This post is all about emotional self-care examples.
Self-care starts with the small stuff, so you can fit it in and work towards the bigger stuff like taking a day to walk at the park or have a picnic. Emotional self-care is no different. In this post, we’re focusing on emotional self-care because it’s overlooked a lot of the time.
Emotional self-care gets you to focus on processing your emotions, working through the stuff you deal with everyday, and prioritizing the stuff that makes you happy. So, let’s talk about ways you can practice emotional self-care.
This post is all about emotional self-care examples.
EMOTIONAL SELF-CARE EXAMPLES:
1. Journaling
Emotional self-care starts with getting your thoughts out of your head and onto paper or a screen. Whether you’ve tried journaling or not, challenge yourself to journal ten minutes everyday for a week.
When you sit down to start journaling, approach it with grace. Give yourself the room to right about whatever you’re thinking about and remind yourself to keep writing. It’ll be easy to pause, think of something else, and decide that thought isn’t worth writing down.
This is where journaling goes to die, so remind yourself that no one will read this but you. You may never even read it yourself, so what’s the harm in writing down whatever you’re feeling?
Do It for Yourself
The moment you get your thoughts and feelings onto paper you’re doing yourself the service of not processing everything in your head. For one, that’s a lot and no one should have to do that.
Plus, it’s not very effective to try and process everything you’re feeling within your mind because you already know what you’re thinking. By getting those thoughts onto paper, you’re getting a different perspective on them and that will help you work through those thoughts and feelings.
On those days when you’re writing random stuff that you don’t think you’ll ever care about again, you’re proving to yourself that you deserve time and space even when you’re not working through some major stuff in your life.
2. Meditation
In those moments when you can slow down and focus on your breathing, you can spend a few minutes practicing meditation. Your moments like this might be few and far between, but that is all the more reason to cherish them and meditate when they come around.
Meditation is all about focusing on your breathing as a way of calming your mind and improving your relationship between you and your thoughts. If you’re anything like us, here at Knockoff Therapy, at one point in your life, you’ve been frustrated because you couldn’t control your thoughts.
Meditation helps you change the way you talk about your thoughts. First of all, you are not your thoughts. Instead, they are an extension of you. Second of all, you can work on quieting your thoughts in quieter moments so that you can use this skill when your mind is buzzing.
So, practice slowing down your breathing, noticing the way your chest expands and contracts with each breath, and notice your thoughts.
Avoid judging yourself or criticizing yourself when you go off on a thought tangent. Approach this activity with grace for yourself and remember that this emotional self-care example takes practice.
3. Engage in hobbies
Go do the thing you like to do that you don’t let yourself do because it doesn’t make any money. Or the thing you used to do but go too busy to do anymore. Let yourself enjoy a hobby and give it time in your week simply because it brings you joy.
Part of emotional self-care is you treating yourself the way you’d treat other people and sending yourself the clear message that you matter and the activities you enjoy are just as important as the ones that help you to pay for rent and groceries.
4. Practice gratitude
Once you begin your journaling practice, you can start writing down three things each day that make you grateful. Think about the things that made you happy or feel loved or feel seen, including anything you did for yourself.
Get specific with these sources of gratitude. Instead of “I’m grateful I could practice my hobby today,” write down “I’m grateful I scheduled time in the day to something just for me because I haven’t done it in a while.” Big or small, write down at least three sources of gratitude.
In the beginning, you’ll probably have a hard time, but, as time goes on, you’ll notice that you start identifying sources of gratitude in your daily life so you can write it down later.
Before you know it, you’re changing your perspective on a world that seems like it can be pretty painful sometimes.
5. Seek therapy or counseling
Go to therapy. Just like all of these emotional self-care examples try to do, therapy is one more way to help you process your emotions in a supportive environment where you can rely on someone else for help.
It’s overwhelming to think through your own emotions, especially when you deal with your emotions and thoughts 24/7 instead of in an hour session every week. Therapy isn’t accessible for everyone.
But, if you can afford it through insurance or your monthly income, give yourself the gift of help. You don’t have to work through all of your emotions on your own, especially if you’ve never seen anyone do that and you’re doing it one your own.
6. Connect with loved ones
Reach out to the people you care about and put effort into spending time with them. Contact is always a two-way street, so this emotional self-care example is not designed to guilt you into spending time with people or to shame you for not spending more time with them.
Instead, this is a reminder that you should prioritize spending time with loved ones because it makes you happy. Whoever your family or chosen family is, they are people you want in your life.
So, do yourself a favor and schedule time into your day to hang out with them. Maybe it’s a conversation on the phone that allows you to reconnect with your mother or it’s a brunch date with your sister.
7. Set boundaries
If you’ve ever felt burnt out after an interaction with someone, you need boundaries. Boundaries are a complicated part of emotional self-care because they push you out of your comfort zone and require you to tell people how to be better friends, partners, and loved ones to you.
As liberating as it can feel once you see a boundary in action and improving your relationship with someone, it’s also terrifying to initiate that conversation.
This is where the hard part of self-care comes in: you have to do what’s best for you and stop suffering in silence or letting the same conflicts play out over and over in your relationship.
Communicate your boundaries to the other person to improve your relationship and take care of yourself (it’s also a form of self-care to want someone in your life and do the work to make sure that happens in a healthy way).
8. Engage in physical exercise
Physical exercise is a great way to take care of your mind. Not only does physical exercise make you happier by releasing dopamine and serotonin and improve your mood, but it’s a great way to reset your day.
You can schedule exercise into your day at a time when you want to set the tone for the rest of your day. It can be in the morning, after work, or on a break during work. Maybe you schedule it between classes when you have long enough to dedicate to yourself.
If you’re thinking about this and already feeling the stress, remember that physical exercise can be walking around the block a few times or doing jumping jacks for a minute. You can even dance it out to your favorite song. Exercise should be enjoyable for you.
9. Take breaks
Take time during your day and week to recharge. This means you go for a walk at lunch time to reset your mind. Or you take a day off on the weekend to do a staycation.
Whatever taking a break looks like for you, make sure you’re taking a moment to breathe and enjoy the world around you. In other words, as tempting as it might be, be careful about staying in bed for a few days or binging shows.
To be clear, you should definitely let yourself sleep in and watch your favorite shows, but make sure that you’re actually taking care of yourself when you’re resting and engaging one of these emotional self-care examples.
If you take a break and beat yourself up the entire time or keep yourself from dealing with stress or anxiety, you’re not really giving yourself the break you deserve.
10. Listen to music
Jam out to your favorite playlist or sit down on the couch and breathe deeply to a low-key playlist. Whatever music you enjoy, listen to it and let your body experience it. In other words, dance to it. Sing to it. Engage with the music and just enjoy it.
It can be really hard to find something that brings you pure joy, so, once you’ve found the kind of music that does that for you, savor it. Spend time with that type of music and do it for no other reason than you deserve joy, happiness, and to engage in an emotional self-care example.
11. Disconnect from technology
When you get a break in your day, when you get bored, or when you remember an uncomfortable memory, you might take your phone out. Then, you start feeling a bunch of other negative emotions and you get stuck scrolling.
You can use any coping mechanism to get through the day and none of them are inherently bad for you. But, when we rely too heavily on any one coping mechanism, that’s when we can struggle with it more than we would without it.
So, disconnect from technology when you need to. Notice how it makes you feel and whether it’s helping or hurting. It’s impossible to cut technology out of our lives and most of us don’t have a reason to, but it’s still useful to know it’s getting to be too much for us in the moment.
