Welcome back to Sarah’s Self-Care Corner!  For this week’s blog, I will explain the concept of emotional self-care and coping with your various emotions throughout the day.  Each day brings different stress to our lives, so it is important to care for yourself, including your emotional health.  By nurturing your emotions, you are able to decrease stress, calm your nerves, cope with difficult situations and problems, and enhance your overall mood.  

What is Emotional Self-Care?

Emotional self-care includes acknowledging your emotions, identifying which emotion you are feeling, and allowing yourself to feel the specific emotion rather than holding it back.  In today’s world, many people, including myself, try to suppress or ignore emotions rather than deal with them at that specific moment.  Let’s face it – with the speed of life, it just seems easier to put off dealing with the emotion later.  But is that really what we should do?  Ultimately, the emotions that are held in will eventually come out.  If too many emotions are packed in, a person runs the risk of the emotions spilling out uncontrollably!  A key aspect of emotional self-care is really knowing yourself, your situation and being able to express your feelings without being judgemental of those very specific and individualized emotions.  This is not easy to do and takes practice.  By assessing your emotions without judgment, you are able to notice patterns of emotional responses in various situations and try to prevent them from spilling out uncontrollably and impacting your emotional self in the future.  

Assessing Emotional Needs

By adding emotional self-care to your daily life, you will be able to focus on your specific emotions, your internal reaction, and focusing on keeping your mind more at ease and relaxed in high-stress situations.  One way to assess your emotional needs is to be in tune with your body by noticing any physical sensations that come with certain emotions.  You can also consider how your emotions come out positively or negatively when triggered by a specific situation and how to possibly prevent an outburst.  To decide what emotional self-care techniques work best for you, think about what personal needs should be met through this self-care practice.  You can start by asking yourself these questions before choosing your emotional self-care strategy:

• How do you process your emotions?  Are these ways healthy or unhealthy?
• Do you participate in activities that help you feel recharged?
• How do you deal with an emotional outburst? Or do you tend to hold your emotions in?
• What triggers your emotions such as anger, sadness, overwhelmed, or fear?

Incorporating Emotional Self-Care

• Be gentle towards yourself, your emotions, and the others around you.  Everyone, including you, personally deals with and faces situations that cause stress each day.  What this really means is that everyone is doing the best they can in order to get through the day’s demands  If you are upset about something, it is very easy to snap or take out your emotions on someone else that might be trying to help.  This would not be a great way to handle your own stress!  It is important to be kind to yourself and your own emotions, but also give that courtesy to others as everyone is dealing with their own stressors in different ways.

• Take a break from the news and social media. Now more than ever, the news can sometimes bring more harm than good to our emotions.  It is crucial to remain informed on the latest news within the country and around the world, but it is totally okay to limit your screen time, especially if the current events are adding negatively to your emotions.

• Focus on what you can control.  Sometimes we get overwhelmed about things in our lives that are out of our control such as world events, the COVID-19 pandemic, or others’ actions.  It is important to remember that we can only control ourselves as well as our thoughts, emotions, and actions.

• Connect with someone you trust. It is critical to talk about your emotions with other people if you are feeling very overwhelmed, anxious, sad, or angry.  Ultimately, it is always better to let out your emotions rather than bottle them up until you explode.  Talking with someone you trust allows you to release your emotions and feelings in a safe, judgment-free environment.  

Thank you for reading this post, and I hope you have found the information helpful in incorporating emotional self-care into your daily life.  Be sure to check back next week at Sarah’s Self-Care Corner where I will be discussing journaling and various techniques that you can incorporate into your daily life.

Sources:

• https://www.uchealth.org/today/how-to-practice-emotional-self-care/
• https://www.choosingtherapy.com/emotional-self-care/
• https://tristatehospital.org/the-importance-of-self-care/#:~:text=Emotional%20self%2Dcare.&text=What%20emotional%20self%2Dcare%20means,out%2C%20one%20way%20or%20another.
• https://www.verywellmind.com/self-care-strategies-overall-stress-reduction-3144729