Strengthening my Foundation #4: Emotional Self-Care & February Update

Here is the next update in my series on my self-care experiment called “Strengthening my Foundation”. Based on what I’ve done so far, monthly updates seem to be a pattern. Therefore, we will call this my February update. This month I’m going to dive deeper into emotional self-care. 

You can find the introduction to this series here: https://www.crazycatnerd.com/blog/smf1

Exploring Emotional Self-care

Emotional self-care includes any activities that you do with the intention of improving your emotional and mental health. 

You have probably heard that your mental and emotional health can impact your physical body. It is widely known that stress leads to a higher risk of having a heart attack or stroke, but other examples exist as well. NIH has found a correlation between people who have depression and chronic illness. It seems that people with chronic illness have a higher risk of getting depression, but likewise, people with depression have a higher risk of developing another chronic illness (https://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/publications/chronic-illness-mental-health/index.shtml). There is definitely a solid relationship between emotional and physical well-being. I have some experience with this. In particular, a few years ago my anxiety was causing vertigo (not just dizziness, but the room looked like it was actually spinning), as well as heart palpitations and a general feeling of being unwell. With medication and therapy, I got those symptoms mostly under control. Depression and anxiety also impact my energy levels on a regular basis and to a fairly drastic degree. My symptoms are pretty mild compared to some, but even if you don’t have noticeable symptoms, your emotional and mental health is likely playing a role in your productivity and energy.

Lots of activities can positively impact your emotional and mental health. In fact, we can go a bit “meta” on this idea and say that good self-care in all the different categories (physical, social, spiritual, etc...) can contribute to better mental and emotional health. For example, good physical self-care such as getting a good night's sleep, hydrating properly, eating well and exercising can definitely help improve your emotional well-being. Good social self-care such as going out to dinner with friends, hosting a game night or having a deep conversation with a close friend can also make you feel better.

For the purposes of this post and my “experiment”, I’m going to only consider the activities that are taken with the intention of specifically targeting the improvement of mental or emotional health. These types of activities include therapy, mindfulness, meditation, positive affirmations, gratitude practice and journaling, and many others. Therapy could itself include a number of different types of activities such as traditional talk therapy, cognitive behavioral therapy, emotional brain training, reading about a therapy, seeing a professional, completing workbook exercises and more.

For this first look at emotional self-care, I’m going to focus on a class I already take for my emotional wellness called Nourishing Resilience, a mindfulness challenge I have access to at work, and logging my emotions.

THIS LITTLE CUTIE IS FROM A COLLECTION OF SELF-CARE KITTIES THAT WILL BE POPPING UP AROUND MY BLOG NOW. I COMMISSIONED THEM FROM A WONDERFUL ARTIST AND FRIEND, TAAJA TUCKER, WHO ALSO DID MY HEADER. I WILL BE DOING A WHOLE POST ON THESE LATER, BUT YOU CAN FIND MORE OF HER WORK HERE: HTTPS://WWW.ETSY.COM/SHOP/CUTESCI .

Self-care activities since my last post

As best I can, I have been trying to pay attention to my hydration. I added a hydration rating to my check-in procedure on the Daylio app. I’m not specifically tracking the amount of water I consume, I’m just trying to be more mindful about my thirst and taking action to remedy it more quickly.

This round was off to a rocky start with sleep for a variety of reasons, but over the last two weeks, I’ve made significant progress on getting to bed earlier. To assist with this, I’ve scheduled a reminder on my Google Home which notifies me when I should start getting ready for bed. For February, I am keeping a record of my bedtime in a monthly habit tracker in my bullet journal.

I’ve also been trying to keep up with my yoga practice. I had a significant setback from a sprained ankle, but I’m slowly increasing the number of minutes per week. 

Recent life events & their impacts

I’ve had a lot of things going on recently that have impacted my ability to follow my normal self-care routine. In addition to experiencing loss in my family, I also sprained my ankle and went on vacation. 

My ankle impacted my normal routine the most as it eliminated my walking and yoga practice. My vacation definitely impacted my sleep and my ability to check-in, record my progress and be mindful of my hydration.

The stress of the loss, my injury, insurance (oh the phone calls!), and finances definitely took their toll as well. As my mood shifts, so does my enthusiasm for proper self-care!

Mood, Energy, and Productivity tracking

There was a significant gap in my tracking thanks to my vacation. However, I quickly got back on track and have been recording my mood, productivity, and energy at least a few times a day.

As a reminder, all of my scales go from 1 to 5 with 1 being the ideal situation and 5 being the worst. Last week my mood was a 2.6 with the week before that being a 2.5 which is better than what I recorded in my last post (3.3 & 2.6). I reported my productivity last week as 3.2 and 2.6 for the week before. Both of these numbers are higher than what I was reporting in my last post (3.3 & 3.5). I’ve definitely been feeling more productive and energized recently (despite hobbling around in a walking boot). My energy numbers have also been improving. I went from a 3.1 to a 2.8 to a 2.6!

To be honest, I’m pretty surprised by these results. I definitely have felt a bit better, but I’ve also experienced a lot of anxiety and depression symptoms recently. Of course, there is a lot of bias inherent in self-reporting, so it might be that I’m recording my mood less often when I’m experiencing these down days. However, I do feel like I am seeing some improvement. 

Next actionable steps

Now for the fun part! What am I going to do next? I’m definitely going to continue working on the physical habits we talked about in the last post, which were:

1. Hydration- For now, just trying to be more aware of my thirst, and noting it when I check-in on my Daylio app.

2. Bedtime- I’m going to continue trying to get to bed by 10 pm on most nights.

3. Yoga- I will slowly increase the amount of yoga I do per week.

4. Checking-in- I will continue to monitor how I feel multiple times a day.

I’m also going to add in three activities that will target my emotional and mental health.

1. Nourishing Resilience Class- For a couple of years, I’ve been taking classes and going through workbooks that use a technique based on the work of Laurel Mellin. The work focuses on rewiring the brain. For this activity, I’m going to try to focus on and move further along in that work over the next couple of months. For now, I will commit to Nourishing Resilience classwork for 30 minutes per week.

2. Mindfulness- The university I work at is offering a four-week mindfulness challenge that I am participating in. I will try to work on my mindfulness daily with at least one of the activities of the challenge. 

3. Logging my Emotions- Based on what I have learned, there are eight core feelings: happiness, gratitude, pride, security, sadness, anger, guilt, and fear. I’m going to add these feelings into my daily check-ins that I record. This should help me become more aware of my own feelings.