What does it mean to heal yourself? From time to time, we all struggle with mental or physical health challenges. Learning how to heal ourselves can bring us back to a state of well-being.

Maybe you’ve recently experienced something that challenged you emotionally. Or, maybe you’re experiencing a physical health issue. In addition to modern medicine from your doctor, you may also be interested in learning strategies to heal your mind, body, and soul. Self-healing is something we can do when we’re sick, when we’re well, and everywhere in between. So in this article, we’ll talk about lots of different self-healing techniques so that you can explore, try them out, and see which ones work best for you.

What Is Self-Healing?

Self-healing is defined as the process of recovery from ill-health, usually emotional ill-health, but self-healing can also include accompanying physical health issues (note that emotional and physical ill-health often go together). Self-healing isn’t a term that is generally used in psychological research. However, the process of self-healing from things like trauma, depression, anxiety, and stress are topics that are frequently studied, so we actually know quite a bit about how to heal the mind.

How Do You Self-Heal?

In this article, we’re going to focus mostly on emotional self-healing. Good nutrition and engaging in regular exercise are absolutely essential for self-healing. But the exact diet that is right for your self-healing may be completely different from someone else’s.

The right exercise program also depends on you—what your body can handle, what feels good to you, your current fitness, etc So I’m going to leave you with the task of exploring the right diet and fitness plans for you. But this mindful eating article might help you begin exploring which foods feel self-healing to you.

Self-Healing Techniques

The following self-healing techniques can benefit both your emotional and physical health. They may help you feel a bit bitter immediately but their real power emerges when you practice them regularly.
Self-heal with self-compassion
Oftentimes, we’re harder on ourselves than we are on anyone else. We might even get mad at ourselves for being sick or unable to get over past hurt or rejection. But by being extra hard on ourselves, we do ourselves no good. Instead, we just make it harder for our body and mind to heal.
Self-heal by getting more sleep
Did you know that we do much of our healing while we’re asleep? That’s right—lack of sleep can weaken the immune system making it harder for the body to heal itself

Self-heal by breathing deeper
If we’ve been struggling with stress, trauma, or physical health issues, our sympathetic, “fight-of-flight” system has likely been activated for awhile.
We all have challenges that we need to heal from. Some of us have emotional challenges, others of us have physical challenges, and some of us have both. Luckily, we actually have a lot of power to make positive changes to our well-being. We can shift the way we think and how we treat our bodies. As a result of these efforts, we can begin to heal and recover from the hardships we’ve experienced.