Tips for Emotional Wellbeing
One of the three key components in overall optimal health is your emotional wellbeing. This equates to being able to handle whatever life throws at you without diving straight into despair. Don’t stuff your emotions down inside and ignore them. This is what leads to your mental wellbeing becoming compromised.
Emotional Health Basics
The most basic step is to acknowledge your emotions and accept them. What you feel is not wrong. Feelings cannot be “wrong”. However, your reactions to these feelings can be immature and childlike if you do not control your emotions. Understand that it is okay to feel and then evaluate how best to express those feelings.
Creating balance in your life is one of the best ways to create optimal emotional health. It is vital to make time for:
- Fun/play time with your family such as picnics, hiking, movie night.
- Time for yourself to relax, get creative, or learn something new.
- Time with your friends and spouse.
You can keep claiming that there aren’t enough hours in the day but without these things your emotional wellbeing is at risk of becoming depleted. Your emotional health depends highly on you recharging your self-esteem batteries. Having a creative outlet or a night out with your friends allows you to release the stress of work and home and connect with the happiness inside you.
Find Your Happiness
If you’re not sure what brings you true happiness and refills your emotional health fountain then look into what types of things brought you joy in the past. Perhaps you’re the creative type who delves in woodworking, painting, or even writing. Maybe you’re a sports person who loves being in the game. Maybe your true emotional wellbeing rests in helping others. Find a charity to get involved in or help out at the local homeless shelter.
Physical Condition
You may not realize it but your body shape and how you feel about it deeply affects your emotional health. If you feel bad about how you look then your emotions will follow into depression. This often leads to physical ailments that will work to erode your physical and mental health simultaneously. Keep in mind that the foods you put in your body as well as the amount of exercise you get will also affect your emotional health. This is easy to spot when you go more than 4 or 5 hours without eating or drinking. Notice how cranky you are? You are in less control of your emotions when you don’t take care of your body.
All three of three components of body, mind and spirit must be in alignment in order to achieve your best life. Emotional health is one of the easiest parts that can be taken care of as long as you take the time you need. All the time in the world means nothing if you spend it stressed out and angry.
