Emotional Wellness
Emotional wellness, which is also known as emotional health or emotional well-being, is a person's ability to handle emotions and the varied experiences they encounter in life. The National Center For Emotional Wellness defines emotional wellness as "an awareness, understanding and acceptance of our feelings, and our ability to manage effectively through challenges and change.
How Emotional Wellness Affects Your Life
You might not realize how many different areas of life your emotional wellness, or lack thereof, is involved in. Let's look at how your ability to handle, understand and manage your emotions impacts your life.
Relationships
When we interact with others, we must understand our perspectives about different issues. Sometimes we disagree with other people, and to keep relationships happy and healthy, we need to be able to have disagreements calmly and appropriately.
If you aren't able to deal with your emotions well, it's difficult to deal with those of others. The state of emotional wellness impacts our relationships whether they are personal or professional. To best connect with and relate to others, the more emotionally healthy we are, the more support and care we can offer those we love and respect.
Work and School
Whether you're decades into your chosen career or still deciding what you want to do in your life, your ability to handle situations as they arise is vital to your success. Knowing how you feel, dealing with your emotions, and being able to move forward from challenges with a positive mindset all lead to better outcomes in your scholastic and professional life.
Mental Health
This may seem obvious, but your emotional health is a big part of your overall mental health and wellness. While that fact is true for everyone, it can be even more impactful for those facing mental health challenges and conditions. As you learn about how to deal with your mental health challenges, you'll be most successful in navigating them if you are in touch with, and able to deal with, your feelings and emotions.
The Impact of Poor Emotional Wellness
In many ways not being able to work through life in a positive emotional state can lead to worse outcomes, particularly because a negative emotional state is a stressful one. Here are some examples:
Hypertension: long-term stress worsens blood pressure.
Increased illness: stress worsens everything from heart issues to psychiatric problems.
Relationship issues
Difficulties at work
Trouble concentrating
Benefits of Strong Emotional Wellness
As much as poor emotional health can make for major problems in your life, having strong emotional wellness can help you thrive. These are some of the many benefits of having good emotional well-being:
Your relationships with others can be at their best.
Reducing stress reduces illness and increases immunity.
Positivity promotes productivity, helping you accomplish more in life.
How to Optimize Your Emotional Wellness
Now that you understand how important emotional wellness is to a healthy life, you're probably wondering if there is anything specific you can do so that your emotional health is at its best. Luckily, there is no shortage of activities that can promote emotional well-being. Read on to learn how you can enhance and improve your state of mind.
Practice Mindfulness
Mindfulness is about being present in the moment. Rather than living on autopilot, mindfulness encourages us to take part in our lives, and it can improve both physical and emotional well-being. You can practice mindfulness by doing everything from running to eating.
Manage Stress
Managing stress is key to staying emotionally and physically healthy. When starting a stress management practice, try different activities to see which fit you best and make you feel happier. You can do meditation with or practice deep breathing.
Take Care of Your Physical Wellbeing
We often think of our physical and emotional selves separately, but as you have seen here, the two are highly connected. By improving your physical wellness, you'll see benefits emotionally, too.
Performing activities that increase your endorphins, which are one of the feel-good chemicals our bodies produce, is an easy way to increase your emotional wellness. Endorphins can be increased through everything from dancing to laughing.
Work Towards a Balanced Life
Work-life balance is something we talk about a lot as a society. That's because people started noticing that when they worked too much, they didn't have time for personal relationships, relaxation, or fun.
To be at your best emotionally, you'll want to cultivate a balance between work and play. Setting aside designated time to do recreational activities and creating firm boundaries around work hours are two simple ways to help improve this balance.
