Why Emotional Health Is Essential for Overall Wellbeing
Human beings are beautifully complex and wonderfully resilient. We are created of a vast network of systems all relying on and supporting each other to produce the person you see before you in the mirror. Each of these systems work together to create our overall health. Our overall health includes our physical health, emotional health, social health, environmental health, and spiritual health. All are interconnected and rely upon that symbiotic relationship to create the complex and ever adapting person you are. Emotional Health plays a large role in our overall health, and impacts our bodies’ ability to thrive.
The WHO constitution states "Health is a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity." Experiencing vibrant emotional health and pleasure in your daily activities is far more than just not being sick. And the role of emotional wellbeing in the pie chart of influence is an important one. Therapy can be an excellent way to make a commitment to your overall health because investing in your emotional wellbeing is investing in your overall health.
What is emotional health? It is defined simply as the way a person thinks and feels. And how they cope with those thoughts and feelings. However, thoughts and feelings can actually be quite complex at times. “Emotional health refers to a person’s feelings which encompasses everything about you. It actually governs all of your decisions, your mood, and who you are. Every single aspect of you is determinant of how you feel about something, what is actually going on in your heart, not in your head. This impacts how you make decisions. This influences how you spend your time and with whom you spend it. This dictates career opportunities and drives what you are passionate about. Emotional wellbeing identifies your first thought as you wake in the morning and the mood you find when your feet hit the floor. There is nothing in life that remains untouched by our emotional health.
“Emotions have long been classified as positive or negative, but a better way to think of them might be to evaluate how they affect one's general outlook on life under a given set of circumstances.” Our lived experiences influence our perception and outlook on life, and our perception is our own version of reality. Similar to ourselves, every single person we meet has a different and unique lived experience, and therefore, a different version of reality. Each of these lived experiences, positive or negative, create an emotional response associated with each experience. And we carry that associated emotional response forward with us into other similar situations, expecting a continuance of what happened before. Our experiences and emotional responses are intimately intertwined. Our emotional responses are our feelings, and those feelings can influence behaviors. When feelings are dictating behaviors, then our emotional health and wellbeing really are running the show.
We have all had some less than pleasant lived experiences that may have influenced how we are feeling. When our feelings are caught in the net of negativity and stagnation, they can drastically impact everything around us. Our relationships suffer because we are short with our partners and friends. We can be less present with our children, or find ourselves reprimanded at work due to irritability. Our emotional health influences how easily we can become triggered by a person or situation that we didn’t even realize reminded our subconscious of a time that was not good. Emotional intelligence around our own state of wellbeing can minimize the negative effects of the past. Cognitive Behavioral Therapy and Dialectical Behavioral Therapy are excellent evidence-based approaches to help identify and redirect thoughts that influence feelings. Counseling in Nashville is available to help gain the skills needed to take control of how your feelings are influencing your life.
What are some things we can do to improve our emotional health?
1. Take care of yourself. Be kind to both your physical self and your emotional self. Embrace self-care and make it a part of your regular routine.
2. Communicate honestly and openly with those around you. Practice gratitude and take time to focus on that for which you are thankful instead of focusing on what you don’t have.
3. Pay attention to your feelings and observe how your actions are impacted by different moods. This can be as simple as acknowledging you’ve had a rough day, and then observing how you react to the stimulus around you; traffic, kids, co-workers, and partner. When you are in a particularly good mood, how are your behaviors different? Do you smile at strangers on the street, or say hello to those around you when normally you don’t?
4. Observe your thoughts and how they influence your feelings. If you notice yourself in a particularly bad mood, pause and hold space for what it is you are thinking about. There’s a good possibility that whatever you’re thinking about is putting you in a bad mood.
5. Seek Support. Find people who have been intentional about the work they have done on their emotional health and learn about their successes and failures. Be open to learning about a way of thinking that may be different from what you are used to. Find a good therapist you connect with that can help guide these conversations with yourself. Therapy can help you learn to identify the thoughts that are affecting feelings and replace them with thoughts that help improve your feelings. Therapy can help you learn to take control of your emotional wellbeing journey by giving you the tools to be able to guide your thoughts in a manner that results in intentional experiences and an improved quality of life, which is directly related to overall health. There are therapists in Nashville with availability who are specially trained in evidenced based therapeutic approaches and can be an extra layer of support.
When seeking to be healthy people, we cannot forget our minds and souls. Our emotional wellbeing is an integral component of our overall health, and must be cared for the same as the rest of our bodies. The preventative appointments, yearly checkups, and regular cleanings that we do for our physical selves, we must also do for our emotional selves. It requires the same intentional activity as eating healthy and exercise when our goal is overall health.
If you would like to learn more about emotional wellbeing, check out our website atwww.nashvilleccc.com to find resources, blogs and learn about our therapists.
