Social Self-Care: The 5 Key Habits
Human beings are social creatures by nature, so it’s no wonder your social connections play a crucial role in your quality of life and happiness. That’s why it’s essential to ensure your relationships are beneficial, positive, and impact your life in an uplifting and fulfilling way.
The key to successful social self-care is to focus on making sure your social connections are healthy, meaningful, and don’t hinder your health and well-being. To accomplish this, there are key habits you can practice in your everyday life that will help you ensure your relationships are good for you instead of detrimental to your inner peace.
Let’s take a look at the basic habits you can use to create and nurture healthy relationships.
The 5 Key Steps Of Social Self-Care
1. Set healthy boundaries
Taking the time to establish boundaries is the foundation of healthy and respectful relationships – it should always be your priority in your relations with others. Your boundaries are the invisible lines that define the limits of what you’re comfortable with in your interactions with others, and what you don’t tolerate. Maintaining these boundaries is the key to protecting your emotional well-being and ensuring you’re fostering positive relationships.
How do you set healthy boundaries?
- Identify and recognize your own limits.
- Communicate your boundaries with people, let them know what is and isn’t acceptable, and what makes you uncomfortable.
- If someone doesn’t respect them, even after you’ve tried to communicate with them, then maybe you should distance yourself from them. If someone is set on crossing your boundaries, then you deserve better than people who don’t respect you.
See: How to Set Healthy Boundaries: 5 Simple Steps
2. Cut toxic people off
Toxic people can drain your energy and negatively impact both your mental and emotional health.
We’re often inclined to forgive or even tolerate toxic people out of a misguided sense of politeness, but in the long term these relationships can take a toll on you and turn detrimental to your well-being, inner peace, and happiness.
I’m not saying that cutting people off is always easy. It might seem difficult or unnecessarily unfair and mean, especially at first – but cutting people off is not about being mean – it’s about respecting yourself enough to step away from what is bad for you.
In the case of toxic relationships, doing something difficult and uncomfortable now will prove beneficial later on. Just imagine yourself a couple of weeks, months or years from now, looking back and feeling happy to have cut ties with this person. There’s nothing more liberating than finally distancing yourself from someone negative for you. It’s like getting your life back – you feel easier, happier and lighter. (It’s something I had to do with my dad, and I only regret not having done it earlier. The transformation in my life was worth more than I can express in words.)
It’s important to take a close look at the relationships in your life and identify the toxic ones: manipulative people, people who complain all the time and drain you, abusive people (physically, emotionally, or mentally), or simply people who don’t support your own growth, well-being, and never make you feel good about yourself.
Assess your relationships and reflect on how they affect your mental and emotional health. Do not hesitate to create distance or even cut ties when necessary. After all, life is short, and time is limited and precious, so why should you waste it on those people instead of focusing on those who are here for you, who uplift, support, and respect you?
Remember, if you don’t distance yourself from toxic people, no one else will do it for you.
Tip:
Cutting ties is not only about toxic people.
If you don’t get anything positive from a relationship, then it might not be worth your time. Be it family, friends, partners, acquaintances, etc…. The nature of the relationship isn’t what’s important. What’s important is the quality of the connection and how it impacts your life.
A good rule of thumb in life is that if something makes you feel bad, it might actually not be good for you.
(Also, being family doesn’t excuse anything. If you wouldn’t tolerate something from a friend or a partner, then you certainly shouldn’t tolerate it from a family member. Being family is not an excuse.)
3. Nurture authentic and meaningful relationships
Meaningful and authentic relationships are a cornerstone for a happy and fulfilling life.
While cutting ties with toxic people is essential for your well-being, nurturing healthy and authentic relationships in your life is equally important. They make you grow. They inspire you. They make you feel good about yourself, and provide a sense of belonging and understanding. You’re genuinely happy to spend time with these people, and you can count on them just as they can count on you.
How do you nurture authentic relationships?
- Figure out the people who matter to you and are good for you.
- Dedicate and spend time with these people.
- Communicate openly and honestly with them.
- Support and encourage them.
- Care for them.
- Be there for them when they need it.
Tip:
Remember, relationships are like flowers: they need to be nurtured and taken care of so they can flourish beautifully.
4. Have a supportive social circle
Having a healthy, supportive social circle in your life is a powerful thing.
These people make you feel seen, understood, appreciated, and respected. Surrounding yourself with individuals who have your back and are here for you when you need it most, who encourage and support you makes life so much easier to deal with.
When you have to make difficult choices or when something happens, having supportive people around to help you manage the situation plays a crucial role in how well you deal with it. When you collapse, you can count on them to help you back on your feet and support you.
Tip:
Remember that support and friendship should be reciprocal. It shouldn’t be one-sided. If you wish to maintain a healthy social circle, it’s important to reciprocate the support, encouragement, and care that you receive when those people need it during their own difficult times. Besides, this reciprocity will strengthen your bonds and make your relationships even more fulfilling for all people involved.
5. Learn to say “No”
Learning to say “no” is a valuable life skill that we should all learn to excel at, despite how challenging it seems.
Saying no can be complicated and terrifying, right? How can such a little word of only two letters be so difficult to speak up?
It might appear so much easier to try to avoid conflict and upset people, but this desire to please people can turn out to be detrimental for you.
If there is one habit that will transform your life and make it generally easier, it’s this one vital skill – learning to say no, especially when you don’t feel like saying yes yet do it anyway because you’d hate to disappoint someone.
How many times have you ended up in uncomfortable or draining situations just because you didn’t say no, yet could have avoided them if you had?
Saying no might be difficult now, but it will save you from later discomfort. It helps save your time and maintain your boundaries and peace, care for your own emotional well-being, and avoid unpleasant situations. When you say “no” be polite but assertive. And even though you shouldn’t have to justify yourself when you do, taking the time to be polite and explain to the other party why you have to decline might help ease up the process.
Saying no is a skill, and like all skills, the more you practice, the easier it’ll become in time.
Tip:
If someone is healthy for you, they will have no problem with you saying “no” and establishing your boundaries.
Something that I’ve noticed about this, is that saying “no” actually is a good indicator about someone. You’d be surprised how some people take it as a personal offense when you have to decline (no matter how polite you try to be). It helps reveal the true nature of a relationship, especially when someone hangs out with you only because you’re useful to them. Their reactions to you saying “no” actually expose this.
So aside from standing up for yourself, saying “no” is also a great way to reveal who has no problem with you respecting yourself and setting up boundaries for your well-being, and who does and takes it as a personal offense. It’s a tremendous help when you’re reflecting on the quality of your relationships.
Bottom Line
Social self-care is all about focusing on the quality of your connections with other people (be it family, friends, acquaintances, etc…).
The people you spend time with have a huge impact on your life, so when it comes to social self-care, your top priority should be focusing on nurturing healthy and meaningful relationships that support you, and limit the ones that have a negative impact on your life.
So establish healthy boundaries, assess your relationships in life and reflect on how they impact you, then do not hesitate to cut ties with toxic people who drain you while focusing on nurturing your healthy and supportive relationships. The quality of your relationships reflects in your everyday life, so ensuring that yours are good for you is essential for your happiness.
Less is more when it comes to relationships. It’s better to have a few genuine and fulfilling connections instead of many shallow and unsupportive ones. Quality over quantity is key.
So that’s it.
If you have any tips, ideas, or habits about social self-care that you think could help others, please share them in the comments.
And remember to be gentle with yourself. Have a wonderful day.