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Emotional health is a buzzword these days. There are all manner of approaches offered to get it. As much as we’d love it to be a simple formula it takes practice, investment, and some education to know what our goal is and how we might get there. With that in mind, here are five truths about emotional health.
Feel What You Feel
I find that often when people are on the hunt for emotional health, they are actually on the hunt for happiness. If they can get the keys to emotional health they won’t feel the hard thing anymore. Just the easy, pleasant things. Our world nudges that message along with a steady stream of input that suggests we should have it all together. No insecurity, no fears, no pain. Nothing inconvenient or lacking. Emotional health is not the lack of negative feelings, it is the acknowledgement of our feelings and the ability to express them and move through them with awareness and maturity. Part of that process is feeling what you feel. If you’re hurt by your friend's comment, be hurt. If you are grieving the loss of something precious to you, feel it. If you are frustrated by your day, be frustrated. If you’re overwhelmed with joy by a win, feel that joy fully. It’s not emotionally unhealthy to feel what you feel-even if it’s a hard emotion. It’s more damaging to pretend you don’t feel it, to stuff it, or to ignore it. Feel what you feel!
Don’t Be Ruled by What You Feel
Here is the caveat to, “Feel what you feel.” Don’t be ruled by what you feel. Your feelings matter and are part of being healthy is feeling them. They are not, however, your ruling force. When we are ruled only by our emotions without any engagement with our intellect we make decisions to our detriment. We harm people around us and we choose dangerous things for ourselves. You are a whole person with both emotions and a brain. Engaging your intellect is an important step in emotional health. Think while you feel. Attempt to bring some logic to your emotional reaction. Your feelings may be true and valid, but how you choose to react in your feelings requires some cognitive reasoning. If you’re having trouble bringing reason into your feelings, bring someone trusted into your conversation with yourself.
Make Connections
Engaging our intellect is the process by which we start to make important connections about our feelings. These connections bring clarity to the storm of our emotions. They help us identify why we are feeling what we are feeling, what triggered it, where it comes from, and finally how we might react with maturity and health. If the goal is a healthier way to engage with our emotion, with other people, and with the world around us then we need clarity to get there. We need clarity about what we are feeling, why we are feeling it, and what an appropriate response might be. This is an introspective effort that takes practice and insight, and usually some distance from the height of the emotion. The processing happens first outside of the onslaught of the emotion and as you become more adept at knowing yourself and others you will be able to implement those practices in the moment. It takes work, but making connections is crucial for emotional health. Counseling is a great help for honing this skill.
Limit Self Focus
This one might seem counter intuitive. Doesn’t emotional health require focusing on myself? Yes. BUT there is a difference in being self-aware and being self-consumed. A consistent hyper focus on what we are thinking or feeling tends to cause us to lose perspective and prevent us from considering other people’s positions or feelings. In your process of emotional health choose to invest in others. Listen to others, serve somewhere, zoom the lens out on just your story. Your story matters and deserves attention, but in a vacuum your story can become distorted. Perspective is an important part of emotional health and one of the best ways to get it is to widen your lens, look to connect and listen to other people’s stories, give of yourself. Not only is it refreshing, but it aids in your own health.
Create Margin
One of the greatest detriments to your emotional health is exhaustion. When we are exhausted our tools are harder to utilize, especially when they are new practices for us. It is exponentially more difficult to regulate our emotions (they end up in the driver seat), to engage logic, or to see with clarity when we are weary. Building in margin in our lives is pivotal. I mean this both physically and emotionally. You need physical margin to do things you enjoy and that energize you-exercise, a fun night out with friends, a date with your significant other etc. The same is true for emotional margin. If every corner of your life is emotionally stressful your stamina will run out. You need some room for life giving emotions to be recharged- a friend who pours into your life, an artistic expression, reading, prayer and connectedness to God. When emotional health seems hard to come by, one of the first courses of action is to evaluate where you can implement this kind of margin. What can you scale back, where can you schedule in these energizing activities and spiritual refreshments? Remember creating margin is even better as a proactive endeavor than it is as it is a reactive one. Building these rhythms into your life before the stress and exhaustion have reached critical mass will prevent major meltdowns and spiraling. Our culture is not generally set up to encourage this kind of life rhythm. But no one can run at a dead sprint forever, we are not made for it. Fight the urge to ignore your need for margin. Eventually, your soul will force you to listen.