When it comes to health and wellness, it typically embodies physical, mental, emotional, and behavioral wellness. This is what makes up your “health” and overall well-being. With emotional wellness, it is all about your emotions, feelings, and many of your thoughts.
This includes how you handle your emotions after various events in your life and your ability to bounce back from challenges, as well as how much negative things in your life affect you.
Here are some things to know about emotional wellness.
Emotional Strength, Resilience, and Intelligence
Emotional wellness encompasses your ability to handle stressful situations, showing how much emotional strength and resilience you have. It might look like this:
Healthy ways of coping with stressful situations
A good sign of healthy emotional well-being is the ability to cope with stress in productive ways. As opposed to ignoring your emotions, turning to substances, or other addictions, you can sit with your emotions and handle stress in a much healthier way.
Being a grateful person who chooses to focus on the positive
Someone who focuses a lot on their emotional wellness also tends to be more grateful and can appreciate all the small blessings in their life. Consider whether you focus more on the good things in your life or the bad.
Treating others with respect and never judging their emotions
Allowing others to feel how they need to feel and express their emotions is an amazing sign of being emotionally healthy, mature, and intelligent.
Never judge your own emotions or feelings
Emotionally healthy people will also not judge their own emotions when they come up. This actually happens a lot more often than you might think.
The Impact of Your Emotional Wellness
While anyone can improve their emotional well-being, there are some signs of poor emotional wellness. Keep in mind this is completely normal and doesn’t mean you are “broken”. It simply means your emotional well-being is what you should be focusing most of your attention on.
Some common signs that you need to work on your emotional wellness include:
- Feeling shame or guilt for your own emotions or feelings
- Ridiculing others for how they choose to express themselves
- Turning to drugs, alcohol, or other addictions to hide from your emotions
- Allowing toxic people to remain in your life
- Giving too much of yourself to others with no personal boundaries
- Having no healthy outlets for your feelings
As you can imagine, having these signs of poor emotional wellness can lead to a lot of negative consequences in just about every area of your life. This includes:
- Issues with friendships and relationships
- Problems with your job or co-workers
- A weakened immune system
- Unexplainable body aches and pains
- Behavioral issues like irritability and moodiness
- Problems with focus and concentration
- Poor sleeping habits
Tips for Improving Your Emotional Wellness
If you want to start working on your emotional wellness, here are some places to start:
Learn How to Be Mindful
Mindfulness is really valuable when it comes to accepting and processing your emotions. If you have a tendency to either react immediately to how you feel or completely hide from your emotions, then you need more mindfulness in your life. It allows you to really sit with your emotions, and understand where they are coming from before reacting.
Use a Journal to Understand Your Thoughts and Feelings
It can be difficult to constantly live inside your head and make sense of your feelings and emotions. Get some of those thoughts onto paper so you can start working through your issues by writing in a journal every day. The clarity you gain is a wonderful step in the right direction toward better emotional wellbeing.
Communicate Openly With the People in Your Life
Open and honest communication is also really important. Emotional wellness isn’t just about your own emotions but other people’s as well. This helps you to learn more empathy and sympathy and to practice forgiveness when necessary.
