Emotional Self-Care: Self-Care Series (Part 6)

What is Emotional Self-Care?

According to Verywell Mind, emotional self-care involves any activities that help you acknowledge and express your feelings. This type of self-care overlaps with all forms of self-care. It’s important for our well being to be in tune with our emotions and have healthy ways to express them. When we recognize our feelings, whether they are happy, angry, sad, or anxious, we are able to cope better by finding ways to work through them. Incorporate self-care activities into your life that help you feel recharged and at peace, whatever that may be for you.

How To Practice Emotional Self-Care

Get In Touch With Your Emotions

Sometimes emotional self-care is as simple as making the effort to recognize your emotions. You could do this individually, through meditation and practicing mindfulness. Or you can process your feelings with a close friend, your partner or with your therapist. Either method can help you become more in tune with what you feel and what you may need.

Express How You’re Feeling

Once you recognize your emotions, it helps to find a healthy way to express them. You could put your thoughts onto paper through journaling. Or you may have another form of artistic expression that is calming to you, like painting or coloring. Having a creative outlet that you enjoy can be a great way to feel more at ease.

Emotional Self-Care Activities

There are many different self-care activities that can help us to feel emotionally fulfilled. Here are some more ideas:

• Baking or cooking your favorite recipe
• Volunteering for a cause that you care about
• Having a “lazy day” (sometimes we need to do nothing to recharge)
• Limiting your news consumption and spending time outside instead
• Doing something nice for someone else (without expecting reciprocation)
• Practicing positive thinking
• Partaking in any activity that brings you joy and brightens your day

Implementing Your Self-Care Routine

This is the last post in our Self-Care Series. Our past five blog posts have highlighted the different forms of self-care that you can incorporate into your life: physical self-care, professional self-care, spiritual self-care, social self-care, environmental self-care, and now finally, emotional self-care. Now that you have a full background about the different forms of self-care, you can focus on putting them into practice.

Assess What You Need

First, try to think about the areas of your life that could use more attention. Perhaps you need to prioritize your physical health more. Or you may feel like you need to focus more on your social relationships. Identifying parts of our lives that could use more care gives us an indicator about the type of self-care that we would benefit from.

Develop Your Self-Care Plan

Without a concrete plan to implement more self-care into our lives, it can sometimes be difficult to execute. You might try coming up with a “self-care schedule” of designated time to focus on yourself. Perhaps waking up 30 minutes earlier to drink a cup of tea and meditate works for you. Or maybe you carve out an hour before bed to read instead of scroll on your phone. Customize your self-care in a way that works with your everyday schedule. You can also challenge yourself, by setting goals for self-care each week.

Start Small

There are so many different ways to focus on self-care, that it might seem overwhelming. Rest assured, you don’t have to tackle everything all at once. Start small by thinking of just one area of your life that you want to take better care of. The process of self-care and self-love takes time.

Re-evaluate Your Self-Care

At the end of each week, you can evaluate what you’ve done for self-care and if you feel you need to make room for more of it. Take note of how certain self-care activities made you feel. If you feel more relaxed and fulfilled after, then that’s great! If not, you can always re-adjust your self-care to better fit your life and your interests. Remember that it takes time to fully get into a habit. It’s okay if adopting your self-care routine is a gradual process.