4 Handy Steps to Help You Practice Self Empathy
Self-empathy, or being capable of having empathy for yourself, helps you calm yourself during conflict or when you’re feeling stressed, angry, frustrated, anxious, afraid and other strong emotions.
Self-empathy, or being capable of having empathy for yourself, helps you calm yourself during conflict or when you’re feeling stressed, angry, frustrated, anxious, afraid and other strong emotions.
Self-empathy also helps you get clear about your needs and the needs of others so that you can make choices and decisions that support harmony, cooperation and connection.
According to Marshall Rosenberg Phd, author of “Nonviolent Communication: A Language of Life,” in order to have self empathy, the following 4 steps will help you connect to your own self empathy:
1. The awareness that you need self empathy in a given moment.
Your amygdala is activated and shifting you into the fight/flight/freeze state of your nervous system — therefore, the first step is to actually learn to become aware that you’re entering this state.
Your amygdala is activated when you:
Have tension, constriction or unpleasant sensations in your face, jaw, neck, chest or stomach.
You have thoughts that are judgmental, angry, fearful, blaming, critical or demanding.
You react and do or say things that lead to conflict and disconnection, rather than being able to respond in ways that lead to connection.
2. The willingness and time to go inward and observe your mind and body with compassion and presence.
What emotions are you feeling? Where do you feel this in your body? Many people feel emotions like stress, anxiety, frustration, anger as contractions in their jaw or abdomen, some feel a tightening in their throats or pain in their backs. At first this feels impossible to tease apart. So the two questions we can ask ourselves to begin with is: what am I feeling and where do I feel this in my physical body?
3. The ability to name sensations, emotions, and needs and distinguish them from the thoughts, stories, interpretations, and strategies or expectations.
So many of us don’t differentiate an emotion from a thought or story we tell ourselves about another person or situation. A feeling is different than a sensation. A feeling or emotion is different from a thought or the story of something that happened.
4. The time and willingness to stay with your sensations, feelings and needs and hold them with warm, compassionate presence.
When we connect with our body and simply “listen,” we are giving ourselves attention, which is the most powerful form of self empathy and self love. We don’t have to fix anything, change anything or do anything. Simply feel our body and allow whatever sensation is there to be there. For more detailed information about his actual self empathy process, check out Marshall Rosenberg’s book, “Nonviolent Communication: A Language of Life”.
Your body has the answers
You can begin a self empathy practice just by listening to your body. Your body is your best indicator of when you begin to enter into an activated state. Most of us push these feelings aside and distract ourselves, pour a glass of wine, work out, check our phones, and so on.
But all distractions do is delay the anxious or stressful feelings until later … and they ALWAYS come back.
Incorporating mini practices into your day that help you sense and feel your body will not only grow your body awareness skill, but help you feel calmer and more grounded by helping you to regulate your nervous system. These small moments of attending to yourself are self empathy and they make a difference. To learn more about how self care practices are the first step to practicing self empathy as well as regulating your nervous system, read this article called “What is self care. How to prioritize your wellbeing in daily life.”
Here's the Technique You Need to Calm Your Mind and Transform Your Emotional State
Havening is a psychosensory technique that calms the nervous system and can help you feel grounded, calm and peaceful.
Havening is NOT psychotherapy or talk therapy, and it is always recommended that you are working with a health care provider, especially if you are on medication. This is a form of somatic therapy and helps give relief on a subconscious level as well as providing you with tools for self soothing as a self care practice.
Havening is a psychosensory technique that calms the nervous system and can help you feel grounded, calm and peaceful. Psychosensory techniques are a form of therapeutic technique that use sensory stimuli to affect psychological and emotional health.
Dr. Ronald Ruden, a Harvard trained medical doctor who specializes in emotional trauma, neuroscience, and addictions, is the creator of Havening.
Over 30 years ago, he observed how, in most cases, a distressed infant is soothed quickly by gentle stroking on his back. Ruden researched the benefits of intentional touch on different areas of the body, concluding that when the upper arms, palms of the hands, and face are stroked gently and repeatedly, Delta waves are created in the body.
Delta brainwaves are the slowest brain waves, and they release oxytocin, dopamine, seratonin and GABA, also known as the “happiness hormones,” into the blood stream. These hormones are responsible for a neurochemical reaction that releases traumatically encoded memories that are stored in the amygdala, which leave a person feeling calmer, centered and resilient.
Havening uses sensory input in order to alter a thought, mood, or behavior. It’s believed that when you perceive an event or experience as traumatic or stressful, it becomes immutably encoded in your brain and body, often with life-changing consequences. Havening is designed to de-traumatize your nervous system by removing, altering, or diffusing the intensity of the emotional memory of your traumatic or stressful life event and its negative effects.
Havening is a somatic modality that is designed to help overcome problems caused by traumatic or stressful encoding, and it uses touch and the senses as its main tools.
In a session, a client has the opportunity to release the intense feelings around a traumatic event like an automobile accident or even a relationship or work-related situation — anything that has been disruptive and you feel its influence on your life in some uncomfortable way.
It also helps release familiar long standing emotions or behaviors such as constant fear, guilt, shame, worry or, for example, a familiar feeling like “waiting for the other shoe to drop” that have been with you ever since you can remember. Havening Technique® is designed to ease symptoms of chronic stress and anxiety. To learn more about what survival nervous system responses feel like, click here.
If you’d like to try self-havening at home, and feel the self-soothing effects of the “happiness hormones” for yourself, check out this blog post “Havening self care practice.”
Havening can benefit emotional stress in connection with:
Nervousness
Persistent worrying
Everyday stress
Feeling overwhelmed
Test anxiety
Fear about illness
Fear of heights
Afraid of the dark
Fear of flying
Fear of animals
Fear of abandonment
Fear of being out of control
Grieving
Caregiver support
Death of a loved one or pet
Letting go of past relationships
Abandonment
Physical or verbal assault
Childhood memories
Bullying
Traumatic accidents
Witnessing disturbing events
Relationships with parents, partners, bosses or colleagues, children
Anger, frustration
Guilt
Sadness
Shame, humiliation
Body image issues
Physical discomfort associated with stress
Sports performance enhancement
Emotional resilience and wellbeing
Transform Your Mind and Mood: How Gratitude Rewires Your Brain for Happiness
Doing this practice regularly not only shifts your mood, but it actually changes the neural pathways in your brain.
Doing a gratitude practice regularly not only shifts your mood, but it actually changes the neural pathways in your brain.
At first, and especially if you’re new to this sort of thing, you may find you have resistance to this. You might think “how can this even work?” Or you might feel it’s too new age or woo woo — not practical or action-based.
I thought this too, when I first heard Oprah talk about it many years ago. “How can I feel grateful for things when so much needs improvement?” I thought.
But what I know now is that the practice of gratitude, or learning to see all the small things that are actually working well in life, is actually a practice that not only shifts my mood to feeling calm and peaceful, but I’ve begun to see almost effortless expansion in many areas of my own life.
I’m sure you’ve heard the saying “What you focus on grows.” Well this is putting that Universal law into practice. When we start to see what’s going well and put our focused attention on those places, regardless of how small or seemingly trivial these areas are, we’re priming our brain to look for the good in all areas.
Don’t get me wrong — some days, trying to come up with anything that I can feel gratitude for can feel hard. It’s on these days that I go to little things, like “my spicy chai latte from Meraki Cafe was so good,” or to a memory with my kids when they were little at Sandy Point beach in Massachusetts. Your brain doesn’t know if you’re being grateful for something big like winning $100K or a happy memory from the past. In fact, your neural circuitry sees it all as the same thing.
THREE practices
If you’d like to ease into this practice before you commit a large amount of time, I’ve included two different practices — one is a mini practice that you can do throughout the day if you like. The other is a longer morning or evening practice.
Do this when
You want to shift your mood or raise your vibration
You want to add a self care practice into your life
You want to attract more love, abundance and peace into your life
You feel fearful, worried or anxious about the future
You want to regulate your nervous system (For some background information about your nervous system, click here.)
Benefits
You’ll feel more peaceful and expanded
You’ll have a clear experience—both emotionally and physically— that you’re being supported
It brings you into the present moment (and out of the future or past)
You’ll physically change the “worry and anxiety” neural pathways in your brain to “trusting, loving and calm.” The longer you write and bask in the feelings of gratitude, you reinforce these neural pathways. You actually train your brain to look for good vs. what’s “wrong” and stressful.
Practice #1 (short and sweet)
Write down 3 things that happened in the past hour or two (or write a memory from the past) that you’re grateful for. It can be as simple as “My coffee was good,” or “I love how the sun felt on my face when I walked outside.”
You can set your phone alarm throughout the day to keep bringing your mind back to noticing or searching for “the good.” Practicing in this way begins to change the neural pathways and reinforce them.
Practice #2 (longer, possibly morning or evening)
Journal for 10-20 minutes about 3-5 things you’re grateful for. Allow yourself to really FEEL the gratitude and and linger in the feeling. ABSORB the feeling. The longer you can remain in the “felt sense” of gratitude, even if you’re thinking about something or someone from many years ago, the more neural pathways you’re creating and practicing/reinforcing.
As with any practice, the more consistently you practice, the more “results” you’ll notice. Doing a practice every day for 3-5 minutes is more valuable than doing a practice for 60 minutes 1X/week. Make this easy for yourself and enjoy!
Practice #3 (this can take as long or short as you like)
This is from a method called HeartMath®. There are 3 steps. You can do all three steps to make it a gratitude practice or only do steps 1 and 2 to bring parasympathetic coherence (rest and digest) throughout your entire body and nervous system.
Step 1: Focus your attention on the area of your heart. This can be on your anatomical heart or the general space in your chest where your heart resides, or any image of your heart.
Step 2: Begin to breathe in and out of your heart space. You just imagine your breath flowing in and out of your heart or heart space as you breathe.
You can stay with this or turn this into a gratitude practice with Step 3….
Step 3: Allow your imagination to call forth an image or memory of a time when you felt gratitude for something in your life. Connect to that feeling and then bring it into your heart space as you continue to breathe in and out of your heart.
After practicing any of these options, always take a moment at the end to feel yourself — your body, how you feel emotionally, and observe the state of your nervous system. Do you feel calmer, more relaxed, more grounded, safer, more neutral? Just observe yourself without needing it to be any special way.