Being healthy is about more than just eating right and getting regular exercise. It’s also about thinking positively and working to improve your mental and emotional wellness.
But what, exactly, does it mean to improve emotional wellness? It’s about being in touch with your feelings and being comfortable expressing them — from your doubts and worries to your aspirations, goals, and positive feelings. It’s about being aware of both how you feel and how others perceive your emotional state. So, how can you improve your emotional wellness?
1. Be Aware of Stress
Stress gets a lot of bad press, and there’s a good reason for that. Left unmanaged and allowed to run out of control, stress can be a serious drain on one’s emotional and physical well-being. No matter the source, personal or professional, stress has been identified as a major threat to one’s overall health.
To manage stress better, make sure to take on activities that distract you from that which stresses you out. In other words, find an outlet that helps you contain the stress, such as playing sports, volunteering in the community, or trying yoga. Massage, guided relaxation techniques and tai chi are other methods that can be used to handle stress better and improve emotional wellness.
2. Search for Balance
All work and no play…can be disastrous. It’s important to balance our lives with many different activities and access to different types of people. Spend too much time at work and you may find yourself becoming overly dependent on the people and tasks you find there. At the same time, you can start to hurt your personal relationships at home.
To improve emotional wellness, be aware of balance. Attempt to recognize the advantages of spending an equal amount of time in different places and with different people. Set realistic objectives and go about achieving them, but be careful to avoid overwhelming yourself.
3. Think Positively
Tell yourself that you’re not good enough for that job, promotion, sports team, or relationship and you may find yourself becoming the master of your own destiny. And while it’s true that sometimes things don’t work out, thinking positively can help improve your chances of reaching your goals.
Even if that’s not the case in every situation, thinking positively can make you feel better and will make you appear more confident, assured, even more attractive in the eyes of others. There’s simply no drawback to thinking positively instead of negatively—it’s a huge part of improving your emotional wellness.
4. Move Beyond Mistakes
We all make mistakes. And we all know that humans, by nature, must make mistakes to learn from them. These mistakes are all around us—they’re at work, they’re at home, and they’re everywhere between. The important thing to remember is that no one is perfect and most people recognize that all humans are capable of making mistakes.
Once you realize this you can begin to accept your mistakes and start the process of moving on from them. Remember that there’s no way to go back in time to change what happened. Instead, to improve your emotional wellness, recognize that the past is the past and think about how you can make up for the mistake through actions now and in the future.
5. Things Change
To enhance and maintain your emotional wellness, it’s important to take stock of your life during both good and bad times. During good times, recognize just how much better things are than when they were bad. Take a few minutes to appreciate your current state of affairs and think about the simple decisions that are within your control that can help you maintain or grow your positive feelings about the now.
If you’re in a time of crisis—and let’s face it, we all go through these moments in life—remember that things will get better. Chances are this isn’t the first time you’ve struggled and chances are you found your way out of the valley before. Things will change.
6. Recognize the Value of Support
Some people have no problem reaching out to their family and friends for support in good times or bad. But others, some of whom may be more proud than others, have a hard time accepting the support of others.
However, maintaining and improving emotional wellness means accepting support. To turn it away is to deny that we are human and to dismiss the helping hand of an important family member or friend. And don’t fool yourself—if someone genuinely wants to help, they are worth your attention.
