SELF-CARE: TAKING CARE OF YOUR EMOTIONAL WELL-BEING.

Disclosure: I am no professional this is based off of my own experience in self-care if you need further assistance please seek a professional to help guide you. - Nova Papa

Today I will be discussing the ways in which you can care for your emotional well-being with explaining how some of these aspects work for me. What is emotional self-care? It is the ability to care for your emotional self and to be connected to how you feel and how you cope with these emotions. Emotional self-care includes but is not limited to; stress management, emotional maturity, forgiveness, compassion and kindness. These aspects aren’t necessarily focused on other people but on the individual themselves.

Stress Management is one that comes from understanding the way in which your body reacts to stress and being able to gain control when feeling a lack of control. This can be done through breathing exercises like meditation. Emotional Maturity is understanding how you feel and how to process although it is critical in positive emotional self-care it comes with age, life experience and a lot of practice in training your mind to acknowledge negative thoughts move past them and change your mind to accept the positive thoughts.

Forgiveness doesn’t necessarily mean forgiving others, but it means forgiving yourself, being able to accept yourself of all your flaws and quirks but most importantly accept the imperfections while also maintaining the person who you want to be.

Compassion and kindness can be separate but can also link together, to give compassion and be kind to yourself allow yourself to feel and think what you need it to and do what your body is craving to ensure you are taking care of yourself as a whole.

For me emotional self-care is one of the toughest ones, as I have always been a person who will put others' needs before my own and if I was going through anything, but somebody needed me I would drop everything to be by their side. The tough aspect of this is that not everybody you drop your needs for would do the same for you, they prioritise themselves which majority of the time is needed and is understood. I have now started to actively challenge myself when I know I need my time to work through my emotions.

Stress Management is one thing that helps to guide me through this. I am able to manage time and be patient with myself, it also encourages me to plan and designate my time to best suit my current needs. Although I still have a long way to go on it, I still try to plan my days. Forgiveness, compassion and kindness are ones that I have typically always possessed in regard to others, as like I mentioned I put others before myself, but when it comes to forgiving, being kind and compassionate to myself I struggle. It’s something that I have been trying to work on through other self-care practices such as journaling and self-reflection.

Emotional well-being is one that has been tough to write about as it is extremely personal, it is one thing to be physically vulnerable compared to being emotionally vulnerable. Your emotional self is your true self she/he is the one that feels everything no matter if you wear a mask to hide who you are, or you wear your emotions on your sleeve. It’s tough to even write this post and reflect on what I have worked on and what I need to work on as it breaks the barrier between the mask that I wear.

In the next blog post I will be discussing the third aspect to self-care which is social self-care. Like this blog post and my previous one on physical self-care I will be going into some details on different ways you can help encourage positive social self-care as well as going into some detail about my personal experiences with social self-care.

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With Gratitude & Love

From our Author Nova Papa & Founder Caroline Mc Guinness