Self-Soothing Habits: Healthy Alternatives to Negative Behaviors

When you have a sex addiction, you use sexual behaviors to cope with negative emotions and calm your nervous system. But once you are in recovery from sex addiction, you have to find more positive ways to deal with those emotions. That’s where self-soothing habits come in. These habits are healthy alternatives to the negative behaviors you’re trying to stop.

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What Is Self-Soothing?

Self-soothing is the ability to calm yourself during moments of stress, anxiety, or emotional distress. It involves using healthy coping strategies to regulate emotions without relying on external validation or harmful behaviors. 

Benefits of self-soothing include:

• Emotional Regulation. Learning to calm yourself helps you manage stress, anxiety, and overwhelming emotions healthily.
• Increased Resilience. Self-soothing strengthens your ability to cope with difficult situations without relying on external validation or unhealthy habits, like casual sex or viewing pornography.
• Improved Mental Health. Learning these techniques and turning to them instead of behaviors that aren’t serving you reduces symptoms of anxiety, depression, and emotional distress over time.
• Better Decision-Making. When you know ways to better cope with your emotions, it allows you to automatically choose different behaviors, making room for clearer thinking and rational responses.
• Enhanced Self-Awareness. Recovery is about understanding and embracing your more authentic self. Self-soothing encourages mindfulness and a deeper understanding of personal emotional triggers.
• Stronger Relationships. When you’re more in control, you’ll improve relationships by learning to prevent emotional outbursts or unhealthy dependency on others for comfort.

Why Self-Soothing Helps in Sex Addiction Recovery

Self-soothing plays a crucial role in sex addiction recovery because it helps you manage emotional distress, reduce compulsive urges, and develop healthier coping mechanisms. 

When recovering from sex addiction, self-soothing can help you:

• Regulate Triggers. Self-soothing provides healthier ways to cope with hypersexuality triggers, helping you avoid negative behaviors you’re working to leave behind.
• Build Resilience. Sobriety isn’t always comfortable. Self-soothing helps strengthen your ability to tolerate discomfort without acting on harmful urges.
• Maintain Long-Term Recovery. Developing self-soothing habits fosters a sense of control and empowerment, which is essential for maintaining sobriety.

Self-Soothing Habits to Consider

You can self-soothe in many different ways. It’s all about identifying approaches that serve you well and practicing them until they become habits. Here are some options to consider.

Adopt a Calming Word or Phrase

Having a word or a phrase that helps center you when dealing with stress is key to learning how to better manage your emotions. You can decide on a phrase or word by taking note of phrases that make you feel at ease when you are reading, listening to a podcast, or even talking to your therapist or a loved one.

Exercise

Adding just 30 minutes of exercise to your daily routine can improve how you feel physically and mentally. Exercise releases the same endorphins as many of the negative behaviors you may have been engaging in. So, exercise can help give you the same feelings without the negative aftermath.

Focus on Nutrition

Your eating habits can have an effect on your overall mood and play an important role in how your body responds to everyday stresses. If you increase your healthy food intake, you will start to react to everyday stresses in a new way. Nutrition is important for recovery in a lot of ways. When you feed your body and mind well, you feel better.

Practice Stress Management

Stress management is a broad term that employs techniques and psychotherapies that can help you manage and control your stress levels. When you are stressed, refer to the Four A’s of Stress Management:

• Avoid. Avoid things that cause you stress. For example, if rush hour traffic raises your blood pressure, you can avoid that stressor by taking a different route or leaving for work earlier. The same tactic can be applied to people and unwanted requests — sit further away from the coworker who bugs you in a meeting and learn to say “no” to requests for which you truly don’t have interest or time.
• Alter. It’s unrealistic to think you can avoid everything that causes you stress. When you can’t, try to alter your way of thinking about it. For example, instead of lamenting on how much you hate being stuck in traffic, focus on having more time to listen to the podcast you enjoy. How you frame things, even to yourself, matters.
• Accept. You probably won’t always have the ability to avoid or alter situations. In those moments, it might be best to try to learn to accept and practice positive self-talk, forgive, and find someone to talk to about what is bothering you.
• Adapt. Redefine what success means to you. Would it be unbearable to make a frozen lasagna instead of making dinner from scratch six nights a week? Some other techniques to help you adapt would be to stop thinking, look at the bigger picture, and reframe any issues that you are having.

Spend Time in Nature

At times, nothing is better than a fresh breath of air. Smelling the fresh air can be just the self-soothing you need. Spending time in nature can help you reduce stress. The next time you feel stressed, spend some time in the sun. A little bit of vitamin D can go a long way.

Be Mindful

Getting in touch with and understanding your feelings can help you make sense of and process what you’re going through. Mindfulness can look like deep breathing, meditation, or even journaling. The bottom line is to process through your emotions, instead of attempting to avoid them.

Enjoy Relationships

While many people need time to themselves when they are feeling particularly stressed or emotional, it’s not a long-term coping mechanism. Ensuring that you are taking time to nurture the relationships in your life is important. Plan ahead to go on a date night with your spouse or make plans to catch up with friends. Social support is key to overcoming addiction.

Offer Service to Others

Helping others can have a positive effect on your life. An act of kindness can make you feel good about yourself. You never know what kind of day a person is having, and by helping them, you could be doing them a great service. You may feel joy from helping others, which in turn can help you overcome stress. 

Engage in Spiritual/Religious Involvement

Engaging in spiritual or religious practices that are closely related to your values and beliefs can be beneficial to recovery. By doing this, it allows you to connect with something greater than yourself and helps you to stay centered and grounded. If you never thought about your values or beliefs, now is a good time to do it. 

How Therapy Can Help 

Learning how to avoid using sex or other negative behaviors to self-soothe isn’t as easy as deciding just simply to do something else instead. To recover from sex addiction, you need to address the root cause of that addiction and heal from it. That probably means working with a mental health professional. 

When you’re ready for support, Begin Again Institute is here to help. Our 14-Day Men’s Intensive and our 14-Day Christian Men’s Intensive fully immerse you in treatment that includes individual and group therapies and education to help you understand the cause of the addiction and heal from it. 

Contact BAI today if you’re ready to start your recovery.

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