Emotional Wellness
Ok, so emotional wellness and mental wellness are different. Then what exactly is emotional wellness? Emotional wellness is a more well-known type of wellness, but it's often not fully understood. An emotionally well person is aware of how their thoughts affect their feelings and vice versa. They accept mistakes and learn from them while trying to find the positive in anything that happens. Is an emotionally well person always positive? No, not at all! Again, we are humans and we will never be perfect. Part of being emotionally well is understanding our limitations and accepting them. Emotional wellness is about finding balance, reducing stress, practicing self-care, and doing what helps you individually to feel well.
Four Steps Toward Emotional Wellness
Step 1: Practice self care when it makes sense. Can we always practice self care? No, we don't live in a perfect world of phone-free bed time, long baths, weekly facials, and monthly massages. If we did, that would be awesome. As it is, all we can do is make the most of the free time that we have and do things that will help us to be as emotionally well as we can. Some ways of doing this include getting to bed on time when you're not too busy, taking a bath with candles when you have some free time, saying no to things that would be too much on your plate, and taking some time to binge Netflix just because. Self care is very personal, so pick your poison.
Step 2: Practice emotional mindfulness. Just like mental wellness, emotional wellness requires mindfulness. Mindfulness in reference to emotional wellness means to be aware of your emotions, accept them, fact-check them, and combat the incorrect ones with correct thoughts. We cannot directly manipulate our emotions, but when an emotion is in-congruent with reality, what we can do is combat them with rational and positive thoughts.
Step 3: Strive for balance. We can never be completely and utterly balanced (at least not forever). Balance can mean something different for every person. For emotional wellness in general, it means recognizing needs, responsibilities, and obligations as well as desires, temptations, and limitations and picking and choosing where each of them go. If you find yourself catering to more of the first group and less of the second or vice-versa, you may be lacking balance.
Step 4: Practice mental, physical, and spiritual wellness. "Does she know that she's repeating herself with step four?" Yes, yes I do! And I stand by the imporance of remembering each one!
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