Emotional Self-Care: The 5 Key Habits
Taking care of your emotional health is essential to live a happy life, and emotional self-care helps you with this. Emotional self-care helps you manage your emotions and boosts your emotional well-being.
First things first: the whole point of emotional self-care is not to feel good all the time. It can help you feel better, of course, but its main purpose is to help you manage and handle all your emotions and emotional states as best as you can.
An effective emotional self-care practice helps you develop a healthy relationship with your emotions, and incorporates habits and tools in your everyday life to help you avoid becoming overwhelmed by them. This post will offer you simple and practical habits to help you achieve this.
So without further ado, let’s take a look at the 5 key steps to take care of your emotional well-being.
The 5 Key Steps for an successful emotional self-care practice
1. Reflect and Identify
Whenever you start focusing on improving an area of your life, you should always start by reflecting on it. Reflection and assessment will help you get a clear view of its present state. Then you can identify what might causes you to be out of balance (if you are), whether it is habits or activities or simply neglecting it, or see how you could improve it.
When it comes to emotional well-being, you want to assess your life and figure out what you do in that might have a negative impact on your emotional well-being. Often, the start of a self-care practice revolves more around identifying and stopping what affects you negatively more than incorporating new habits and activities. If you incorporate new habits yet fail to recognize and quit what’s actually harming you, then your practice will be ineffective because you’ve omitted to fix the initial cause, and you’ll be masking instead of fixing.
So, which habits in your everyday life promote emotional well-being, and which ones undermine it?
Your answer to this question will provide clarity and direction to create an emotional self-care practice that focuses on actually fixing the problem and helping improve your well-being as a result.
Tip:
Write down a list of anything that makes you feel bad: people, places, situations, foods, activities, etc… And another for anything that makes you feel good. These two lists will help you keep track of the emotional impact different things have on you and your overall well-being. Then it becomes easier to avoid them in the future.
2. Feel and embrace all your emotions
Feeling and embracing all your emotions will transform your whole life. Yes, all of your emotions. We don’t discriminate.
Repressing your emotions is an automatic response for many people, just as denying and judging them, and although it might appear like a perfectly good idea at the time, it won’t remain so in the long run.
Repressing and bottling up emotions is one of those major habits that undermine emotional well-being and can lead to mental and physical health issues over time. Pretending they don’t exist is only an illusion that can become harmful later on.
When you don’t feel your emotions, you bottle them up. And when you do, then you miss the opportunity to let them out, because once they’re in, then they remain stuck in your body and negatively affect both your physical and mental health.
Emotional self-care requires you to be brave enough to face or confront all your emotions. Yes, it is complicated, and yes, it is painful. However, if you keep suppressing them you’ll end up numb and stilted because you cannot numb yourself to the uncomfortable emotions in your life without numbing yourself to the positive ones as well. That’s not how it works.
Also, emotions are a paradoxical matter. The worse you allow yourself to feel, the better and more liberated you’ll be afterward (even though you might feel emotionally drained first, but don’t let this discourage you, you will feel better later on).
Tip:
What helps me tremendously is to imagine my emotions as roller coasters, and feeling them is riding them. It won’t last forever, and while I’m on it I’m going to feel its full intensity.
Also, what I’ve discovered is that if I don’t judge my emotions when they first show up, be it anger, frustration, jealousy, fear, etc…. and try not to beat myself up for them, then feeling them becomes easier, and they dissolve far more easily than when I do judge and resist them.
The key is to embrace them, no matter how painful and ugly they are. I give myself a timeslot where I’m going to let them move through me, let them be as painful as possible and feel them as intensely as possible. And this is where emotions are paradoxical because I always feel better and lighter after I allow myself to suffer as intensely and painfully as I can. (It gets worse before it gets better, right? But first, you have to be willing to let it get worse to enjoy the reward.)
Another tip I have to use when an emotion is particularly painful and I’d like to push it far away from me is to remind myself that feeling my emotions won’t harm me (no matter how much it seems like it – it’s only an illusion), but repressing them will in the long run.
“What you resist persists,” Carl Jung once said, and it is certainly true when it comes to emotions.
3. RECOGNIZE AND Let go of Toxic positivity
Toxic positivity will ruin your life.
Forcing yourself to feel positive all the time and repressing emotions are often two sides of the same destructive coin. (They go hand in hand for many people.)
Society nowadays is all about positivity. Positive thinking. Feeling positive all the time. Positive vibes. But the truth is that feeling positive all the time is not realistic, nor is it natural – let’s not forget that the harmony of nature relies on the balance of opposites, after all. And if the sun kept shining bright all the time, Earth would burn and become infertile, inhibiting life and growth. And that’s just the same for you.
Forcing yourself to be positive all the time will only end up in toxic positivity. And like suppressing your emotions, you’ll become numb and stilted, disconnected from your real emotions as a result.
It’s also important to note that toxic positivity and optimism are not the same thing! And there is one major difference between them: emotional honesty.
Toxic positivity focuses on achieving a positive mindset to such a toxic and unnatural degree that you repress and deny all your other genuine emotions because toxic positivity is a prison where only positivity is permitted and tolerated.
Optimism, on the other hand, while trying to encourage a positive mindset, never reaches a degree of forced delusion and dishonesty, and allows both positive and negative emotions without promoting emotional suppression. Optimism is a mindset where, while still embracing all your emotions, you choose deliberately and consciously to hope for the better.
Optimism is genuine and supports growth. Toxic positivity isn’t and doesn’t.
4. The importance of downtime and Soothing Activities
Relaxing activities and slow times are essential to take care of your emotional health. They allow both your brain and body to let go and recharge.
Any downtime where you focus on slowing down will help you prevent burning out. The previous point was all about toxic positivity and how detrimental it is to your emotional well-being, and it’s the same thing with toxic productivity.
Society nowadays encourages an unhealthy level of productivity that is not sustainable. If you’re one of those people who strive to be productive all the time, it can have negative consequences on your health, mentally, physically, and emotionally in the long run.
Burnout isn’t only physical and mental. There’s a major emotional aspect to it and if you never take the time to decompress and let go of all your accumulated stress, tension, and anxiety, at some point your body will shut down whether you like it or not.
Rest and relaxation are just as crucial as productivity.
Downtime is primordial for emotional regulation. It helps you release stress and connect to your inner self to find your inner peace and serenity. You have to settle down and unwind at some point and allow your mind and body to decompress or your excessing productivity will take a toll on you.
Examples of soothing activities to help your brain and body to recharge:
- Journaling
- Doing nothing (This is not a waste of time!)
- Meditation
- Relaxation
- Yoga
- Breathwork
- A warm bath
- Spend time in nature
- Have a rest and cozy day (or night, depending on how much free time you have)
5. Limit social media and news
You cannot spend all your time on social media and news, and expect to feel good.
Another key step for emotional self-care is to limit your exposure to influences that might affect your emotional well-being, especially social media and news. While both have positive aspects, too much of them can become emotionally harmful.
Spending too much time every day on social media can have a negative impact on you, and has been linked with:
- depression
- anxiety and stress
- loneliness
- self-comparison
So yes, too much time spent on social media has a huge impact on your emotional well-being. So maybe it’s not a bad idea to try to limit your screen time and see if it helps you feel better.
Many people who’ve tried to limit their use of social media have reported feeling lighter, happier, less anxious, and liberated, while having more free time to focus on what matters most – and isn’t this all we want in life?
Notice how you feel emotionally after time spent on social media, then after a stroll in nature or reading a physical book. The difference in emotional states is always striking.
And it’s not just social media. Spending too much time reading or watching the news can affect you the same way social media does (and for some people, social media is their source for the news so they get both at once).
And yes, it is important to keep yourself informed about what’s going on in your country or the world, but at some point, too much is just this: too much.
Life is oversaturated with news. They’re everywhere we look. They’re inescapable. You turn on your TV, news. You go on the internet or social media, news again. People talk with you, still news. It’s an omnipresent overload.
And at some point, it becomes necessary to take a break. You cannot spend your life focusing your attention on all the atrocities going on in the world and hope to live a happy life. Because it’s like social media, how do you feel afterward? Do you feel good, happy, light, and free? Or do you feel stressed and anxious and emotionally exhausted instead?
There needs to be a balance: a healthy amount of time keeping yourself informed and another healthy amount of time focusing on your own life.
Besides, if you try to limit your media exposure, then as a result you’ll get more free time for things that you love and make you feel good.
Remember, balance is key in life.
Bottom Line
Emotional self-care is essential to live a happy and fulfilling life. However, with our busy lives, it can become easy to forget about taking care of our emotional health.
The good thing is that emotional self-care doesn’t have to be a difficult thing. These 5 key steps are simple and practical habits that you can turn to whenever you need to.
And remember that if you struggle with your emotioanl health, then steping back and reflecting on your everyday habits and behaviors to see if you can identify a contributing factor is good, just as focusing on healthy and benefical habits, but if you really do struggle with your emotional health and nothing improves it, then maybe going to a therapist can actually be helpful.
So that’s it.
As always, if you have any tips, tricks, or ideas to help with emotional self-care, please do not hesitate to share them in the comments.
I hope you have a nice day. And remember, be gentle with yourslef, and enjoy life today instead of waiting until later.