The Sacred Donning of Leg Warmers: an Ode to Self Soothing

The post this week focuses on the tender art of self soothing. Self soothing is a practice where we learn to comfort ourselves with supportive, healthful behaviors. It’s helpful and adaptive to be able to identify low level stressors and relieve them in a productive way.

Having grown up in the years before the internet, there were long periods in childhood where managing my time was up to me. In the summer, I remember many days where it was hard to occupy myself from sun up to sun down. I had to learn how to tolerate loneliness and boredom and get along with kids I didn't really like.

Fast forward to life in a pandemic and there are obvious parallels. As I reprise those long summer days, I notice how much more difficult it is to soothe myself as an adult. There are far more opportunities for unhealthy distraction, and it’s easy to turn anything into an obsession or addiction.

So what does healthy self-soothing look like?

First off, it’s important to distinguish between the need to calm down and the need to process a tough situation. Simple discomforts like feeling hot or cold, tired or overloaded are great opportunities to practice self soothing. None of these things are threatening to our overall mental health. but they can be a big drag on our energetic resources.

Case in point: after weeks of being chronically chilled, I decided to tackle the late January deep freeze with a new pair of LEG WARMERS. This tiny 80’s replay has turned out to be a major self-soothing victory. I am not only significantly warmer: I feel far more cheerful.

Deeper work is required when circumstances have moved past malaise and into distress. We can no longer reset ourselves easily: all of the cheery short term fixes feel more like band-aids than relief.

Ten minutes of Savasana when we are spiraling just isn't going to cut it.

In this case, the gloves have to come off. We shelve our self-soothing practices and move into examination and integration mode– sometimes by ourselves, sometimes with professionals.

After years of Covid, we’ve all had to do a bunch of that.

The value of self soothing is that it can help us get calm enough to see where we are and what we need. As we learn to resolve our basic discomforts, we start to tolerate day-to-day dissatisfaction and build more resilience. When self soothing fails, we can trust that we have done our best and can then move swiftly to pursue wise counsel. Most importantly, offering kindness to ourselves when we genuinely need it increases our sense of care without the baggage of “self care.”

Also, I still recommend Savasana.