The Four Ingredients for Emotional Wellbeing

Self-Care

Self-care is about looking after the basics. This involves behavioural tasks that are about taking care of your body each day. It includes Sleep, Exercise, Light, Food, Clean, Avoiding your kryptonite, Routine and rest and Engagement. Some of these skills will be more habitual than others already. When your body is taken care of, then your emotions get easier to handle. 

Self-Validation

This is a cognitive technique because it is about the way that you talk to yourself about your emotions. Self-validation involves acknowledging and accepting your inner experiences as real for you. It is not asking you to like them, or even to want them. You just have to accept that they are there. Self-validation sounds like: “My feelings are real for me. I am struggling. I am in distress. I feel scared.” To self-validate you need to Acknowledge the feeling, Accept that the feeling is happening and Allow it to be there without trying to push it away.

Self-Soothing 

Self-soothing is both behavioural and experiential. It is about looking after yourself while you feel distressed. It is about the actions that you take to care for yourself, with the aim of reducing the intensity of the distress. We often use the five senses for this, so think about what is soothing to look at (photos, scenery, TV), to listen to (music, nature sounds, binaural beats), to smell (candles, flowers, body cream), to taste (tea, mints, juice) and touch (weighted blanket, warm shower, oodie). These self-soothing behaviours need to be familiar, comfortable and authentic.

Self-Compassion

Self-compassion is the willingness to look after yourself with kindness while you experience your feelings. It says “I deserve to look after myself while I am feeling distressed”.  Self-compassion says “That was a really hard day, I struggled with that, and now I am going to take care of myself while I recover from my day and let my big feelings pass.” It is empowering to know that you can look after yourself while you’re having these feelings, talking to yourself with kindness, not pretending the threat is not happening, but holding yourself with compassion, having the skills to look after yourself. 

To practise self-compassion you need to be KIND. Start with a Kind approach to yourself and Identify your struggle and notice what is difficult about this experience. Then you need to Nurture your inner child (or vulnerable child) and Decide to be a healthy adult and take the appropriate steps to use whichever skills are needed in this moment. 

Some of this will be really uncomfortable at first. And when our brain is presented with novel or unfamiliar experiences it can be suspicious and try to warn us away from danger. However, I want you to be really clear that there is no danger in what we are suggesting that you do here. And the more you practise looking after your emotions, the more familiar it gets, and the less scary it becomes.