Your Self Care Is Affected By How You Think, Feel, and Act

Practicing good self care is easiest when you have healthy thoughts, feelings, and actions. Think about it. When you are flooded with negative thoughts, it creates negative emotions and you often end up losing any and all motivation. This happens all of the time when people start trying to practice self care. When you let negativity guide the way, you end up defeated, overwhelmed, and convinced that you just can’t do it.

Change Your Self Care by Changing Your Thoughts

From a Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) perspective, your thoughts dictate your feelings and your actions follow suit. In this equation, your thoughts are the determining variable. How you think about self care affects how you feel about it and ultimately what you do about it.T

Try to bring awareness to the words you tell yourself inside your head about self care. You may find that you are experiencing a lot of negative thoughts. You may be thinking that it is too expensive, or time consuming, or too exhausting, or just all around too selfish. If any of these thoughts are in your head, then you are setting yourself up to experience negative feelings and this rarely often leads to any positive actions. Instead of just throwing it all out or starting completely over, intentionally taking time to adjust our thoughts can help get us back on track to feeling healthier and eventually being more motivated to practice self care.

Putting It All Together

So what does this all mean? How does it work? Well, first ask yourself a few questions. What comes to your mind when you think about the word self care? Is it mostly positive, or more negative? The trick is to keep the positive and challenge the negative. Try writing out all of the things you think about self care. Look back over them with fresh eyes and see if they are really true. Are these thoughts helpful? Untrue and unhelpful thoughts take up precious space in your head and keep you from focusing on your positive and helpful thoughts. So when you notice any untrue or unhelpful thoughts popping up, try your best to either change the thought, or just get rid of it and let go. Doing this will lead to better feelings and ultimately it all leads to better self care.