Cut Yourself Some Slack
Practice These 4 Self-Compassion Skills for Better Emotional Control.
Stress, anxiety, and other negative emotions have become part of many people's lives today. As we grapple with tough economic times, everyone seems to be on edge due to life's pressures. Use these four tips to lead a more self-compassionate and better life.
What is Emotional Regulation?
Emotional regulation refers to your ability to respond and manage emotional experiences effectively. People regulate their emotions to achieve different desired outcomes, for example, coping with a specific emotional experience.
Still, not all emotion regulation methods are useful. Healthy emotion regulation involves checking your emotions and modifying your reaction in helpful ways. This can help diffuse a potentially deadly scenario and turn it into a better outcome.
Unhealthy emotion regulation, on the other hand, can lead to the feeling of being overwhelmed. As a result, you may look for a temporary fix to help stop the intense feelings, including self-injury. Often, a little self-compassion during a time of emotional distress can help you cope with overwhelming emotions in your life.
How Self-Compassion Fosters a Positive Life
Self-compassion is being aware and unbiased toward life experiences and how you respond to them emotionally. More importantly, it's learning to forgive, nurture yourself, and move on to bigger and better things in the future. There are numerous benefits to practicing self-compassion in your overall life. These include:
- Lower levels of anxiety and depression: self-compassion helps you be kind to yourself in hard times. You recognize that you're suffering and become kinder to yourself during that time. Doing this has been scientifically proven to reduce anxiety and depression, leading to a better life.
- Increases optimism: Ever heard of the saying tough times don't last, but tough people do? Well, being kind to yourself during difficult times and setbacks helps you take every experience as a learning opportunity. This way, you become more hopeful and not scared of other future experiences.
- Build motivation: Beating yourself up after failure takes away your motivation to succeed since your mind is often in a negative place. Self-compassion gives you a sense of peace even after rejection, criticism, or failure. When your mind is at peace, you can produce at high levels.
- Live harmoniously: Self-compassion for oneself reflects on other people as well. Being kind to yourself allows you to relate to other people's experiences and accept them for who they're without overwhelming yourself. As a result, you work and live better with others.
Self-Compassion skills
There are various ways to practice self-compassion. Below are the four most effective ways to practice self-compassion in your life:
Love yourself
The first step to being self-compassionate is to love yourself as you would a best friend or loved one. It makes no sense to care about others and mistreat yourself. Instead, pick yourself up as you would with a close person in times of difficulty. Talk to yourself as you would them at such a time, with care but being critical of the circumstances that led to the problem in the first place.
Change your Thought Process
A fixed mindset can hamper your growth and create many "self-imposed barriers." Self-compassion helps you develop a growth mindset such that you view challenges as growth opportunities, not obstacles. It also helps you draw inspiration from other people's success stories rather than feel jealous of them.
Practice Mindfulness
The art of self-compassion requires being critical but not judgmental of yourself. There's a difference. Being judgmental of yourself could lead to suppressing and denying thoughts and emotions. Whereas critically assessing an emotion, whether good or bad, the moment it appears allows you to process emotions without feeling overwhelmed.
Be Grateful
Rather than focus on what you don't have, appreciate the small and big things in your life. You can use journaling as a way of expressing your gratitude for various blessings in your life. You can also go for gratitude walks where you allow the gentle inner voice to focus on your blessings rather than shortcomings.
Self-compassion is essential to an overall better life. Whether in school, working, or in-between jobs, a little self-care can help improve your current situation. Contact us at The Resilient Minds for help leaving a more self-compassionate life.