Having discussed the importance and ways prioritizing self-care in the new year, I outlined the various areas of your life you can focus on one at a time. Over the next couple months, I will dive a bit deeper into resources available to you for each of these areas of self-care, starting with emotional self-care.
Long after new year’s resolutions collect mental cobwebs, if your emotional well-being is the first thing you’d like to attend to in this new decade, let’s get into the transformative power of good emotional care and various resources available to you.
Emotional Care, an Overview
Emotional self-care are often mistaken for mental self-care (which I’ll tackle in the next edition of the blog). The distinction between the two is best given by WebMD as,
Mental health refers to your ability to process information. Emotional health, on the other hand, refers to your ability to express feelings which are based upon the information you have processed. So, if your cognitive function is hindered by depression or anxiety, for example, you may struggle with accurately identifying a situation. This can then trigger inappropriate responses because those responses are based upon inaccurate thoughts.
You must consider how your feelings and behaviors are connected to one another (and to your thoughts and mental processing of actions and situations) when considering the best emotional self-care practices.
It’s good for you to feel a wide range of positive and negative emotions from time-to-time. For example, you may feel sad when mourning the loss of a loved one or a companion pet. This is normative and everyone’s grieving period differs.
However, if that mourning extends beyond what should be normal for you to function in your world, that’s when you know the feelings have taken over the ship. Good emotional self-care can help to buffer these emotional peaks and valleys so that these types of extremes don’t happen in the first place.
With emotional self-care, you can feel however you want, but you can’t act out however you feel. Setting those behavioral boundaries so that you can stay on track in life and work and in right relationship with others is the goal of good emotional self-care.
Emotional Care Resources
As noted emotional self-care is how you regulate your emotions in your interior world (self-speak and feelings) and your behaviors (actions and interactions with others). Thankfully, the Web is a treasure trove of positive emotional self-care information, but some of it can be more less useful. So, I am listing resources below that should steer you in the right direction:
- Carley Schweet, author of Boundaries with Soul, provides ten easy emotional self-care practices and along with some of her favorite books for emotional care: Easy Ways to Practice Emotional Self-Care.
- The Habits for Wellbeing site has provided 22 ways to practice emotional self-care and letting go. Letting go is such a recurring theme in emotional self-care, that it’s worth considering if you need to let go of some things emotionally in your life.
- Abigail Brenner MD, author of Transitions: How Women Embrace Change and Celebrate Life and SHIFT: How to Deal When Life Changes, on Psychology Today provides a psychiatrist’s perspective on emotional self-care. I especially like her suggestions #4 and #5.
- Radical Transformation Project provides an Emotional Self-Care Guide that provides not just a list of practices but some guidance on how to approach each suggestion, plus other resources on the site.
These resources should certainly whet your appetite with plentiful options for starting your new year with productive emotional self-care practices.
Where to Start With Emotional Care
When dealing with a practice as multifaceted as emotional care, I think that journaling daily is a good place to start. It’s simple. It requires no prior skills. You have all that you need inside you to make it happen.
Journaling can be difficult for those who set too high a standard for expressing their emotions outside themselves, especially on paper (whether physical or digital). You can say whatever you’d like in your journal, and write for a specific amount of time (say, five minutes on a timer).
As well, you can focus on a single emotion or concept daily. Monday can be gratitude; Tuesday, solitude; Wednesday, frustrations/anger/sadness; Thursday, joy/contentment; Friday, anticipation; Saturday, trust/acceptance; and, Sunday, surprise. Of course, you can change these around and pick different emotions on different days. But, it gives you a starting point that can be cathartic and start to give you a sense of the emotions you are feeling throughout your days and weeks.
As always, if you need more emotional care than you believe you can provide yourself, seek help. You can reach out to Four Directions Wellness for services and always talk any serious issues through with a mental health professional.
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Is emotional care the area of your life that you are focusing on this year, this month, or even this week? Let me know in the comments and how you plan to better your emotional care.