8 Steps to Emotional Self-Care
If you’re feeling anxious, scared, or otherwise off-balance, here are some emotional self-care things you can do.
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For most of us, life is looking very different right now than it did just a few weeks ago. We’re not able to go out to dinner and movies and other things we’ve always enjoyed. We’re cooking at home, working at home, or going to work each day knowing we might be exposing ourselves and our families to a virus that still has many unknowns.
This is creating a lot of stress, anxiety, fear and other uncomfortable feelings. If we don’t take care of ourselves, those feelings can become overwhelming.
I don’t think there’s ever been a time when emotional self-care has been more important. If you’ve never done it before, though, you might not know what to do. Here are eight easy ways to engage in emotional self-care right now.
Honor your feelings
This is perhaps the most important way you can engage in emotional self-care. Honor your feelings, whatever they are.
Too often, we try to ignore, shove aside, or change feelings that re unpleasant or that we simply don’t want to feel or deal with. This doesn’t do any good. It just makes the feeling more persistent, and it will come back over and over.
Honor your feelings. Acknowledge that this is how you feel right now. If you need to cry, cry. If you’re angry and you want to scream into a pillow, do it. If you have a mixture of feelings, acknowledge them all.
The sooner you acknowledge, accept, and feel your feelings, the sooner they can change.
Be patient with yourself
A lot has changed. You’re working from home and maybe even have kids schooling at home suddenly. You can’t find everything you need at the store so you’re improvising meals. Your gym is closed so you have to find a new way to get some workouts in.
Be patient with yourself if it’s not all perfect. You might forget a meeting. You might tell…
