June 10th 2019

June 10th 2019

Happy Monday!

It’s been a rainy week in Singapore. How does the weather affect your mood? It’s funny how things like the weather can have an impact on our mood and make it harder to work on being level and moderate.

When you are feeling down or get out of sorts by a bad day or overwhelmed by emotions, how do you self-sooth?

What I find with many of my clients is that they don’t have self-soothing skills. Often what they may do instead to dismiss their negative feeling or state. Other times they may try to ignore it or minimize it. Neither of these options are helpful, and in fact, they can be quite hurtful. When we dismiss, ignore or minimize our negative feelings or states, they will usually sneak up and blow up on us at a later time. They will often come out bigger.

Instead, what you want to do is:

1. Identify the feeling
2. Name it
3. State it as big as it is. This is okay. If something is big to you state it. Remember, we don’t act on feelings, we are acknowledging them so we can figure out what they are trying to tell us and see what to do.
4. Once you have identified and name it, often there may be nothing you can do it in the moment, this is okay to acknowledge
5. Finally, you want to do something comforting to yourself, soothing. You need to make yourself feel better, even if you can’t fix it.

So let’s say you are feeling lonely. You are having dinner alone, yet again. State the problem and name the feelings. Acknowledge it. There is nothing you can immediate do. So instead, after you realize you are lonely and sad, you need to do something nice.

You will need to create a list but some suggestions are:

1. Go for a walk
2. Listen to a comforting song you love
3. Read a poem that makes you feel better
4. Treat yourself to a facial, mani or pedi
5. Foot massage
6. Back Massage
7. A nice cup of coffee
8. Go get flowers to spruce up your dining table
9. Call a friend
10. Watch a funny youtube video
11. Read some funny memes

These are just a few ideas of how to make yourself feel better. Come up with a list so you can turn to it when you are feeling bad or down.

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