Most individuals pay close attention to their physical well-being and appearance. You apply bandages and ointments if you have cuts or scrapes, wear warm clothes when the temperature gets cold, and get a massage if your muscles feel tired and strained. However, it’s also vital that you pay much attention to your emotional health the same way you do with your physical health.
Every day, you deal with different stress and pressures from your work, family, or other responsibilities, and it’s your emotional health that gets overwhelmed the most. When you’re not taking good care of your emotional health, it will be harder to cope with your thoughts and emotions, making you feel easily stressed, anxious, and drained. Yet before anything else, it’s crucial to know and understand what emotional health is.
Defining Emotional Health
Emotional health refers to a person’s ability to manage their feelings, thoughts, and emotions when dealing with the ups and downs in life. To be emotionally healthy doesn’t necessarily mean the absence of negative emotions (e.g., anger, sadness, frustration). Instead, an emotionally healthy person is more aware of their feelings, knows how to deal or cope with them healthily, and can bounce back from the challenges.
Lifestyle Habits To Maintain Good Emotional Health And Wellness
Thankfully, like the rest of your health, there are several ways to help you become an emotionally healthy person. Adopting these five lifestyle habits will help you maintain good emotional health and wellness and improve your emotional resilience.
- Seek Or Accept Support And Help From Others
Maintaining good emotional health can be challenging, especially for people experiencing emotional issues like anger problems, behavioral disorders, anxiety issues, depression, and others. Thus, if you believe you have emotional issues, it’s good to seek help and support from qualified professionals. For instance, if your anger issues hinder you from building social relationships, you can avail yourself of anger management therapy or anger management courses to address the primary cause of these outbursts and hopefully get your emotional health and overall life back on track.
Aside from professional help, you can also accept support from your trusted friend or family member. When you’re going through difficult times or dealing with complex emotions, opening up to them will keep your thoughts and feelings in check and eventually help you find ways to cope with them healthily.
- Smile More Often
Stress is already bound to be part of your life. However, it can take a toll on your emotional health when it’s not managed well. Among the simplest habits you can start doing every day is smiling more often. Every time you smile, your body releases more neurotransmitters, eventually reducing your stress levels.
Furthermore, your body’s production of serotonin, dopamine, and endorphin also increases, which helps enhance your mood and releases negative emotions. So, make it a habit to smile daily, even to strangers. Smiling will make you happier, and because it’s contagious, it could make someone else’s day lighter and optimistic, too.
- Do Habits That Help Cultivate A Positive Mindset
While it’s not every day that you see yourself in favorable circumstances, some habits will help you see the positive in every situation and maintain good emotional health. Having a positive mindset can help you manage your thoughts and feelings better. Here are some habits to help you cultivate a positive attitude:
- Meditate for a few minutes daily.
- Maintain an exercise routine
- Inspire yourself with positive quotes.
- Do random acts of kindness.
Doing small acts of positive habits can dramatically change your mind’s way of seeing the world and may help you become an optimist. Being emotionally healthy doesn’t mean being positive and happy all the time, but you can deal with your emotions more healthily and constructively through these positive actions.
- Practice Gratitude Every Day
Being grateful for what you have can also help maintain good emotional health. Instead of stressing out and complaining about everything, your gratefulness and appreciation will help you understand and see the best in every situation. To practice gratitude in your daily life, you can:
- Write a gratitude journal and add new things to it every day.
- Spend quality time with loved ones.
- Commit to avoiding complaining about anything.
- Show humility.
According to positive psychology research, gratitude is directly associated with greater happiness. So, learn to practice gratitude every day to help you relish good experiences, feel more positive emotions, build strong relationships, and improve your emotional health.
- Promote Self-Esteem
Many people fail to realize that they’re being too critical or too hard on themselves. This decreases your self-esteem and affects your emotional health. Thus, you need to adopt habits that help promote your self-esteem. You can do this by practicing the following:
- Be self-forgiving.
- Eat right.
- Set enough time for yourself.
- Do something with a purpose.
- Get moving and take care of your body.
Having high and healthy self-esteem matters as it helps you develop healthy coping skills, manage adversity, and put negative situations into perspective.
Takeaway
People with good emotional health are still bound to feel negative emotions or deal with emotional problems. Through the lifestyle habits mentioned here, you can maintain your emotional health and make coping with life’s setbacks a lot easier.
Incorporating the Greatness app into your daily routine can further enhance your efforts to cultivate a positive attitude and maintain good emotional health. The app offers personalized features such as motivational reminders, habit tracking, and positive affirmations to support your journey toward forming new habits.
