What is self-care?
What is self-care? What will you do when you think you are taking care of yourself? Do you envision eating well, sleeping well and exercising?
Yes,maintaining health is very important.However,most of what appears to be self-care involves punishing yourself and living up to societal expectations of a low-weight, clear-skinned person. Authentic self-care is unconditional kindness and compassion toward yourself. Self-compassion has three elements: common humanity, mindfulness, and kindness.
Are you harsh on yourself? Do you feel guilty if you are unable to fulfil people’s expectations? Does the word compassion scare you or confuse you?
Let me keep it short. Being compassionate is being yourself at all times and accepting that unconditionally. When you train yourself to get there, you are genuinely self-compassionate. Now, close your eyes and take a few rounds of deep breaths. Once you are comfortable, visualise a time when you felt guilty for refusing to help or putting boundaries to protect your mental health.
How did it feel then? How does it feel now? Do you feel bad about the incident? Do you feel guilty or helpless? Let’s see how to defuse your anger now. Emotional regulation is also part of self-care. Learn to regulate your anger by defusing your thoughts. An exercise to understand that you cannot control your THOUGHTS. Now, get up and stand on one end of the rope. The other end is tied to a door by a knot.
Pull the rope firmly on both ends,pulling harder and harder. Try your best. Is it helping?
Try and let it go now… Is the knot getting better when you let it go?
Another exercise is to understand that you cannot dictate your thoughts.
I will give you 10 lakh as a prize. Look at an individual you dislike. Can you fall in love with the prize of 10 lakhs?
The answer is NO!
This is why we cannot control our thoughts.
When the triggers arise, you get thoughts that pop into your mind. Following this, you will feel a plethora of emotions, including anger.
Now we learn how to “DEFUSE” these thoughts by two techniques:
- Close your eyes and experience these thoughts. As thoughts arise, delete them as you would delete spam messages. Put it straight in the bin of your mind.
- When you experience these thoughts, try to give shape to them, colour, and size. Describe it in terms of its weight and heaviness.
Acceptance of emotions:
To be able to “accept” the feelings, we need three aspects: We need to stay in the present moment. So, gently bring your focus to the emotion of anger. Be exploratory and aware. Be curious about the emotion. Be non-judgemental of the emotion of anger. Validate the emotion. Remember that letting go of your anger is self-care, too. Now blow into a balloon. Visualise that you are blowing your anger into the balloon and process the emotion. Do you feel better once the anger leaves your body? Make a note about how regulating your emotions can contribute to self-care. How will anger damage your health in the long run?
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