The Fall Self-Care Challenge: 30 Ways to Be More Present This Season

There’s something about fall that makes me want to slow everything down. Maybe it’s the cooler mornings, the earlier sunsets, or the completely unnecessary number of tiny pumpkins I suddenly feel compelled to buy.

Whatever it is, fall has always felt like an invitation to get a little cozier and pay a little more attention to the everyday things that are easy to rush past during the rest of the year.

That’s also why I think it’s such a good season to rethink self-care.

For a long time, we’ve talked about self-care as something we need to do: meditate, journal, exercise, develop the perfect morning routine, drink the tea, take the bath. I like plenty of those things (especially the bath), but lately I’ve been much more interested in another question: What if self-care is also about what we give our attention to?

We live in a world where almost every empty moment can be filled. We can wake up and immediately check our phones, listen to something while we walk, scroll while we eat, and end the day watching one last video that somehow turns into 20. None of those things is inherently bad. I like my phone, I love a good podcast, and I have absolutely lost more time than I care to admit watching things I never intended to watch.

But fall gives us so many good reasons to look up.

So this year, rather than turning fall self-care into another routine to perfect, I wanted to create something simpler: a collection of ways to enjoy the season while being a little more intentional about where your attention goes.

Start Your Morning in Your Own Life

One of the easiest places to experiment with this is the beginning of the day. Our phones make it possible to wake up and enter everyone else’s world before we’ve really entered our own. Within minutes, we can know what happened overnight, what someone needs from us, what everyone is talking about, and what we forgot to do yesterday.

There’s nothing wrong with checking your phone in the morning, but I’ve found that even a few minutes of space before doing it can change the tone of the day. Make coffee and actually drink it. Open the curtains and notice what the weather is doing. Stretch for a few minutes, take the dog outside, or step onto the porch and feel whether the air has finally started to get cold.

And yes, make the pumpkin spice breakfast if that’s your thing. One of my favorite parts of fall is a pumpkin smoothie, and I refuse to turn every pleasant experience into a personal-development exercise. Sometimes the smoothie is just delicious.

The idea is simply to let yourself arrive in your own day before inviting the rest of the world into it.

Make Your Evenings Feel Like Evenings Again

Fall evenings are practically begging us to get cozy, and this is one place where I wholeheartedly embrace the cliché. Bring out the blankets. Light the candle. Make the tea. Turn on the little twinkle lights. If putting tiny decorative pumpkins around your house makes you happy, I support this decision.

But coziness isn’t only about aesthetics. There’s something valuable about creating an environment you actually want to be present in.

The internet, after all, never gives us a natural stopping point. There will always be another email to answer, another headline to read, another episode to watch, another post to check. Eventually, we have to decide for ourselves that the day is over.

That might mean reading before bed instead of scrolling, having tea without simultaneously checking email, watching a movie with your phone in another room, or simply going to bed early because you’re tired. You don’t need to perform an elaborate nighttime ritual to take care of yourself. Sometimes a quiet evening that doesn’t accomplish anything is exactly what you need.

Enjoy Fall Without Trying to Win at Fall

Every season now seems to arrive with a checklist. Fall may be the biggest offender. We have fall bucket lists, reading lists, travel lists, decorating lists, recipes to make, orchards to visit, foliage to see, and approximately 7,000 ways the internet would like us to have the perfect cozy autumn.

I genuinely love some of this. Give me the apple orchard, the scenic drive, the farmers’ market, the pumpkin patch, and anything involving cider.

But I don’t think we need to optimize our enjoyment of the season.

A bucket list should make you excited about your life, not make you feel behind in it. If you make it to one pumpkin patch and spend the rest of October drinking coffee on your couch, congratulations: you still successfully experienced fall.

What matters isn’t how many seasonal experiences you can squeeze into three months. It’s whether you’re actually there for the ones you choose.

The 30-Day Fall Self-Care Challenge

With that in mind, I created a 30-day challenge that’s intentionally difficult to fail.

Choose one activity each day—or whenever you feel like it. Repeat your favorites. Skip the ones that don’t appeal to you. Miss four days and continue on the fifth. There is no streak, no score, and definitely no requirement to turn any of this into content.

The goal is simply to create more opportunities to spend your attention on something you genuinely want to experience.

1. Take a walk without headphones.

2. Read something on paper for 30 minutes.

3. Drink your morning coffee without your phone.

4. Wander through a farmers’ market.

5. Watch the sunset outside.

6. Light your favorite fall candle and enjoy an evening at home.

7. Send someone a handwritten card.

8. Take a scenic drive somewhere beautiful.

9. Make something with your hands.

10. Sit outside for ten minutes without doing anything else.

11. Cook something seasonal.

12. Have a meal without your phone on the table.

13. Go apple picking.

14. Visit a pumpkin patch.

15. Call someone you’ve been meaning to catch up with.

16. Have a cozy fall movie night.

17. Leave your phone inside while you spend a little time outside.

18. Wander through a bookstore or library.

19. Make a fall playlist.

20. Explore somewhere you’ve never been in your own town.

21. The next time you’re waiting in line, look around instead of automatically reaching for your phone.

22. Take pictures of the changing leaves, then put your phone away and enjoy them.

23. Invite someone over for an easy dinner or coffee.

24. Go outside and stargaze on a clear night.

25. Visit a fall festival, football game, harvest event, or something happening in your community.

26. Take yourself out for coffee.

27. Spend one hour doing something you enjoy without your phone nearby.

28. Revisit a hobby you loved before everything became something to post, track, or share.

29. Make something pumpkin-flavored. I’m still voting for the smoothie.

30. Repeat the activity you enjoyed most.

At the end of the month, I wouldn’t worry too much about how many you completed. I’d be more interested in which ones you want to do again.

Maybe you discover that you love walking without headphones. Maybe leaving your phone away from the dinner table makes conversations feel different. Maybe you realize you don’t actually enjoy being disconnected for an hour—and that’s useful information, too.

That’s one of the things I’ve learned from spending so much time thinking and writing about attention: there isn’t one correct way to use technology. The interesting part is noticing when we’re choosing how we spend our time and when we’re simply following a habit.

A Different Kind of Self-Care

Self-care doesn’t always need to be another thing we add to our lives. Sometimes it can mean protecting more of the life that’s already there.

That’s a big part of what I explore in my book, Reclaim: How to Stop Scrolling Through Your Life and Start Living It. Reclaim isn’t about digital detoxes or giving up technology. It’s about understanding why our attention goes where it does, recognizing the moments when we’re operating on autopilot, and getting more intentional about what we want our time to contain.

Fall seems like a particularly good season to practice.

Take the picture of the leaves. Make the playlist. Text your friend. Use Google Maps to find the apple orchard. Technology can absolutely be part of the experience.

Just remember to look up when you get there.

Get "Reclaim: How to Stop Scrolling Through Your Life and Start Living It" on Amazon.

Be well,

Heather