What Self-Care Really Means

Let’s face it: Self-care routines are difficult to establish and maintain. This is true even if we’re fortunate enough to have access to the resources needed, such as wholesome food and time to exercise, as well as the luxury of routinely getting eight hours of sleep.

Self-nurturant skills

Most of us have been reminded many times to practice self-care for the sake of our own physical and mental health or general well-being. We have been advised to eat a healthy diet, include some physical activity in each day, and get adequate sleep. These habits have been characterized as self-nurturant skills (Webb, 2014).

It’s not difficult to see how these actions would improve general well-being; you might even consider them to be obvious parts of a balanced lifestyle. That doesn’t make them easy to do, considering the many factors that might interfere with our efforts toward improved self-care.

Most of us have days or even weeks when it’s very challenging to keep up these basic self-care habits. For example, if your resources are limited in terms of time or money, you might find it nearly impossible to routinely eat healthy foods or get in the recommended minimum of 30 minutes of exercise each day.

A broader view of self-care

If we think about self-care in broader terms, we can consider many other ways to reach the same goals of emotional and physical well-being. These wouldn’t completely replace the healthy habits noted already, but they might “sub in” on certain days as needed. On other days, these added skills can enhance the overall well-being derived from the self-nurturant skills.

This broader view of care includes several more categories of behaviors: self-soothing behaviors, improving your self-discipline, and practicing self-compassion.

Self-soothing as a learned skill set

In an ideal childhood, self-soothing is a skill learned from parents. Parents who themselves grew up with caregivers who helped them identify their emotions (and figure out what helped them feel better) are naturally likely to do the same for their children.

In my clinical experience, it’s uncommon to learn self-soothing during childhood. Past generations of parents were generally unaware of the importance of this aspect of emotional intelligence (Goleman, 1995). They could not teach what they didn’t know.

In many instances, other, more urgent needs simply had to take priority over teaching emotional awareness and self-soothing skills. Providing food, shelter, clothing, and health care were necessary priorities and left no time or energy for efforts toward emotional wisdom.

Self-soothing can be learned at any age, and it can take many different forms. The process involves identifying what you’re feeling and then looking at your options for what might help you feel better.

Self-soothing is different for each individual, depending on what helps them to feel calmer or less angry, sad, or worried.

Examples of self-soothing strategies

• Take a walk, outdoors if possible
• Listen to music
• Run, do yoga, lift weights, dance, etc.
• Take a warm bath
• Be with your pet(s)
• Contact a friend
• Pray by yourself or with a group
• Meditate
• Practice deep breathing for two minutes
• Cook or bake (enjoy the process without overusing food to self-sooth)
• Rest with a weighted blanket
• Use compassionate self-talk

Of course, some behaviors that might feel soothing in the moment, such as substance abuse, emotional eating, or compulsive gambling, have a strong potential to cause more harm in the longer term. Being prepared with your own list of healthy self-soothing strategies helps to lessen the risk of becoming stuck in these harmful habits.

Self-discipline as a form of self-care

It may be obvious to many that self-discipline is a form of self-care. You know that you feel better and function better when you’re doing the right things for yourself and avoiding the wrong things.

But for anyone who grew up with childhood emotional neglect, this awareness isn’t instinctive. If you were never required to maintain good habits, such as saving money or doing menial tasks, you may have never learned that you’re capable of these types of self-discipline.

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Self-discipline is defined by Dr. Jonice Webb as “making yourself do things you don’t want to do and stopping yourself from doing things you shouldn’t do.” This concept was beautifully summed up by one of my colleagues as “making the hard choices that are good for you.”

Many of my past clients have labelled themselves lazy, or as procrastinators, when actually they simply hadn’t learned the benefits of self-discipline. My suggestion for learning to practice self-discipline is to choose just one thing you’d like to start doing each day, and make it a top priority.

Or, you might choose one thing you’d like to stop doing, and replace that bad habit with a better one, one small step at a time.

The importance of self-compassion

Self-compassion is another form of self-care, which is not instinctive to all of us. Anyone who grew up with emotional abuse or neglect is at greater risk of lacking self-compassion.

What does a lack of self-compassion look like? Judging yourself harshly, blaming yourself for mistakes, insulting yourself (privately or with others), and disliking yourself are all signs of a lack of self-compassion. Expecting perfection of yourself can also be a sign of lacking self-compassion.

Just as the other forms of self-care can be learned, that is also true of self-compassion. It can be the most challenging self-care skill because it requires genuine self-love, not in the narcissistic (superior, self-focused) sense, but in the knowledge that you are “good enough,” “worthy,” and deserving of kindness.

Learning self-compassion is a complex, multistep process that takes time and continuous effort. Rather than try to simplify it to fit the context of this post, my intention is to follow up with a second post on that specific topic.

Final thoughts

Self-care is much more than eating well, exercising, and getting enough rest. A broader set of self-care skills includes knowing how to soothe yourself, practicing self-discipline, and being compassionate toward yourself. Although many people are not taught these skills during childhood, for various reasons, they can be learned at any age.