This topic of the blog has been chosen to keep in mind the need for healthy relationships, essential good mental health, increasing stress, perceived negative feelings which we can see around us in the people. These all lead to impact the lives of the people badly both personally and professionally.
What is emotional wellness and why is it important?
Emotional wellness or emotional health is the term that reflects our state of mind. It is a concept of balancing our own feelings both positive and negative, experiences of life. Emotional wellness is about self-awareness, understanding your thoughts, accepting your own emotions, and handling your life in a constructive way with positivity.
Somehow mental health and emotional wellness are core related terms and scientifically it has been proven and stated by WHO that to stay positive, emotional well-being plays a crucial role.
All of you must have heard people, celebrities, and influencers just asking us to stay positive, to be positive, to get over things, to stay in control of our emotions but most of it is not easy to do actually. In case you are not able to do all this, you are going to numb yourself by going on to social media and scrolling through videos and posts that are not meaningful, you could also probably start watching series after series on different platforms or you could get addicted to online games. In many cases people start overeating, you can be oversleeping or start taking alcohol, people tend to become very possessive in their relationship becoming very anxious about loved ones, and also leads to displacement of your emotions meaning using your own emotions in ways. This is also the situation where we are unable to regulate emotions in the correct way essentially.
So if you’re feeling sad and out of control, using it as anger sometimes also happens. There is a vicious cycle of helplessness, hopelessness, and that sadness that many of you have been going through. During this phase, if someone tells you that you have to stay positive it becomes difficult for you to understand how that’s possible. For people who have experienced mental fitness or who have practiced positivity, some of these activities like controlling anger and being optimistic may seem very easy. To do for many of you who found emotion regulation difficult even in the past can be challenging.
What are those 5 R’s for emotional wellness:
Let’s not talk about 5 R’s which will help us in dealing with this because it’s always important to have solutions not just forcing people to think in different ways. Practically to be in a position where you are at present emotionally and then making a difference in life is more required. Let’s start with the five R’s which can actually help anyone a lot when we talk about emotional Wellness or emotional well-being –
Routine:
It is very important to have a proper routine for sleep, for your eating habits, exercise, work, and hobby, it usually brings about a good balance. You may ask – What if I am not able to sleep. Then the first thing we need to do is fix the same time every night for sleep and even if you are not able to go into a deep sleep immediately you could focus on some breathing out of physiological aspects. This helps you to calm yourself, some of you could listen to instrumental music when you try to fall asleep. Proper food at the right time helps a lot in controlling the emotional mood swings, exercise on the regular basis releases the happy hormones in your body, doing your work keeps you occupied also away from useless thoughts and giving time to your hobbies releases stress. Read here about stress management
Reducing Triggers:
The second is to reduce the triggers which disturb you, that is become aware of what triggers you to find out what makes you feel helpless, hopeless, angry, or jealous or guilty because once you become aware you can set your boundaries and cut off what is unnecessary in life. Boundaries mean where you can actually communicate assertively to a person or people not to send the words that are useless or unverifiable and let them know that you don’t want that unwanted information. This is where you realize that some information is triggering but you like to communicate it to the concerned person. You may also exit groups, block sites and block people or unfriend people all over social media who deliberately spread false information. The second R (Reduce) refers to limiting yourself from all the people and information who triggers your emotions somehow.
Reflection of Your Inner Self :
Reflection is the ability to go inwards. We live in a conditioned world where we always keep on trying to look outwards for the solutions. Looking inwards might sound complicated as suddenly anyone cannot start with the guided meditation for changing anything. Reflection starts with the physiological awareness of yourself and gentle breathing is a good way to start it. Just count your breath or you can take pranayama. Basically breathing helps you to ground yourself and help you become more aware of this moment. Sensory experiences are another way, where you start becoming aware of what you can feel of your skin, what you can taste, what you can smell, what you can see around you because make sure that you’re in your body and inhabiting your body as gently as you can. This is one of the ways in which you can bring reflection, once you start doing this you realize that your mind wanders less and then you can make a micro recovery. Micro recovery is a very subconscious process and makes you balanced back with the use of guided meditation practices or reflective practice over a period of time.
Regulation:
By regulation we mean- when a lot of information is coming towards you, you need to realize what you want to pay attention to and what you want to cut off. It is not possible to cut all the thoughts or make yourself numb, it’s all about managing your own thoughts as well as emotions associated with every thought. Letting go of thoughts can be suggested at the initial level with two techniques.
- Cognitive -At a very beginner level the first method is cognitive where we need to realize and observe our own actions and reactions. For example on the day’s anyone feels difficulty in breathing or the physical symptoms of yawning, it can be anxiety. Firstly we need to observe, identify and label it if it is a feeling of guilt, feeling of anger, feeling of being anxious, or just a feeling of being out of control. The second is how to handle it: either to stay with it, let it go, or change it by breathing exercises, having a glass of water, focusing on better thoughts.
- Sensory-You can simply focus on any five senses in any order after closing your eyes for example-5 things that I can see around me, four things that I can hear in my environment, three things that I can taste right now, two things that I can smell, one thing that I can touch. The time slowly you will realize that it becomes easy to build a window of tolerance and able to bounce back with your emotional disturbance.
Reaching out to someone:
As human beings, we crave human connection, and to control emotions many people can do this by reaching out to a loved one. Reach out to friends, reach out to a spouse, and reach out to somebody who will be able to support you as a therapeutic just by listening to you. Another way is to be a volunteer and spend your time helping out with somebody because some people are able to regulate better when they are able to be useful in a situation. Lastly, if you need to reach out to somebody therapeutically, look for some qualified therapist who will be able to support you through all this phase.
It is essential to understand your own different kinds of feelings, your limitations, accept the challenges of your life, and manage all these for having satisfying relationships and success. Emotional Wellness leads to good mental health and Physical health giving you an opportunity to live a blissful life.
Wish you all a Wonderful, Satisfying, Contented, and Happy life
