When we think of health, we probably think of our physical bodies. Until recently, the concept of emotional health wasn’t as widely taught or discussed. Now mental and emotional health is a hot topic!
What is emotional health? Emotionally healthy people are in control of their thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. They’re able to cope with life’s challenges, keep problems in perspective, and bounce back from setbacks. Emotionally healthy people feel good about themselves and have positive relationships.
Now, managing our emotions is very important, but it isn’t something most of us were taught to do growing up. If you’re wondering how, it’s the work that I do here at Heather Rasband Coaching, and I can teach you how! Let’s talk about emotional health.
What Does it Mean to Be Emotionally Healthy?
When we talk about the answer to “what is emotional health,” it’s easy to believe some misconceptions. First of all, being emotionally healthy doesn’t mean you’re always happy or free of negative emotions. Emotions themselves aren’t good or bad; it’s how we react to them. Emotional health is about having the skills and resources to manage the ups and downs of daily life.
Our emotions are essential. They’re the driving force behind every action we take. They’re the reason why we want certain things in our lives.
- We want relationships because they evoke feelings of connection and love—the best human emotions!
- We want financial stability because it evokes feelings of security and freedom. It also helps banish feelings of scarcity and lack.
- We strive for goals because achievement helps us feel confident, worthy, and proud (in a good way).
When we learn how to manage our emotions and be emotionally healthy, it lets us create a life we love. We let go of the need or desire to control people and situations outside ourselves. However, we’re not taught how to manage our emotions in school. It may or may not have been taught by our parents either.
So as adults, we need to explore emotional health as part of our continued growth.
10 Steps to Good Emotional Health
Here are the ten steps to help you become more emotionally healthy. While it won’t happen overnight, it’s something that we can work on each day. Like exercise and a healthy body, when we build our emotional health, we’ll see incremental changes that add up to big gains!
- Identify Your Most Common Struggles
Take time to identify where you struggle the most—this gives you a place to start working on your emotional health. These could be relationships, procrastination, over-doing it (work, drinking, eating), victim mentality, judging others or judging yourself.
- Understand Where Your Struggles Originate
Step back and ask yourself why you do what you do. This can be a hard question since many of us haven’t explored it before, but when we get to the root reason, we can address the cause of our unwanted behavior. Hint: It’s not just because “that’s the way we are.” As a life coach, I can tell you it’s all about identifying and changing your thoughts (and I’m here to help you)!
- Learn to Manage Negative Emotions Healthily
We often mismanage our feelings in four ways: reacting, avoiding, resisting, and numbing. Reacting is yelling, getting angry, or “losing it.” At first, it feels good, but after, it’s embarrassing. Avoiding is telling yourself you aren’t upset or pretending it away. When we avoid emotion for too long, it creates an unmet need, and we feel resentful and bitter, negatively impacting relationships.
Resisting is telling yourself you shouldn’t feel a certain way. Resisting an emotion is like holding a beachball underwater. Eventually, it comes shooting back to the surface. Our repressed emotions do the same thing—if we resist for too long, they’ll shoot out in a total meltdown or overreaction about something minor.
Numbing can appear in many ways. My favorite numbing tool is chocolate chip cookies. Am I sad? Eat a cookie! Extremely unhealthy avenues for numbing include drugs, alcohol, and pornography. More mainstream avenues are food, social media, TV (hello binge-watching!), shopping, and oversleeping.
Instead, the healthiest way to deal with emotion is to process it. Allow it in our bodies and feel it. Name the emotion, describe it, and process the experience. As we do this, they become less traumatic. They’re just feelings! Even negative emotions like sorrow, loss, anger, and frustration are part of our experience. God allows us to experience these emotions so we can realize how sweet the positive emotions are.
- Recognize Your Inner Self-Critic
We can be our own worst enemy. We say mean things to ourselves we’d never say to anyone else. Once we recognize sabotaging mind chatter, we can start talking to ourselves in a more emotionally healthy way. Remember, we get to decide what we want to think about ourselves. If someone else was talking to you in that way, how would you respond? Once you start supporting yourself, you’ll be amazed at what you can accomplish!
- Take Emotional Responsibility for Yourself
Eleanor Roosevelt said, “No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.” In other words, situations and other people don’t control your emotions—only you do. When we’re emotionally healthy and responsible, we don’t blame our problems on the actions of others.
- Stop Trying to do “ALL the Things!”
So many of us take on more than we can reasonably handle. We overcommit and then feel bad when tasks fall by the wayside. Reduce the stress and overwhelm by being choosy about what you do. Simplify your life and focus only on the essential items. You’ll find more fulfillment in doing a few things well than many things half-heartedly.
- Keep Commitments to Yourself
When you plan to go to the gym—keep the appointment. When you tell yourself that you are going to take an afternoon off, do it! Make decisions and plan so you can honor those choices. When we lie to ourselves, we stop trusting ourselves. Remember, you’re the CEO of your life, and your promises to yourself are precious.
- Choose Joy Over Pleasure
Joy is a feeling of extreme happiness from something good. Pleasure is a state of being pleased. Our lives are meant to be joyful. We’re meant to extract happiness from the good in our life. Don’t trade that long-term joy for temporary pleasure. It may feel good in the moment, but the long-term payoff isn’t there.
- Set Healthy Boundaries
A big part of our mental health involves our relationships—with others and with ourselves. Healthy relationships start with setting appropriate, healthy boundaries. (See my post on healthy relationships for more details on what healthy boundaries look like). We all have expectations of others, but setting healthy boundaries is all about keeping those expectations clear and realistic. Sometimes our expectations can rob us of our ability to see the beauty of how things really are.
Unconditional love doesn’t mean loving someone else’s actions if you don’t agree with them. Unconditional love is having the kind of love Christ has for us—he loves us but not everything we do. We can apply this concept to our love of ourselves as well. Love the heck out of yourself and work on the habits or tendencies you would like to change. When you improve from a place of love, you’ll have the best results!
- Prioritize Self-Improvement and Goals for Better Mental and Emotional Health
Self-improvement is one of the main reasons we’re here on earth. We should follow the commandments to develop our talents, overcome weaknesses, and love one another. We should also recognize that our whole life is a time of progress and learning. Life is a classroom, not a test, and we’re not here to become perfect. Perfection isn’t attainable right now, and it only comes from the atoning sacrifice of our Savior Jesus Christ in the life to come.
Give yourself permission to relax, stop judging yourself and others. We’re all on a unique journey. We accomplish our goals by working on them a little each day. When we keep at it consistently, we’ll get significant results over time. We all have setbacks, and we all need time to rest. Be patient with your progress, and don’t compare yourself to others.
Living with Better Mental and Emotional Health
Good mental and emotional health is within our grasp. Many times, it’s not as far off as we may fear. When we recognize our struggles, explore our inner-self-critic, and take emotional responsibility for ourselves, we’ll start to see progress on our journey.
We have to set appropriate boundaries—recognize that we can’t do everything, keep commitments to ourselves, and understand that we’re on a journey where our goal is progress, not perfection.
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