Being healthy is about more than eating right and getting regular exercise. It’s also about thinking positively and working to improve your mental and emotional wellness. Being emotionally healthy improves your self-esteem and helps you feel secure and relaxed in everyday life.
Improving your emotional wellness starts with being in touch with your feelings and getting comfortable with expressing them. Your feelings include everything from your doubts and worries to your aspirations and goals. It’s about being aware of both how you feel and how others perceive your emotional state.
Here are some tips to help you improve your emotional health:
- Manage stress. When left unmanaged, stress can be a serious drain on your emotional and physical wellbeing as well as a major threat to your overall health. To lower stress, try distracting yourself by playing sports, practicing yoga or volunteering. Other great stress relievers are massage, guided relaxation techniques and tai chi.
- Strive for balance. It’s important to balance your life with a variety of activities and relationships with different types of people. For example, avoid spending too much time at work because doing so will hurt your relationships at home. Set realistic objectives and go about achieving them, while being careful to avoid overwhelming yourself.
- Think positively. Telling yourself that you’re not good enough for that job, promotion, sports team, or relationship isn’t healthy or helpful. While it’s true that sometimes things don’t work out, thinking positively can help improve your chances of reaching your goals. Being optimistic can help you feel better and will make you appear more confident, assured, and even more attractive in the eyes of others. There are no drawbacks to thinking positively, and it’s a huge part of improving your emotional wellness.
- Move past mistakes. We all know that humans, by nature, must make mistakes to learn from them. These mistakes are all around us—they’re at work, home, and everywhere in 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 there’s no way to go back in time to change what happened. Instead, 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.
- Appreciate the good – and bad – times. It’s important to take stock of your life during both good and bad times to enhance and maintain your emotional wellness. During the good times, take a few minutes to appreciate your current state and think about how you can maintain or grow your positive feelings. If things aren’t going so good—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 unfortunately it’s probably not the last. Think about the simple decisions that are within your control, reflect back on the good times and remember how you found your way out of the low spots before. Things will change.
- 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 have a hard time accepting it. However, maintaining and improving emotional wellness means accepting support. To turn it away is to dismiss the helping hand of an important family member or friend. If someone genuinely wants to help, they are worth your attention.