Building Daily Routines Around Emotional Self-Care

Today I would like to share with you some thoughts around emotional self care.

To some extent, we all know what self-care of our body looks like. Some may have a more involved or elaborate programme perhaps including a diet of unprocessed organic foods, regular exercise and so on; but at the very least, most of us accept that a basic level of physical self-care would involve washing, brushing our teeth, and tending to wounds or injuries.

Thankfully, at some point in our lives, someone has introduced to us the notion that it is a good idea to do these things, at a cost of maybe 20 minutes or so per day, every single day.

At first, we may not have appreciated the wisdom in this and maybe we saw it as unnecessary or inconvenient. But as time passed, it has become engrained in our daily routines and we see the benefits. Now, no matter how busy we might be or how disenclined we may feel to do it, we wash daily, and floss and brush our teeth twice each day. Likewise, if we experience some physical wound, we know that we need to clean it up, possibly keep it covered, and if it is serious enough, get help.

It’s worth considering how this could be analogous to emotional or mental self-care. If we accept that our physical being requires some level of maintenance on a daily basis, then doesn’t it seem likely that our emotional or mental being does too? After all, to a large extent this is the substrate from which all of our experience of life grows. Foundational, in fact, to the will to physical self-care.

So it’s worth considering what life may be like if we were taught from an early age, just as in the case of say dental hygeine, that is was just a matter of course to put aside a few minutes morning and evening for specific steps to support emotional hygeine. Or that if we received a wound, there would be a necessary and urgent – and possibly sustained – course of remedial action. Possibly involving the support of a professional.

Some people do have these types of routines or rituals in place. But many don’t. For those of us who don’t, we may experience a feeling of friction in our life or the sense that we are not really connecting with our felt meaning. That life isn’t meeting us in the way that we feel it might. We may feel overwhelmed by feelings we don’t understand. We may encounter painful patterns that keep recurring. We may find it difficult to be close to other people. We may experience frenetic business or distraction. We may experience fear of what may happen if we stop.

If any of these experiences resonate with you, or if you don’t have some kind of daily practice in place, then perhaps this article could be an invitation to you to consider what your daily emotional hygeine routine might include if you were to care for yourself the way you would for someone you love very much.

Some possible suggestions include writing or journaling, meditation, creating listening partnerships, or finding professional listener – a therapist. Whatever it may be for you, I would suggest that the most important thing is simply creating the dedicated space. Allowing time and space with intention, without distraction, to observe the contents of your psyche with curiosity and acceptance.

It’s also worth extending this principle to explore what we can put in place in terms of urgent remedial action for wounds or injuries to our emotional or mental being.

And further, if you are in a relationship with someone else, what habitual or ritualised care of that third entity could look like.

I’m planning to make some resources available on my website to support you with this, so watch this space. And of course, I am here to offer therapeutic support on a one-to-one basis.

As always, if you feel any of your loved ones would enjoy or benefit from the contents of this article, please do forward it to them.