If you’ve been self-harming for a while and wanting to stop, you’ve probably looked up “things to do instead of cutting” before. You may have looked at those long lists of things and wondered, “which one of these should I even do?”
The reason I bring this up is because it’s quite common to be overrun with a long list of things posed as alternatives, not knowing which one will work for you.
Maybe you try out the first one on the list, and then go in sequential order if it doesn’t work. Or maybe you go in random order— heck, this one and that one sound interesting. And then none of them work. You find yourself still wanting to self-injure, and in some cases, you find your craving to be even worse than it was to start with.
So, what gives? It’s not as if you’re not trying. I mean, look you’ve tried a dozen different things already and still you ended up hurting yourself.
Addiction is difficult
I don’t have to tell you, but addiction isn’t easy. You get into destructive habits and in many cases you’re not really sure how or why you’ve developed them.
It isn’t enough to just say, “I want to stop cutting”, and at first you might be pretty lousy at knowing how to take care of yourself when the urge comes on.
This is what causes the random-fire approach— ignorance. If you don’t know yourself then you feel you have no other choice but to try a bunch of different things, hoping one will work.
A slower, more accurate alternative
And that’s what I’m hoping to give you an alternative to today. I will be giving you a list of things that can be substituted for self-injury, sure. But I hope to explain them in a way that doesn’t encourage a rapid-fire approach.
That being said, if you’re looking for a quick-scan article of distractions from your trigger, this isn’t it. However, perhaps you would like to bookmark this page for another time, when you have more space between you and your distress.
The approach I’m offering here isn’t a quick one, but it’s one that can help streamline the ceasing of self injury, to help you sort yourself out faster overall, as well as help your urge to diminish over time.
Study yourself, study your addiction
Just as no two individuals are alike, no two addictions are alike. You can read online or listen to psychologists go on and on about the possible reasons people would want to hurt themselves, but actually, it’s more important to figure out why you do. Not why “someone might”.
Different emotions, same behavior
It’s been made clear that everyone who self harms, does it for different reasons. In other words, even if you know other people who have the same addiction, they are getting different things from it than you are.
And even in yourself, depending on the situation, you may be using cutting as a tool to bring about different ends.
Find your “root”…or not
I’m not saying you necessarily need to find a “root” for your tendency to self harm, although it would be neat if you could.
No, what I am suggesting is that each time you feel triggered and want to injure yourself again, take a moment out to reflect on what you’re actually feeling.
I’m not a big fan of the teaching that everyone has a root for their self-injury and if you just find it, you can rid yourself of the urge to do it forever.
For some, it may be true. But I think that for those who have developed a habit of self-injury, it’s gone so far past “I do this because of that”. What you may have used for one sole purpose in the beginning, has often grown to a broad-spectrum, maladaptive coping mechanism.
What is the “root teaching” you’re talking about?
The theory goes that you began self-harming because you had very strong emotion that you didn’t have a good way of expressing. And since you didn’t know of a way to express it, you did something way out of the ordinary to try and cope with it and express it as well.
If you had known a better way, you would have used that instead. I’m sure we’ve all wished from time to time that we could have gotten really into something that would have been societally understood and acceptable instead of something that hurts us and all of our loved ones.
Anyways, the teaching goes a little something like this. You find out what you were trying to express, and then you use that as a way of going about your treatment. You learn how to express that strong emotion or cope with that incredible pain, whatever your case may entail.
“Don’t bother with the root” theory
As I said, I believe the premise is flawed. Not everyone has just one reason for self-injury in the first place, and sometimes there are more messy cases where you may have started “cutting” here because of this thing, but you had been hurting yourself in more subtle ways long before that. Remember, cutting isn’t the only form of self-harm.
Once hurting yourself becomes a habit, it becomes an option in your head. That is to say, it becomes a possible solution to a whole host of problems in the future. You begin to see what else it can “help you with”. Before long, self-destruction becomes a habit and a way of life. Even if you want to stop, there are so many things it’s tangled with, it’s daunting to try and cut it out altogether.
Your feelings are messages
So when you get triggered to hurt yourself, it can happen so fast. You seem to go from situation to what we’ll call “bad coping behavior” in a matter of seconds, without ever stopping at emotion in between.
This is with very good reason. Your bad coping behavior is what you have engineered so that you can bypass those overwhelming emotions. So what can we do about it? The answer is simple (but not easy). You can feel.
Playing with fire? (Letting yourself feel the trigger)
You have developed an unhelpful behavior to help you deal with your feelings that overwhelm you. Thus, it can seem like a bad idea to dive headfirst into your feelings when they’re so obviously too much for you, but hear me out.
If you can’t figure out what you’re feeling, you’re not going to know what to do instead. All of those long lists about “things you can try instead of cutting” tend to be mostly distractions, and while that puts a band-aid on your problems, ultimately it causes the same issue that self-injury does. Which is that you can never soothe your emotions by ignoring them.
So, when you find yourself triggered, try to backtrack into what you’re feeling even for just a moment, if you can’t bear anymore. This will help you at least get into the habit of identifying what you’re feeling. (It can also help with a little side effect of getting you slowly more acquainted with your feelings. That is how you will learn they are not so scary to begin with (you can see my article about feeling your feelings here).
What do I do with these feelings?
So at this point, you know what feelings you’re working with here. If you happen to be in therapy right now, this is a good place to ask your therapist for help. Firstly, you can use these feelings and situational triggers as good talking points to work through. But also, they can help you find some healthier ways of coping with these feelings. Ones that don’t hurt you or others.
If you don’t have a therapist, that’s perfectly okay too, it just means you’ll have to be a little creative. Keeping that in mind, here are some things you can try to replace the behavior of cutting, as well as what it might help you with.
1. Breathe
Breathe in, breathe out. Breathe slowly and deeply. Try to lengthen your breath out as long as you can sustain it.
This will help you slow down, so it helps if you want to self-harm due to overwhelm or anxiety, when your thoughts are swirling too quickly.
Focusing on lengthening your breath out also helps activate your parasympathetic nervous system, which is just a fancy way of saying it calms you down from a biological level. For this reason, it can also help with fear and anger.
2. Journal
Journaling can take on many forms, and for this reason it is also good for many things. You can have a very analytical journaling experience where you outline facts and possibilities, pros and cons of situations. This sort of practice will help with overwhelm.
There is also a kind of journaling called “abstract journaling”, which I got a lot of value out of, particularly on my most chaotic days. In abstract journaling, your writing doesn’t have to be formatted in prose, it can be disjointed, different fonts, different pieces written in different directions.
I may write a post on it in the future, but essentially it is the opposite of the analytical journaling experience. No rules whatsoever.
Journaling can also be a good gateway into figuring out how you feel. By just letting yourself write whatever comes to your head, you can observe the language that comes out and infer your feelings.
Journaling is also good for victimization/not feeling heard. Your journal can be a safe place to say what needs to be said so you can eventually let it go. For this reason, your journal can also be a tool for any other feelings like sadness or anger.
3. Cry
It may seem strange that I suggest crying as an alternative to cutting, because for many that’s what they were trying to avoid in the first place. And it’s understandable to not want to cry in a public place, in front of strangers and acquaintances alike.
It’s true that crying can be embarrassing, but it is much healthier than hurting yourself. Thing about it is, if you have hang-ups about crying in public this might be a less viable option.
That being said, if you don’t have qualms about crying in front of others, or if you can find a private place to have a good cry, then go for it! Crying releases a whole host of emotions including fear, anger and sadness.
4. Draw or Paint
So now we get to visual arts. I have found great success in expressing myself with drawing. Visual art can be helpful in the same way that journaling is, when you express your emotions.
Also, you may find that you can express things with visual art that you can’t with words. This is a great thing, and if that is what you’re longing for (self expression), then drawing is great!
You don’t have to be extremely talented to express yourself through art, either. One of the best lessons I learned in drawing is that something doesn’t have to be technically good to be beautiful. This is a beautiful lesson for life in general, I think.
Also, you can express your addiction to and desire for self harm in your art. You may find in some cases, that is close enough. With art, you can express any feelings—anger, fear, sadness, confusion, frustration—anything.
5. Exercise
You’ve probably heard of exercise as a coping mechanism. And it is a great one, if you can get yourself to start.
When you exercise, you show yourself that you are capable of overcoming challenges on a base level. This brings you confidence, even without results showing on your outside aesthetic. Also, when you exercise, your body pumps out more endorphins for you, making it easier to regulate a good mood.
But there are many kinds of exercise, which is important to remember. You don’t have to consider yourself a fit person to start exercising.
If you are dealing with anger when you are triggered, more intense exercises are helpful. Running, lifting weights, that sort of thing. Always make sure you know proper form when doing exercise though, you don’t want to hurt yourself!
However, there are other doors into exercise, such as dancing, taking walks, and gentle yoga. These are all things you can start off slow and easy, and start ramping up once you build your fitness.
These gentler types of exercise can help manage anxiety, sadness, grief and emotional numbness. They can also help if you have a habit of dissociating from your body.
6. Sing or listen to music
Music is another form of art, so some of the benefits will overlap with the visual arts that we already covered. Just like visual arts, through music, you can express things that would be impossible using straight language. The notes and the empty spaces in between have an expressiveness all of their own, and can bypass our defenses when we are too guarded.
A good thing about music is it’s easier to participate in without having to create anything. You can just sit back and experience in a more personal and accessible way than looking at a painting.
It is much easier to find a song that expresses what you’re feeling, than it is to find someone’s artwork that really hits you. Plus, music we can carry with us and in us. You can push repeat to a song on your iPod all day. Or you can sing it over and over again in your head.
Music can express any emotion, if you can find the right song, artist, or playlist. So this makes it a good starting point for almost anyone looking to get something off their chest.
Also, you can keep replaying songs to fill time, until your next meal or class or whatever you use to mark your time. This will bring you the benefit those “distractions” do, without some of the more harmful side effects like snowballing emotions or numbness.
7. Pray or chant
This one is for a special kind of person. The positives of praying and chanting are that they can be highly personalized. They can also fill up large swaths of space, and they can help change your mindset.
However, this approach is more reserved for a spiritual person. Not to say that only certain people can pray, but you’ll find that if you only pray or chant when you need something, it comes from a disingenuous place and really doesn’t reap the same benefits.
If you do believe in a higher power, however, these can be great. By using prayer or chanting, you can feel more connected (combat loneliness), purposeful (banish existential crisis and fear of change), and centered. They are also good ways of letting things out and feeling heard.
8. Come up with a game plan or first step
Calling all control freaks out there! No, I’m just kidding. But some people do self harm out of lack of control in their external lives. A good, simple first step to digging yourself out of this is looking as objectively as you can about your problem, and coming up with an actionable plan or first step towards being free of it. Once you execute this, you will begin to feel more in control and powerful in your own life.
Also, planning and making a first step is really great for anxiety. It gives you an anchor to hold onto when you feel like your thoughts are sweeping you away. It’s such a cliché to say, take one day at a time, but the slow systematic approach to life brings you a better, more peaceful perspective. Also, you will find that it will bring you better adaptability if you can just say, “okay, what next?” to each tense situation.
9. Tear up a piece of paper
This one is actually pretty close to what you would see on a normal list of self harm distractions. However, I’m including it for multiple reasons.
Firstly, it’s a great first step to take you out of your trigger and give you something out of the ordinary to focus on. There are physical sensations, stimulating visual cues, and even sounds to go along with it.
I like it as a distraction because it doesn’t imbue you with any extra opinions or messages from others about what you should be thinking or feeling right now, and it doesn’t just say, “oh look over here at my flashy display of information to the point where you can ignore your trigger completely!”
Tearing a piece of paper is a good way to express anger and destructive feelings without hurting anyone or damaging anything important. Plus you can recycle it when you’re done.
It’s also good for people who experience numbness and dissociation, because it brings you back into the present moment. This can turn into a mindfulness exercise, if you’re into that.
You can also combine this practice with another practice. If you journal about something or draw something and then tear it up, that’s a very tangible way of telling yourself, “I am removing myself from this behavior/situation” now. It can be a good way to renounce old habits that are no longer serving you, or acknowledge that other people’s hurtful actions are their own, and are not a reflection of you.
10. Engage in self care
This is an especially good strategy if you engage in self harm for reasons of self soothing. This behavior can be harder to put your finger on, particularly if it is only thing you use to soothe yourself. But essentially, it’s like cutting is your peaceful time alone where you don’t have to do things for other people.
If this is you, you may have a hard time giving it up because it’s one of the few things you do for yourself. You may be a person with a caretaker mentality.
The good news is that you don’t have to give up this comforting time for yourself. If you just reinvent it, you will be engaging in an activity that you won’t be ashamed of or have to hide, and it won’t hurt you or anyone else.
Good alternatives for this kind of self harm include taking a warm bath or shower with your favorite scents, maybe applying lotion to the area you want to cut (if you don’t have open wounds there, that is), or some other activity you find comforting. I personally enjoy cooking and baking, with my favorite music on in the background.
Have you found a good coping mechanism to replace self harm? Leave a comment to share with everyone! Most of all, remember. Self harm does not make you a lesser person. It just means you have some stuff to learn about yourself and your emotions. I wish you a happy day, free of cutting and other self-harm.
