Self-Care or Self-Comfort? And Why Does the Difference Matter?

Everyone has heard about self-care but not a lot of people really know what it means. This leads most of us to confuse it with self-comfort which ends up doing more harm than good. So here we will tell you the difference and how to avoid unintentional self-comfort.

What is self-comfort?

In short, self-comfort is a way to avoid difficult emotions and thoughts by preoccupying our time with any distraction. It can be anything – work, watching Netflix, reading, playing video games, scrolling on social media, or even studying. The real difference between engaging in a hobby or being productive vs. self-comfort is whether you are doing them to avoid your feelings or not.

Most people choose self-comfort because it is easy and rewarding in the short term, especially when it is something that also makes you feel productive in the moment, like doing chores or working. However, as soon as you stop avoiding your feelings, they come back a lot stronger. Researchers have found that they come along with additional discomfort such as stress, headaches and insomnia. This is because avoidance behaviours negatively impact our stress regulation and physical health.

And that is just the physical part of how it can negatively impact us. Researchers have also found that avoidant behaviour negatively effects our mental wellbeing. For example, if we are avoiding making a big decision using self-comfort, it can stagnate our progression in life, and we can end up pushing away people trying to support us due to not wanting to confront the situation or the feelings. Over contexts in which we are likely to self-comfort to avoid our feelings are grief, a major life change, or disappointment.

What is self-care?

Self-care on the other hand is a way to confront difficult feelings, this can take a form of journaling, talking to someone or doing any other activity that lets you think about and accept your feelings. To continue from the previous example, we could take time to think/write down what we want from life, what is most important to us and what principles we want to continue to stand by. Then we can compare this with how well that aligns with each decision.

This means that self-care just like self-comfort can be done using almost any activity, we just need to find something that gives us space to think about and feel our feelings. For some this can be going for a walk, doing skincare, writing down your thoughts, drawing, or just talking to a friend.

How can we avoid spiralling due to difficult emotions?

Another reason we often choose self-comfort over self-care is because we are scared that confronting these difficult feelings will lead to us spiralling into constant state of sadness that we won’t be able to come back from. The truth about this, however, is that avoiding them is exactly what is leading us there and confronting them is exactly what will help us leave this looming sadness and stress.

Why is it important to choose self-care?

It isn’t easy or always clear how to choose self-care, it takes a lot of intentional choices and commitment. But it doesn’t mean it’s impossible, because it can always start from something small. Such small action can be an exercise that takes a single minute:

1. Place your hand where you feel most discomfort, such as heart, stomach, or throat.
2. Take a deep breath and slowly exhale.
3. Let yourself feel if there is any change in the part of your body you are holding.

This might seem trivial but doing it every now and then can provide that small window of clarity we need to do what we are about to do with intention rather than running on autopilot.

The last thing to mention is that comforting ourselves isn’t bad, especially if something distressing that we are avoiding happened very recently. It can give us time to collect ourselves, the important part is that we do not let it take lead, we need to make sure that we, it being just ourselves or with the help of others, notice when it starts doing a lot more harm than good to us.