Self-Care Resources

General Approaches to Self-Care

Three Types of Self-Care: Preventive, Acute, and Rescue: I tend to think of self-care in the same categories as I do migraine medications. Like migraine meds, I (try to) use preventive self-care daily, acute self-care when I need to “treat” a stressor, and rescue for when I’m down and out, either emotionally or with a migraine attack (or both!).

How self-care (the right kind) can help you: This article is a general approach to self-care and suggests questions to ask yourself to find what types of self-care may be most nourishing for you. (Although I wrote this article recently, it feels outdated now that the world has been flipped on its head by the coronavirus. Still, it may be helpful when you’re ready to start a new or revamp an old self-care practice.)

Help for Coping With Coronavirus-Related Stressors

7 Migraine Coping Skills to Help Manage COVID-19 Stress: I wrote this for Migraine.com after realizing how many of the migraine coping skills I have that have been invaluable for managing the stress and grief of life during a global pandemic.

Six Daily Questions to Ask Yourself in Quarantine: These questions come from the Greater Good Science Center, a center at Berkeley dedicated to the science of a meaningful life. If you’re on social media, you’ve almost certainly seen them. They’re a great way to bring your attention to critical aspects of wellbeing and meaning despite the chaos around us.

Breathing Exercises

This video is a short instruction to show what it looks like when you’re breathing into your belly. Her hands move so much that it’s a great illustration of what belly (aka diaphragmatic) breathing looks like.

Relaxation for Wellness: Dr. Dawn Buse did a Facebook Live session for the American Migraine Foundation about the stress of migraine on the body and the added weight of the stress of COVID-19. She recommends a daily wellness routine to give your body and mind a break and guides you through a short guided visual imagery exercise.

Guided Meditations

You can find tons of guided meditations online, including many with video of soothing nature scenes. I’m a fan of audio meditations that I can listen to in bed with my eyes closed. Here are some of my favorites:

Jack Kornfield’s guided meditations: Jack Kornfield trained as a Buddhist monk and has a PhD in psychology. He is wise and insightful and his guided meditations have been a balm for me in some of my most difficult times. This page has a lot of choices for guided audio or video meditations. His website also has articles he’s written, which I recommend as his perspective is so often soothing.

Dawn Buse’s guided meditations: Dawn Buse is a pain psychologist who has dedicated her career to helping people with migraine. Her guided meditations address the unique needs of people with headache disorders and chronic pain as they were created with us in mind.

Carolyn McManus’s guided meditations: Carolyn McManus taught the mindfulness-based stress reduction course I took in 2008. Her guided meditations, particularly the body scan, were a great introduction to a concept that was totally unknown to me at the time.

Self-Compassion (for Limiting Negative Self-Talk)

Attendees of the virtual RetreatMigraine session I did on self-care on April 18, 2020 brought up that avoiding negative self-talk would be a form of self-care. Kristin Neff’s book on self-compassion helped me a lot with this. She also has a lot of great free resources on her website: Kristin Neff’s self-compassion website. And she has partnered with Christopher Germer, another self-compassion researcher, to create the Center for Mindful Self-Compassion, which also has a lot of great free resources. They co-wrote The Mindful Self-Compassion Workbook, which I also found helpful. [The book links are Amazon affiliate links.]

Last updated April 18, 2020