Take care of yourself and be kind to yourself.

One must first learn to care for and treat oneself well.

In the context of psychology, caring for yourself and being kind to yourself is an ability, which is often more difficult than caring for others. Not only that, many times, if you want to be kind to others, you must first learn to be kind to yourself; If you want to be loved, you also need to believe that you deserve to be loved. And these are inseparable from self-care ability.

So, what kind of ability is self-care? How can we learn to care for ourselves?

What does self-care ability mean?

Simply put, caring for yourself, just like caring for others, is a kind of ability to tolerate yourself, accept yourself, understand your faults and pains, and frankly accept the fact that no one is perfect.

Self-care is not based on self-evaluation. People care about themselves, not because they have some special qualities (beauty, intelligence, talent, etc.) ), but because everyone deserves to be cared for and understood. This means that if you have the ability to take care of yourself, you don't have to rely on "special", on grades, and on being better than others to get a good impression on yourself.

Christine Neve, the author of Self-care, puts forward that self-care includes three core components:

1. Comfort yourself, not criticize yourself.

In eastern culture, it is emphasized to be lenient with others and strict with yourself. The education we have received since childhood constantly tells us how to be kind and understand others, but rarely teaches us how to comfort ourselves when we are wrong or frustrated, and even encourages self-blame. Self-kindness means to stop criticizing and criticizing yourself endlessly, to understand your own defects and mistakes, and not to criticize blindly. At the same time, self-kindness not only emphasizes stopping self-criticism, but also actively learns to comfort yourself, just like comforting a lost friend.

2. "Suffering didn't separate me from others."

When things don't go as expected, or are not satisfactory, people at the bottom may have a sense of isolation and helplessness of "I am the only person in the world who has suffered or made mistakes". But in fact, everyone will experience pain. Fragility and imperfection are part of birth. Therefore, self-care also includes recognizing that pain and imperfection are human nature-it doesn't happen to me alone, but to all of us.

Focus on the present

Self-care also needs to balance negative emotions so that they are neither suppressed nor amplified. If you want to care about yourself, you need to be aware of your negative thoughts or emotions in an open and non-judgmental manner. At the same time, don't be too addicted to your own thoughts or emotions, or you will be bound by negative emotions.

Then, when you are lonely and have no "social energy", why is self-care so important and what benefits can it bring us?

First of all, self-care can enhance our emotional adaptability. In many studies, a stable and consistent conclusion is that people with strong self-care ability have lower levels of depression and anxiety and lower loneliness. This is because this ability helps us better face difficulties and deal with negative emotions; It also allows us to deal with ourselves better when we are depressed and lonely, so that negative emotions last shorter and have less impact on us.

It is worth noting that self-care can't help you suppress negative emotions, because resistance to pain will only aggravate pain (pain = pain x resistance). On the contrary, self-care encourages facing loneliness, facing pain, experiencing all emotions and accepting them is necessary.

Secondly, self-care is also closely related to promoting motivation and self-growth. One of the biggest reasons why many people don't care about themselves is that they think it will make them slack off and lead to nothing. Just like the sentence we have been exposed to since childhood, we tend to believe that only by being as strict with ourselves as possible can we do what we want to do and become what we want to be. But in fact, when self-criticism is used as an incentive, its effect is shallow and short-lived. In addition, the anxiety caused by self-criticism will greatly destroy behavior, which is counterproductive.

On the contrary, self-care is the most effective internal motivation. This is because self-care contains a deep and long-term desire for health and happiness. If you care about yourself, you will do anything that will enable you to learn and grow.

Two misunderstandings about self-care

Neve wrote that when people are depressed or depressed, they may have three attitudes towards themselves. There are some overlapping parts between them and self-care, which are sometimes confused by everyone:

Self-care is not self-pity.

When a person feels sorry for himself, Ta will be immersed in his own distress. There may have been such people around us, and what they always say is "I am really the worst person in the world." Whenever things go wrong, they fall into sympathy for themselves, complain about the people around them and even complain about the unfair fate. However, as mentioned above, self-care needs to be based on the premise of "acknowledging that everyone will have difficulties."

Moreover, people who feel sorry for themselves are often surrounded by their own rich inner emotional dramas, so they can't take a step back and look at their situation from a more objective perspective.

Self-care is not self-indulgence

Some people may say that they don't care about themselves because they don't want to indulge themselves too much, which makes them lose by inertia. However, caring for yourself is not the same as indulging yourself.

For example, "I am too lonely alone, so I will be lazy tomorrow, watch TV all day and eat a lot of junk food to make myself feel better"-this is a self-indulgence behavior. The biggest difference between self-care and self-care is that truly caring for yourself means that what you want is long-term happiness and health.

Finally, what should I do to care for myself?

1. When you treat yourself, think about how you treat others.

One of the easiest ways is to imagine what you would say and do to Ta if your caring friends, relatives or partners came to you when you were hit or extremely lonely and wanted to seek comfort. For example, your best friend cries to you about his pain after his lovelorn love. You may tell Ta that you will meet someone better. You may suggest that Ta can do something she has always wanted to do. You may keep silent and warm Ta with a hug and a bowl of hot soup just cooked. ...

2. Pay attention to the language you use

Many people don't care about themselves, and even those who always treat themselves badly may have become accustomed to frequent self-criticism, so that they often don't realize that they are embarrassing themselves again.

Therefore, before starting to practice self-care, it is very important to know whether you are more unfriendly to yourself than you think.

To this end, you need to be alert to every time you blame and beat your own voice, and write down your thoughts or what you want to say to yourself. For example, after failing an exam, a person who doesn't care about himself may subconsciously scold himself: "Why are you so stupid? After reviewing for so long, I still can't do well in the exam. " At this point, you need to record this sentence and ask yourself, if others were in the same situation at this time, would you say so? Sometimes, we only realize how hard we are on ourselves after listing those words.

Step 3 Pacify yourself with body movements

Studies have shown that good physical exercise can immediately affect the body and brain, soothe our parasympathetic nervous system and relieve the secretion of stress hormones. For example, when a person is sad and miserable, he can put his hand on his heart or put his arm around himself. Besides, if you don't want to talk to others, you can comfort yourself by hugging the bear next to the pillow. Studies have shown that if people who are excluded from the group can come into contact with plush teddy bears, their sense of loneliness and loss will be greatly reduced.

4. Prepare and remember some comforting words.

If you have some comfort that you know by heart, it will be easier to replace it in time every time you want to say "you are too bad" You need to seriously think of some comforting words that can really make you scream and you really recognize it, not just the vague "you are the best" When you get used to caring for yourself with these prepared words, you will really learn to forgive yourself in the process. At the same time, it can also cooperate with the kind body movements mentioned in the last article.

Finally, when you really learn the ability to care for yourself, on the one hand, loneliness will not affect you so much, because you know better how to get along with yourself and be kind to yourself when you are alone; On the other hand, if you learn to love yourself, you will be more fully prepared to contact the outside world than you are now.

We walk in this world, in order to survive, we will face all kinds of pressures, but when you try to overcome many obstacles, there will always be all kinds of troubles that disturb your mind from time to time, such as inner fears and worries, self-denial and external blows, and all kinds of expectations and disappointments. However, life is a feather, which is a normal state. You need to be strong enough to tie it into a beautiful feather duster.

It is increasingly found that hard work and self-discipline are the most beautiful gestures in life. Don't worry about the results you have done and what the expected results will be. As long as you are sure, you must work hard in the established direction. Of course, we should always sum up our own experience and shortcomings, and we should have an attitude of not being ashamed to ask questions and ask for advice modestly.

Learn to care for yourself, be kind to yourself, and strive to reconcile with yourself and the world!

In this world, except birth, illness and death, everything is trivial!