A Comprehensive Guide to Emotional Self-Care: Tips and Strategies

Looking after our emotional health is a critical component of healthy living. Emotional self-care is when we notice, accept, and process our feelings, and when we learn how to support ourselves emotionally so we can be fully present in our lives and in our relationships with others.

Emotional Regulation

While many of us may have grown up being encouraged to ignore or suppress our emotions, a consensus in mental health treatment has formed that it is both healthier and more effective to acknowledge and “go through” what we feel in order to come out the other side, so we can have better relationships with ourselves and with others. Emotional self-care helps us to learn not just how to notice our emotions but also to manage them and support ourselves emotionally. Noticing, accepting, and dealing with emotions - even painful ones - can help us to meet life’s difficulties in healthy, productive ways, rather than turning to substances, unhealthy relationships, or other patterns of behavior that harm us and others.

The difference between more modern practices of emotional self-care and older expectations many of us may be familiar with - to hold our emotions inside whenever possible - is that emotional self-care encourages us to express our emotions, and sometimes even put our own needs first so that we can be fully present for others later, after we’ve taken responsibility for our own emotions.

Healthy Boundaries

Part of emotional self-care is the practice of setting boundaries. To be able to set boundaries in our relationships with others, we have to notice and acknowledge our own emotional needs. Boundaries can include all kinds of asks and expectations for the other people in our lives, but the fundamental premise of having boundaries is that if something or someone is hurting us emotionally, it is often necessary and appropriate for us to minimize or even eliminate that thing or person from our lives. 

While it may seem kinder and more forgiving to others to allow them to trespass our boundaries, and continue in behaviors that hurt us, on a longer timescale, people-pleasing by ignoring or even accepting behavior that harms us emotionally actually harms our relationships with the people that we want to accommodate and show care for. One way that you can think about this dynamic is that by continuing to accept behavior that emotionally hurts you, and not setting boundaries, you are being dishonest to the people in your life. While people-pleasing may seem like an act of care to others, it actually implies a kind of selfishness: instead of being honest with other people, we are using them to present a certain image, and to smooth over conflicts.

In order to set healthy boundaries, we need to turn inwards and notice our own emotional needs. This can start by noticing how we feel emotions in our body. When feeling an emotion, positive or negative, we should stop and think about how we’re holding that emotion in our body - whether it has a certain temperature, whether it feels energizing or energy-draining, whether it makes us want to close ourselves off from others or open ourselves up. This practice of noticing and grounding our emotions in physical sensations is sometimes called mindfulness, which is another critical component of emotional self-care.

Guided Mindfulness Meditation

One of the most important parts of mindfulness is noticing how you feel without judgment. While we may greatly dislike certain emotions, and wish we weren’t experiencing them, emotions help us to learn about ourselves and what we want from our lives and our relationships. To best practice mindfulness, simply allow your emotions in the present moment to be, and notice them without attaching value judgments to them - without labeling, and even dismissing them, as “good,” or “bad.” One thing that can help us to do this is to just breathe - by taking deep breaths, we can slow down our heart rate, collect our thoughts, and better meet the moment we’re in. Slowing down and non-judgmentally noticing how we feel can help us to take the next step - consciously choosing how to respond to something or someone that makes us feel negative or confusing emotions.

Responding to things or people that frustrate and hurt us from a place of conscious self-awareness, rather than a place of knee-jerk reaction, can help us to make intentional choices in dealing with difficult emotional stimuli. This is important because it allows us to choose how we want to navigate our relationships, and can even help us to break patterns of behavior that are holding us back and hurting our relationships with others. 

Healthy Relationships

Another way we can care for ourselves emotionally is, paradoxically, by taking a genuine interest in others. By building empathy and understanding for the other people in our lives, even and especially the ones we perceive as difficult, we can build a solid foundation from which to notice our own feelings, express our boundaries, and treat others with care and intention.