would be sustainable: easy to integrate into daily (lockdown) life and maintain over time. “People relate self-care to pictures of having a glass of champagne in a bubble bath,” says Lecky. “But you can’t do that every day.”
The “self-care challenges” that they came up with became the centerpiece of the Sustainable Self-Care Initiative (SSCI), a not-for-profit organization they launched last June with a small team of friends and colleagues. Their mission? To promote individual and collective wellbeing by making self-care more sustainable, more often.
“We want to distill [self-care] down to the very basics and make it very easy for anyone to … say yes to it,” says Lecky, who serves as SSCI’s CEO…