Whenever we think of health, the only thing that comes to our mind is physical health. However, emotional wellbeing also plays a vital role in determining one’s overall health. Various studies show a direct correlation between physical, emotional, and mental health. Having a healthier mindset, good physical, emotional, and mental health are all attributes to our overall wellbeing. This connection is known as the mind-body connection.
What Exactly is Referred to as Emotional Health?
Emotional health is a crucial aspect of mental health. Although it is difficult to make one's self vulnerable when it comes to expressing one's emotion under duress, a person is much healthier and happier when they are able to associate the interconnectedness between the root of their emotional anxiety or stress and emotional wellbeing. Having the emotional intelligence of being aware of our emotions and sources or circumstances which elicit our emotional responses to emotional conflicts allows one to have a much healthier and happier outlook on life and great depth of relationships.
Human beings who are emotionally healthy possess a brilliant mechanism for coping with negative emotions. Such people are much more empathic towards the human conditions and feelings of their loved ones and friends. In some cases, one's emotional hyper-vigilance may hinder their rational thought process, thereby creating many other problems in their life socially. In severe cases of dealing with ongoing emotional conflicts, one should most definitely seek the support of a health and wellness physician or professional.
Physical health also has some connections with emotional wellbeing. People who undergo vast amounts of mental stress and other negative emotions usually develop numerous physiological health problems, such as social anxiety, fear, self-doubt, mistrust, and worse, emotional trauma, depression, and PTSD. These ailments are not just the result of negative feelings but also behavioral patterns as they relate to the susceptibility of having negative emotions. For instance, numerous people enjoy drinking alcohol, smoking cigarettes or in other cases, sex for relieving depression and stress. However, these habits possess a very high risk of other addictions, and poor health conditions such as heart diseases, hypertension, and other chronic health problems.
How Can you Determine if You are Dealing with Poor Emotional Health?
Included in this blog are the symptoms one should look for to determine if they're having emotional health conflicts:
● Emotional hypersensitivity and overreaction to stressful situations
● Isolating yourself from loved ones in your life such as family, your friends, and colleagues
● Low self-esteem
● Lower energy level than ordinary
● Either poor sleeping habits or sleeping too much
● Either eating too much or eating too little
● An increase in the use of substances
● Having running or roaving emotional thoughts
● Lack of focus
● Lower work performance
● More interpersonal quarrels than the ordinary ones
● Ignoring your self-care or hygiene
● Feeling insecure, worthless, hopeless, abandoned, betrayed, used, or emotionally taken for granted
● Being easily irritated
How Can You Improve Your Emotional Health?
There are numerous ways of improving and maintaining your emotional health. These are inclusive of the following:
Staying Connected:
The community you live in plays a very crucial role in your life. Each individual must learn to share their time with family members and friends. Building healthy emotional, spiritual, and social connections and stronger bonds with loved ones, friends, and colleagues help to improve our quality of life and the depth of our relationships. Spending quality time with loved ones and friends in real-time helps us develop a stronger and more genuine connection.
Live a Balanced Life:
One must always endeavor to develop a balance between their personal, social, and work life. This is known as the live-work balance. Emotional health includes balancing resting, physical activities, and social interaction while healthily mediating between all of these. Remember, it is important to maintain a healthy life and work balance by working smart rather than harder.
Meditation:
Meditating is the process by which one has the ability to discern the root which triggers their emotions. Having the ability to assess and keep one's emotions in check is key to emotional wellbeing.
Watching Out for Negative thoughts and Self-talk
We all have emotional, social, and personal insecurities, but it is important to be mindful when our insecurities begin to foster self-doubt or negative self-talk or thinking. Such as "I am not good enough." "Noone loves me." Talking negatively about yourself might prove to be a self-fulfilling prophecy. Rather than putting yourself in a negative frame of mind, it would be best if you worked on creating a positive image of yourself via your own words and surrounding yourself with those you feel safe to express your emotions or feelings to transparently, without being judged.
Setting Goals and Celebrating Your Improvements:
Goal setting is also critical as it relates to your emotional health and wellbeing. Giving yourself constructive things to do or strive for will give you a greater sense of purpose and focus on assisting you in developing your self-esteem, feeling positive about yourself, and nurturing healthy relationships with loved ones and friends.
Using Substances:
The use of substances in excess to cope with one's emotional duress is not suggested. Sometimes, drinking excessively, smoking excessively, and in worse cases, excessive drug usage, hypersexuality, and promiscuity lead to other problems such as addictive tendencies and other volatile coping mechanism. In such cases, one's degree of emotional intelligence is best served when illicited properly. Keeping in mind substance, alcohol, drug abuse, sex, and excessive cigarette smoking are temporary solutions to long-term problems that can escalate into severer physiological, emotional, and mental health problems.
Learning Strategies for Resilience:
Resilience is the process by which one is able to manage stressful situations in a healthy way. Such individuals tend to have much healthier relationshionships and better qualities of life. There are a number of things you can do to assist you in maintaining your emotional health. The more resilient you are to stressful situations, the better your emotional health will be and your relationships with loved one's and friends.
In Conclusion:
We all have good days and bad days. Our emotional well-being is nurtured by learning how to best take care of ourselves during emotionally stressful or bad times. Not taking care of our emotional health can lead to anxiety, depression, PTSD, worse case scenarios, mental illness. Emotional health entails our ability to mediate between our emotion and thought processes, developing healthy coping skills, having self-awareness, and surrounding ourselves with those of our loved ones, friends, and colleagues with whom we have built strong relationships; who also empathize and affirm our feelings.
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