Lift the weight of emotions, soothe your sensitive nature and harness your empathic gift through the four pillars of self-care. The four pillars will help you harness and strengthen your empathic skills while reducing stress and distraction. Here’s an overview of the physical, mental, emotional and spiritual pillars followed by how to enhance your self-care in each area.
Pillar #1: Physical: Care for your body, ongoing health, home environment and safety are examples of physical needs. Your physical wellbeing relates to the tangible aspects of your daily life from how you sleep, eat and exercise, to your living situation, and safety. Additionally, your physical needs are a “keystone” pillar, meaning if your food, drink, shelter, and sleep needs are met, the other needs benefit. Finally, your physical needs are lifelong and require routine check in and maintenance for optimal health balance.
Pillar #2: Mental: Care for your psychological states, thoughts and self-talk. Mental health needs are related to and include emotional needs, but additionally consist of psychological and social needs. Psychological needs include autonomy, self-sovereignty, perceptions of the quality of your social connections and standings, and sense of competence and ability to overcome challenges. Social needs include love, friendship, sense of belonging, and ability to form intimate attachments.
Pillar #3: Emotional: Care and tending to feelings of fear, anger, love, anxiety, sorrow, joy and many others. It’s important to understand that though we as humans rely on others to enrich our emotional experience, it’s up to each individual to tend and care for their own emotional health, and not to expect others to do the heavy lifting for you. Emotional needs rise and fall depending on life circumstances, hormonal shifts, and exposure to physical health.
Pillar #4: Spiritual: Care for your relationship to the meaningful things in life such as connection, creativity, and faith. Spiritual care is related to a sense of purpose, and fulfillment. Challenging experiences are made meaningful by determining how they helped you grow, what lessons came from them and how we use the elixir of those lessons to share our experiences with others. Let’s dive deeper into understanding how to incorporate more self-care related to each pillar.
Physical Self Care
The way you care for your body has a huge impact on your wellbeing and empathic abilities. All four pillars of self-care are connected. Your relationship to body health is the foundation of mental, emotional and spiritual health. The way you feel about your body health can be complicated. Many empaths and highly sensitive people have a cruel and harsh inner dialogue about how we perceive our bodies, especially if you have previous trauma. Self-care requires a gentle, loving, accepting approach as an antithesis to the habitual demands we make on our bodies.
There are many things we need to do to care for our bodies: Eating healthy food, sleeping enough and exercise are all necessary. Your approach to caring for your body begins with your self-talk. You can transform your relationship to your body simply by witnessing how you speak to yourself. Notice when your inner dialogue is judgmental, or unkind. What are you willing to accept about your body in order to develop more loving self-talk? What are some outdated ideas or phrases that arise when you are caring for your body? What loving self-talk can you replace those old ideas with?
Another aspect of your physical self-care is tending your environment and dealing with clutter. Clutter is a form of unconscious chaos. It’s toxic for an empath. It represents decisions you have put off, abandoned projects and areas of dysfunction. No one wants to live in clutter, but it easily happens when we don’t have time to deal with the flow of things that come into our home or feel overwhelmed. There is a need to self-soothe by accomplishing and acquiring stuff. We bring things into our home with often little thought about where it will go, how we will care for it and what need it resolves for us. The result is more work to integrate these items into our lives. Solving clutter by buying more stuff is not a solution.
We’ve all experienced the peaceful feeling from having an organized drawer, or decluttered countertop. Housework can even be a moving meditation as you go through the sensations of your hands in warm dishwater, feeling soft towels right out of the dryer, or wiping dust form a lampshade. However, doing routine housework is different than going through clutter. There is an emotional component to decluttering. Empaths might feel shame for overspending on that blender you never use, or the fancy bow blouse you’ve never worn. Before you toss or donate something, you have to make a decision about it, which can cause decision fatigue that feels like going blank. Be sure to start small with your decluttering and be nurturing along the way.
Mental Self Care
Caring for you mental health is tantamount to exercise for your body. For an empath, it’s an essential part of wellbeing. Many things effect mental health including what going on socially in your life, stress levels, and environment, so the conscious attention to the self-care need is critical for maintaining balance. Part of the self-care necessary is determining your social needs. Too much can leave you depleted, too little can leave you feeling isolated. The key to self-care lies in the quality of your social engagement. When you want to connect, choose coffee with a few friends. Focus on the quality of the connection rather than the duration of the event. Learn what strikes the right balance of social exposure for you to maintain your mental health self-care.
Emotional Self-Care
As thoughts are to the brain, emotions are to the body. We can’t control our thoughts, only our relationship to our thoughts. We can’t control how our emotions rise and fall, but sometimes we can choose our behavior. Emotional wellbeing for empaths requires self-care and tending our emotional balance and the behaviors. Recognize the signs of emotional exhaustion which include experiencing a short fuse and impatience when it comes to daily engagement, lack of concern for your self-care, physical symptoms of fatigue, and low motivation. These symptoms signal low happy-brain chemicals like serotonin, oxytocin, endorphins and dopamine.
Here is a breakdown of how these brain chemicals contribute to balancing your moods and emotions.
- Serotonin- You experience this chemical during high social status and feelings of importance to social groups. Low serotonin can contribute to feelings of impatience and a short fuse.
- Oxytocin- You experience this chemical when you bond with people, animals, and babies to facilitate feelings of trust. Low oxytocin levels can result in lack of concern for others and self.
- Endorphins-You experience a euphoria form endorphins when your body is masking physical pain from overdoing exercise, to pushing yourself when you’ve had no sleep. Low endorphin production can be experiences as fatigue.
- Dopamine- You experience a feeling of success and accomplishment from dopamine. When your dopamine levels are low, you can experience lack of motivation.
To integrate self-care, create activities that help to restore these depleted, precious resource such as cuddling your pets to restore oxytocin, or finishing a project or checklist to access dopamine.
Spiritual Self-Care
How you derive purpose and fulfillment from your life is an exciting part of being human. Self-care for the spirit is personal and meaningful. What we do to create meaning out of challenging experiences highlights out sense of purpose. When empaths are spiritually depleted, your sense of purpose feels diminished, and creative blocks occur. Revitalize and replenish your creative energy and connection to something bigger than you to manage spiritual self-care.
If you are a musician, play music. If you are an artist, make art. Write, draw, problem solve, help others, get inspired. Tap into your creativity and drop into the process and flow.
The flow state is described as the feeling of being immersed, and fully engaged in an activity in which you lose a sense of time, and other needs. For empaths, doing activities that access the flow state creates meaning and a sense of purpose and is a great way to support spiritual self-care.
