The No BS Therapist:

Becca Upton

What is self-care? Realistic coping technique ideas - 3 February 2025

Hi, thanks for stopping by 🙂

The terms self-care and coping techniques are used a lot, so you’ve probably heard them many times before. Self care has been used and google searched more and more since 2016, so it’s worth knowing what it’s actually about. (Whilst self-care and coping techniques are slightly different, they have a lot in common, so here I’m using them to mean the same wider topic.)

So, what does self-care mean? What are you coping with? You may think self-care helps you to cope with difficult emotions, and you’re part way there. Like, if you finished the work day feeling really stressed, angry or sad, you might do something to try to feel better.

But it can also help you to manage your thoughts, behaviours and physical sensations too. For example, you might be overthinking a lot and find it hard to switch off. You might have lots of people pleasing behaviours or a tendency to avoid others. Or maybe, you have really low energy, your heart is beating really fast or you can’t catch your breath.

In any of these examples, you may use something to help you cope with something you’re already experienced (e.g. after a long day at work), and this is probably what most people think of as self-care.

But, it can also be preventative, getting in ahead of time to help yourself out to make the feelings, thoughts, behaviours or sensations (symptoms) less likely to happen, or less intense when they do happen. It’s quite a good idea to use self-care in both of these ways if you can - both reactive and proactive.

So, if you think of some examples of self-care, what comes to mind? Maybe something quite specific, formal or fluffy like meditation or journaling. Self-care can be this kind of thing if that’s what works for you, but it doesn’t have to be. After all, you’re probably here because you want to know examples of self-care and coping that are more realistic.

The bottom line is, self-care is anything that reduces or prevents symptoms for you. Or, anything you do which is just for you (but, it can help others too - e.g. meeting up with a friend).

It’s not your self-care if it doesn’t do that for you. So if someone else has great self-care but it doesn’t seem to help you, or it’s not your kinda thing in the first place, that’s fine. There will always be something that works for you.

For example, if you felt tired when you got up this morning, you probably had a tea or coffee at some point to reduce your tiredness. This is a perfect example of self-care that’s more low key and down to earth than you might expect.

Also, self-care doesn’t have to be the same every day. For example, if you wake up feeling like crap, sometimes the best self-care options are to get out of the house, go for a walk, meet a friend, or do some chores. Because you might feel better to achieve something.

But on another day when you wake up feeling like crap, the best self-care options are to stay in your pjs, watch some old, comforting TV or films and order a takeaway. Because you might feel better allowing yourself these - I call these a lovely bit of fuck all days.

You may not realise it, but you already use self-care and coping techniques. When it gets into the colder months, you get out your jumpers and slippers. This is you responding to a physical sensation (cold) with something that will help you (more layers = feel warmer). It’s as simple as that.

Some things we’re good at recognising and responding to, like this. But in other cases, we may not realise a symptom starts or changes, or we may be aware of it but not to do anything about it.

Sometimes the right self-care for you is giving yourself something comforting and reassuring. Sometimes it’s doing something you don’t really want to do, but you know you’ll feel better afterwards. Sometimes it’s just accepting the symptoms you’re experiencing and letting them happen for a bit.

You’ll feel different on different days, and so you’ll need different self-care on different days. But also, you might not get it right sometimes, and that’s okay too.

Just a few easy, realistic self-care ideas:

As you can see from these examples, self-care doesn’t have to be fluffy, going overboard, taking all your time, or a massive commitment. Hopefully, this has cleared things up for you a little bit and given you some ideas to help you look after yourself a little better.

I’ll be writing more soon about realistic ways to make self-care actually happen.

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