Now
What can help me feel and function better right now?
Client resources
The Self-Care Series
Practical resources for caring for yourself now, protecting your well-being, and building a more satisfying life.
Self-care is sometimes understood as doing things that help us feel better in the moment. That is part of it—but only part.
Taking good care of yourself also means making choices that protect your future well-being and investing in the things that help you live well over time.
The resources in this series explore psychological skills and practices that can help with all three.
Three perspectives on self-care
Protect
What can reduce problems and protect my well-being going forward?
Grow
What can help me build more health, capability, connection, enjoyment, and satisfaction in my life?
Good self-care considers all three.
Explore the resources
Each resource focuses on a different psychological skill or process.
There is no required order, and you do not need to use all of them.
You may explore something because it connects with something you are working on in therapy—or simply because it catches your attention and seems relevant to you.
Applied Relaxation
Learn to reduce physical tension and arousal.A practical training sequence for developing the ability to relax more fully, more quickly, and eventually during everyday stress.
Returning to the Present
Bring your attention back to where you want it.Practise noticing when attention has drifted, returning to what is happening now, and becoming better able to stay there.
Getting Unstuck
Understand what is preventing movement and find a workable way forward.Explore the different things that can keep us stuck, identify what may be happening in your situation, and consider what might actually help.
Self-Compassion
Extend some of the care you give to others to yourself.Draw on a capacity you probably already have: responding with understanding and care, wishing yourself well, and putting that care into action.Take it with you
You don't need to spend a lot of time here. Explore what interests you, take an idea or practice that seems useful, and try it in your life.
The point isn't more time on the screen. It's what happens away from it.
Take what seems useful, try it, notice what happens, and come back when you want another look.
If you are using these alongside therapy
Making the resources your own
These resources are intentionally general. Your experience is not.
Some offer skills to practise. Others provide questions, exercises, or different ways of looking at something.
As you explore them, you may notice that something fits particularly well, that something does not fit at all, or that a question opens up something you had not considered before.
If you are using these resources alongside therapy, bring any of that into the conversation.
You and your therapist can elaborate it, question it, adapt it, and consider what it means in the context of your own life.
Explore. Practise. Notice. Make it your own.