When life feels heavy, self-care is often the first thing to go. Routines collapse, sleep suffers, meals become an afterthought, and the habits that usually keep us grounded quietly disappear. However, it is during these periods of high stress that our physical and emotional health needs the most intentional support.
Self-care during difficult times doesn't look the same as day-to-day self-care, and it shouldn't. The goal shifts from optimization to maintenance: doing enough to protect your baseline, so you have something to draw from.
Here are some strategies for taking care of yourself when life is genuinely hard.
Protect Your Relationship with Screens. Stress and screen time have a complicated relationship. Scrolling, watching, and refreshing can feel like a form of relief in the moment. Still, research on media consumption and mental health consistently links excessive news and social media exposure to elevated anxiety, rumination, and sleep disruption.
Protecting your screen time relationship doesn't mean you need to go completely offline, unless you want to. Instead, it means being intentional with time on the screen. Set realistic boundaries around when and how long you engage with news and social media. Replace some of that time with restorative activities such as time outside, reading a book, or having a conversation with someone you trust.
Keep Your Hands and Mind Busy. There's a reason hobbies feel grounding during stressful periods. Activities that engage both the hands and the mind, cooking, crafting, woodworking, gardening, and building something, activate focus in a way that interrupts the anxiety cycle. They also provide a sense of completion and accomplishment, which stress tends to erode.
If you have an old hobby you've let go of, now is a good time to pick it back up. If you've always wanted to try something new, a period of stress is actually a reasonable moment to start small.
Take It One Task at a Time. Stress distorts our perception of workload. Things that would normally feel manageable can seem insurmountable when we're already overwhelmed. The antidote isn't doing more; it's being deliberate about narrowing things down.
When anxious thoughts start running ahead of you, pause. Take a slow, deep breath. Slow and deep breathing activates the parasympathetic nervous system and reduces the physiological stress response. Then return to the single task at hand. One task at a time.
Allow Yourself to Feel What You're Feeling. One of the most clinically supported principles in stress psychology is emotional acceptance: the willingness to acknowledge difficult feelings rather than suppress or avoid them. Confusion, sadness, frustration, and grief are all normal responses to hard circumstances. Allowing yourself to feel them — rather than pushing through as though everything is fine — is not weakness. It's how the nervous system processes and recovers.
Permit yourself to feel your emotions while also finding moments of joy. Both can be true at the same time.
Start a Gratitude Practice. Research on gratitude consistently shows that a brief, regular practice can meaningfully shift mood, reduce stress hormones, and improve sleep quality over time. The key is specificity: not "I'm grateful for my family" but "I'm grateful my daughter called to check on me today." Specific gratitude has more neurological impact than general gratitude.
Ask for Help. This one is simple to say and hard to do. But if stress, anxiety, or persistent low mood is interfering with your daily functioning, please reach out to your doctor or a mental health professional. You don't need to manage this alone, and no version of self-care replaces professional support when it's genuinely needed.
