5 Tips for Establishing Emotional Self Care Habits

After battling breast cancer I have found emotional self care is a must. I have 5 emotional self-care ideas and some great DIYs to share with you.

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After battling breast cancer I have found emotional self care is a must. I have 5 tips and some great DIYs to share with you.

Emotional Self-care is extremely important. There is a growing understanding that having regular routines and habits that help you feel your best, thrive, and express the best version of yourself is vitally important. These self-care activities can help you combat negativity and anxiety and manage your emotions in a healthy way.

There is often a big gap between knowing that self-care is important and actually coming up with emotional self care activities that lead to an enhanced sense of well-being, good mental health, and physical health.

As with so much else in life, good self-care often depends on getting the right habits in place and ensuring that the small things you do on a day-to-day basis, all help lead to an enhanced overall sense of well-being. We all need to schedule time to look after our self-care needs and I have some resources that will help you get started.

1. Start off your day with a positive self-care habit before anything else

In order to establish good self-care practices, and ensure you have good emotional health you need to develop positive self-care habits. That helps set the stage for the rest of your day and generate some positive energy and momentum.

The kinds of habits you establish might include using some products from The Ordinary skincare to start your day right. This will help you look and feeling your best (you can find more of the products I use here). It might involve a particular workout, 10 minutes of quiet meditation and contemplation, or stepping outside to breathe in the fresh air while you enjoy your morning cup of coffee.

2. Don’t be too ambitious at first

Any time you’re trying to get a new habit established – regardless of what that habit might be – there is a real risk that you will try to do too much too soon, and end up losing momentum in a hurry.

Instead of trying to implement self-care habits such as doing an intense hour-long workout each morning, or diving into a morning makeup routine that takes a lot of time and energy, start small and work to enhance and increase your habits over time.

Self-care is the kind of thing that you should aim to make a consistent and ongoing part of your life, as its effects will rely largely on consistency. It’s not about getting everything right, instead, it’s about making sure enough of the pieces of your daily routine fall into place so that you can consistently move in the direction of having a good level of well-being.

For many people striving to establish new habits, using habit tracker apps and systems can be very useful, and can allow you to more easily keep on track.

With most of these habit trackers, the aim is to achieve consistency and to help you to get a good “streak” on a given habit.

For self-care routines, in particular, consistency counts for a lot.

3. Emphasise getting the key parts of your daily routine right and consistent

The kind of self-care habits that are likely to have the most powerful overall impact on your sense of well-being, will tend to be those that focus on your core daily routines.

In particular, working to get your core daily routines right, and to ensure they are consistent, can do wonders when it comes to helping you feel your best, and better manage the stresses of everyday life.

So, what are those key parts of your everyday routine? Generally speaking, these will be things like what time you wake up and go to sleep, what time you eat meals – and how you approach your meals – and other core routines or “keystone habits” in your day that make up a key component of how you structure your life. Like having your morning coffee and brushing your teeth, for example.

We all rely on our daily routines in order to give us a sense of balance, stability, and direction. This is especially true when there’s a lot going on in your life that you need to deal with. Routines can be a major “anchor” that helps keep you balanced.

Among other things, make sure that you go to sleep each night with enough time so that you can wind down, get enough rest, and be up at a reasonable hour. Then, make sure to eat your meals at regular times and to make sure that your meals help you to feel nourished and satiated.

These two steps alone can make a big difference.

4. View your self-care habits as vitally important parts of your routine, not as fun optional extras

One big reason good self-care habits often fall by the wayside or are overlooked altogether is that people frequently end up viewing these self-care habits as fun, optional extras that they can add into the day if they have time – as opposed to genuinely important things that should be prioritized.

Ultimately, though, when you feel your best and are emotionally balanced and resilient, you will tend to be more productive, better company for your loved ones, and will just have an altogether more positive experience of life as a whole.

To get good self-care habits established in your life, begin by viewing those self-care habits as a vitally important part of your routine, as opposed to just something that you do to treat yourself when you’re not busy with other things.

5. Focus on things that make you feel energised and positive in some way, not just things that you feel like you “should be doing”

If the self-care habits that you focus on aren’t really things that you enjoy but are just things on a to-do list that you feel like you “should be doing”, it’s very likely you will not stick with them long term, or benefit from them fully.

Aim instead to implement self-care habits that make you feel energized and positive in some way, as opposed to just trying to force yourself to go through a checklist of habits that “sound like a good idea.” For example, you may enjoy massages, manicures, bubble baths, yoga, or spending time with close friends. Find the things you enjoy and you will be able to stay the course.

These things you do can help fight depression and improve your mood. Practice gratitude on a daily basis, utilize breathing exercises, use a gratitude journal, take a nap, set healthy boundaries, do puzzles, read positive affirmations, and if you are in need of help seek therapists or a counselor. I like dancing, it helps me with positive emotions.