Well… is there?
Self-soothe is the act of calming yourself or intentionally seeking to down regulate your nervous system or decompress. Self-care is any activity that you do deliberately in order to take care of your mental, emotional, and physical health.
You could say self soothing is under the umbrella of self-care but it does not encompass all of it.
It’s helpful to differentiate between these two concepts. It’s taken me a long time to know the difference and see the place for each of these in my life.
I’ve found it necessary to self soothe in moments of the day to day motherhood crazy and then move towards self care practices. If I only ‘self-soothe’ but never intentionally care for myself, I slow the process of growth for me. I’m not really investing into my health as much as I can.
Another thought: self soothing seems to be more reactive/responsive while self care is proactive. Both are intentional and helpful – but self care is being proactive with my whole health, while self soothing is responding to any given situation.
What do you think? Is your self-care actually not seeming to, well, CARE, for your overall health?⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀
P.S. This is a diagram I created for ME. This list isn’t exhaustive and it’s not going to be exactly how yours will look like either. Want some HW? Do this for yourself. Figure out which actions would fall under each then keep a pulse on where your spending most of your time.⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀
