In this article, we are going to present some emotional self-care tips to enjoy good emotional health. If you don’t know what self-care is, we recommend that you read this article, where you will also find very valuable physical self-care to implement in your life and thus achieve 360º health.
Emotional self-care allows us to ally ourselves with our emotions for the benefit of our health and well-being. It is a way of taking control of who we are. Recognize ourselves, feel ourselves, take care of ourselves and dedicate time to our mind and emotions.
Some keys to essential emotional self-care are:
- All your emotions are necessary: accept them.
- Promote your emotional well-being by loving and respecting yourself.
- Express your emotions and learn to put words to what you feel.
- Boost your social relationships and develop your affections.
- Choose your relationships, avoiding those that do not respect you.
- Look at the world with empathy and learn to communicate the differences.
- Develop your emotional strengths in the face of problems.
- Take time to enrich yourself and increase your self-esteem.
- Have a more optimistic attitude towards life without neglecting realism.
- Always define your long-term life goals and everyday goals.
Emotional Self-Care: How to Get Started
To begin developing the keys to emotional self-care listed above, it is important to pay attention to five points that we often overlook and that are vital to moving forward. Remember that you start walking with a first step. We hope they’re useful to you.
Focus on what you can control
One of the reasons we often feel anxious is because we think we can control everything. And no, that is a fantasy, an unrealizable purpose. Believing that it is possible surrounds us in a constant feeling of losing control and that frustrates us and detracts from reality.
Faced with a situation, observe and assess what you can really do and what is not in your power. Ask yourself: What can I do to change, improve or alleviate the situation? In what aspects can I? What depends on me? It is very useful to do it in writing, dividing it into two columns. Everything you can control, write it down. Sometimes in our imagination everything can happen, but when we put it on paper we see that it is not possible.
The important thing is to be aware that, despite everything, we control important things in our life, but not all of them. Free yourself from unnecessary burdens and allocate your energy to everything that you can do.
Find out what you want
The immediacy, the monotony and the current rhythm, causes us to live so immersed in day-to-day tasks that we find it difficult to differentiate between what we really want to do and what we should do. The desire for duty. A very fine line that, although it seems difficult to identify, it is enough to be more aware each time we are going to do something.
Learn to stop, not to get carried away and to identify and differentiate what you really want from what you have been told you should do. A very simple but valuable act is to ask yourself before taking any action and say to yourself: “I do it because I must” o “I do it because I want to”.
Love yourself
It seems like a cliché, but although it sounds typical, loving ourselves as we are is a difficult task. One of the most complicated and necessary practices. Working to accept and love ourselves as we are is crucial to enjoy good health and emotional stability, because we show ourselves that we can stop focusing on our flaws.
We must not confuse “accepting and loving ourselves” with forgetting about ourselves and losing the illusion to improve in certain aspects of our life. It means, working to obtain a degree of emotional maturity that allows us to identify those parts that we do not like, know why (ask us if we like them or if it is due to some kind of pressure from your social and / or cultural environment) and assess if we can really change them. If we can, we must work on them to improve them, and that does not take away any kind of value as a person.
Avoid toxic people
Sometimes we surround ourselves with people who do us no good, either because they are childhood friends, family members or because we add more well-known people in our social relationships. They are toxic people. Those people who do not bring us anything in our lives, but who somehow fill our days. They are people who have not matured emotionally, insecure and selfish people who need to have someone close to them to establish a relationship in which to vent their frustrations.
Toxic people usually do not contribute anything positive, causing negative emotions in the victim that lead to deep exhaustion, energy consumption, stress and disappointment. The objective is that you can choose and decide about your emotional health and not that it is always taken away from you. For this reason, the recommendation is that you avoid these types of “friendships”. Do not confuse the bad specific situation that someone in your environment may be living. For toxic people, this attitude towards life is permanent.
Accept your emotions, allow yourself to feel
Did you know that when we repress our emotions we can feel pain, both physical and emotional? Keeping what we feel under the rug is not useful, quite the opposite. A person who enjoys good emotional health knows that emotions exist in him / her, and allows himself/herself to feel them when they arise, observes, identifies and externalizes them, without being tied or depending solely on them.
Instead of fighting negative emotions, for example, try accepting them, but without the resignation that they will never change. Try to say to yourself “I’m sad, this is important to me and I’m worried about“, without judging yourself (because the judgment ends up always making us feel guilty) and without exhausting struggles. Because all emotions are valid and because they all make us human. At first it may seem like exhausting work. But over time, if you allow yourself to feel them without struggling to change them, you will understand them, you will get to know yourself more every day and with time, you will understand that each one has its own course and you will have the ability to identify them.