ABOUT EMOTIONAL WELLNESS

Emotional wellness, also known as emotional health or emotional wellbeing, is an umbrella term that covers a very large area of skills and abilities. Emotional wellness is a lifestyle, a way of living. It refers to our ability to feel good while we live life, carry out everyday activities, cope with distressing, stressful situations and get engaged in healthy relationships with other people. Emotional wellness is the real life indicator of the equilibrium between ones overall mental wellbeing and physical health.

Emotional wellness helps us create the combination of happiness, success and satisfaction that we desire. Some people think that reaching social heights and financial figures will automatically guarantee for them emotional wellness. They think emotional health comes from success and it will magically appear once they are successful. Emotional health, emotional wellbeing is something we cultivate, it cannot be bought. It has to be practiced and developed. Emotional wellness is the foundation upon which you can build a successful life and not the other way round.

Emotional wellness is not about the theory but rather, it is about how we actually feel therefore it is very personal and individual. Emotional intelligence is in the spotlight of research, while emotional wellbeing is often overlooked by psychology and science. What we see, however is that there are a lot of intelligent people who feel terrible in their daily lives. Emotional wellness is different from emotional intelligence and it refers to the practical abilities, skills and practical things we can do to enhance the way we feel.

In this article:

• What is Emotional Wellness?
• Why is it important? How emotional wellness affects our life?
• How to Optimize Your Emotional Wellness?
  • Basic strategies for improving your emotional well-being
  • 10 Emotional Wellness activities
• My own experience with this
• Final thoughts

What is Your Emotional Wellness?

Emotional Wellness—an awareness, understanding and acceptance of our feelings, and our ability to effectively manage through challenges and change.

Dr. Mark Lerner
Chairman, The National Center for Emotional Wellness

Emotional wellness refers to the sense of general wellbeing in life. In everyday language we would use the terms ‘being happy’, ‘being satisfied with life’, when we refer to emotional wellness, but what does it really mean to be emotionally well? An overall sense of well-being doesn’t mean that you’re never sad or angry or stressed. Being emotionally well doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re happy all the time, but rather, that you’re present, stable and able to mentally cope with both the ups and downs of the emotional rollercoaster.

According to the National Center for Emotional Wellness, emotional wellbeing refers to an awareness, understanding, and acceptance of your emotions. Emotions start off as a mental process, but emotions are more than just awareness and understanding. Emotional Wellness, therefore, includes also the ability to manage through changing and challenging times. Emotions are part of our biology. Emotions are like a chemical cocktail fed by the nervous system into our body. We feel real pain in our body when we experience loss and emotional trauma. In the same way we experience biological joy when we feel good emotionally. We might feel invincible when we are in love. Emotions indicate how well we regulate our mental processes and our chemical-biological processes.

EMOTIONAL COMFORT AND EMOTIONAL WELLNESS

Emotional wellness is an indicator of the stability and wellbeing of the system as a whole. Emotional health, therefore is closely related to our physical health and our mental health. The body, the mind and our emotions are in a circular, continuous communication. How we feel emotionally sort of sums up how we do physically and how we do mentally.

The major problem of understanding emotional wellness is related to the key word : stability. We can often mistake stability for wellness. Sometimes we become so comfortable with a certain mild negative emotional vibe that we feel at home in it. Being mildly stressed, anxious, frustrated can feel to us normal and can be even labeled as an achievement of being an important and busy person. In this case the body is suffering our mental comfort, so we cannot call that place to be real emotional wellness. (Emotionally such a person would most probably feel proud but tired, irritable, unsatisfied, etc. )

We can speak of true emotional wellness when there is a certain emotional stability in a good feeling emotional place. Being emotionally healthy and well means, that in the majority of our waking hours we are feeling good. Emotional wellness also means that our mind is working in such a way that the chemistry generated in the body as a result of the sensing, thinking, imagining processes is not harming the body. We want to allow the body to work naturally and normally and to grow, heal, regenerate. It is not about never feeling sad and bad. It is about being able to feel good more often, so the general tendency will be a stable emotional wellbeing.

How Emotional Wellness Affects Your Life?

It is hard to live a fulfilling life if one isn’t feeling well emotionally. Emotional health is as important as mental health and physical health. The three can’t really be separated but thinking about them as separate concepts can help us understand emotional wellbeing more easily.

Emotional wellness and emotional health is based on stability. Being human means facing challenges and adversity during our lifetime. Emotional stability is when we have the resilience, the emotional agility and good coping skills to handle those periods when bad feeling situations occur. Emotional health is when we can get back quickly mentally and chemically/ physically after a shock, a loss, a disappointment. But, emotional health is also when we wake up daily and do our repetitive tasks with a general, mild , good feeling mood. Emotional wellness is when we regularly practice gratitude and have a general positive mindset.

Some people do it the other way round. They recover from short incidents of feeling good into their comfortable negativity, criticism and stress. They can do well financially, socially but they are not doing emotionally well. Someone without optimal emotional health likely shows signs of irritation, anger, disrespect, victimization, pride, blaming. Emotional health signals the good equilibrium between the body and the mind, a good cooperation, and so the lack of emotional wellness signals/results in both physical and mental problems.

Taking care of your emotional health is about taking care of your entire well-being. Emotional wellness is about practicing a healthy emotional lifestyle that includes eating and sleeping well, exercising regularly, caring for yourself and your needs, doing things that are interesting, challenging and motivating to you, creating, learning, laughing. The healthy emotional lifestyle doesn’t come automatically. It takes time and developing good habits.

How to Optimize Your Emotional Wellness?

Emotional wellness is mostly the result of what you do mentally and physically to your body. Emotions do not come out of the blue sky. Emotions are mental-physical creations as a result of the interaction of the mind with the body and vice versa, especially the nervous system and the endocrine glands . To optimize our emotional wellbeing, let’s take a short look on how emotions are created so we know where we can adjust. We take a surface look on it, not an in depth approach so bare in mind that things are much more complicated in reality and the presentation below is a simplified version of how emotions work.

Summarizing the Strategies for Improving Your Emotional Well-being:

• Be more mindful and build your emotional resilience
• Practice emotional maintenance and build a positive mindset
• Practice coping with stress regularly, manage time and reduce stress where possible
• Practice gratitude, and focus deliberately on the little good things in life
• Cultivate self-compassion and self-esteem
• Allow yourself time to chill out, rest and get quality sleep
• Create short term goals, challenges and pursue your interests, hobbies
• Clear and cultivate your social connections

Emotions are showing up in our body as a result of a dialogue between what we do physically and what we do mentally. The first and most simple way we can induce certain ways of feelings is by what we do physically. Chemicals can come from the outside – through drug intake, alcohol, caffeine for example – that would affects how we think and how we feel emotionally. I might feel anxious and over excited all day and realize that I just drank 5 coffees and 3 energy drinks that day. So the first things to watch when we feel that we want to improve our emotional wellness are: what we drink, what we eat and what other supplements we introduce to the body.

The sleep, rest and movement cycles generate chemical, biological reactions in the body that affect the way we think and how we feel emotionally. If we do not sleep enough for 3 days it is likely that we will be easily irritated by anything. If after a long day we go out, take a 20 minute walk and do a 20 minute stretching afterwards, our body starts to create a certain good feeling, chill out chemistry. We will feel good emotions: relaxed, balanced, peaceful, empowered. We can do a lot to feel better emotionally by regulating the eating habits, exercise and rest cycles but the most we can do for our emotional wellness has to do with the way we think.

If I start paying attention to disturbing, loud things I will start to feel emotionally disturbed and my body will get ready chemically to get away from there or to fight. This state of readiness, alertness is mistaken for the emotion of interest by many and it comes with a cost. While pursuing true interest allows the body to function in health and wellbeing, alertness has the danger aspect in it, which makes the body stop the natural processes and put the system chemically in survival mode. Emotional health includes the emotional awareness and an aspect of mindfulness to be able to recognize in time what is really felt. The body reacts chemically and emotionally to the way we think. Our body can handle short incidents of stress and anger, without problem, but a long-term lack of emotional wellness will not be tolerated by the body without the appearance of physical health issues.

10 Activities to Improve Your Emotional Wellness

Below you can find a list with some efficient activities we can all do for a better emotional health.

1. Stop rumination – Stop living in the past and going over the same situations in your mind. These are new times and you are your top version now. You have never before been so experienced in life.
2. Exercise and eat well – eat a balanced diet and prioritize physicals exercise in times of emotional discomfort. The mind affects the body and the body affects the mind. When is emotional trouble try to prioritize exercising in the morning and in the evening at least for a few days.
3. Wander and wonder – Practice paying attention on purpose. This can be done by taking a walk in nature or in an art gallery and deliberately looking for things you like. A nice tree, a cute dog, a beautiful building. You can simply look for colors that you like: a shade of green that is really nice.
4. Think about what you are thinking about – Your thinking has the biggest impact on the way you feel so it is smart to journal or simply mentally do some emotional maintenance regularly.
5. Get organized – An organized environment, an organized home not only reduces stress, but also saves you from a lot of frustrations. Living in a clean, organized space increases your life quality.
6. Manage your time. – Plan your weeks and track your daily activity to reduce stress. Emotional wellness is easier to achieve when you know what is going on in your life.
7. Develop better feeling mindset, perspective and frames – A lot of our bad feelings come from how we look at things. Talking to others about our feelings, learning, reading can help us develop a better feeling view at the facts.
8. Take it easy, don’t force it – You are where you are. Some people try to fake it till they make it. They try to appear positive, kind and full of vitality even when they aren’t really feeling it. Give yourself permission to have bad days and give yourself permission to grow into it.
9. Build your resilience with gratitude and a positive mindset – how you feel is not who you are. it is a changing flowing experience but some places along the emotional range can become familiar while others don’t. It is up to you and your daily practice to make the good feeling emotional places be your familiar zone.
10. Explore and clarify your own self-concept – you can do personality test, answer journal prompts and you can track your results to see ho well you are doing in your professional, personal and family projects that you start. Emotional wellness stems from a healthy self-esteem.

Final Thoughts on Emotional Wellness

We may not be able to control the world around us, but we can try and succeed at creating a general state of emotional wellbeing in our life. Our emotional wellbeing has to do more with our daily exercise and sleep patterns and the way we think about ourselves and others, than the circumstances that happen to us. Emotional wellness is the foundation upon which we can build our fulfilling and successful lives.

NOTE ! If you’re struggling in life with your emotional well-being or mental health it can be helpful to talk with a therapist. It is normal that sometimes you find it difficult to handle difficult emotions. A therapist can help you learn the necessary skills that you can implement in your daily life to improve your resilience, emotional health, and wellness.

References/ Credits/ Sources : Emotional Wellness Toolkit, National Center for Emotional Wellness, Healthy Place – Emotional Wellness Articles, Breathe