In one way it just means living your life. It’s something that we all do.  We try to make the most of our lives by coping with difficulties, making the best of what we’ve got.

Self management involves more than simply living life as it comes.  It involves recognising that each one of us has an important role to play in our own wellbeing.  We will do this better if we are aware of and can modify certain aspects of the way we live.  These include our attitudes, thoughts and beliefs, our emotions, our position in relationship to society and our behaviours.  All of these can influence our health and wellbeing and are related to the stress we feel and our attempts to cope with it.

Self managing our lives is to do with our determination to stay well, managing our experiences, facing our problems and making choices about how we live.  To make this happen we need to ask for information from those who are there to support us, such as mental health professionals, and insist that we are actively involved in decisions which concern us.  Self management involves active participation in and control over our own recovery.  

By using self management plans we can learn to face the problems life throws up and develop personal ways of working them through – rather than giving ourselves over to ‘experts’ who are expected to fix the problem.  Through developing our own self management plan we can work to stay well and increase our strength and resilience.  We can change our beliefs about what we are capable of doing and learn to relax more in the face of the stresses of life.  We can make changes in our lifestyle in ways which are important to our health and wellbeing.  Responsibility for staying well and living a satisfying life shifts towards our own personal effort.

Self managing means believing we can alter aspects of our lives or the way we feel and think about them.  Believing that we cannot achieve control or make choices to improve our lot is likely to lead to a feeling of vulnerability and helplessness.  At the worst points in our lives we may feel completely overwhelmed and be grateful to hand over all thinking and planning about our welfare to others. Yet, even at those bleak times many people are learning that they can still keep some control, some say, over what happens to them – if encouraged by recovery minded supporters. Some hopefulness is retained and as we learn to feel less overwhelmed by events we can make more and better decisions and so we feel more in control and hopeful.

Self management can be valuable because it is empowering and non-stigmatising. People will have different ideas about self management generally and its different approaches.  People are unique.  We like to learn in different ways.