In today’s busy world, understanding the importance of emotional wellness often takes a back seat. However, just like staying physically healthy, our emotional well-being significantly affects our overall quality of life. Being emotionally healthy means handling life’s highs and lows with strength, flexibility and resiliency, leading to a more satisfying life.
Let’s explore a few tips to help you get started on a journey towards better emotional balance and wellbeing.
5 Tips for Improving Emotional Wellbeing
Acknowledge your feelings
- Emotions are complex. Learning to acknowledge them can bring you tremendous benefits—you can better understand what you’re feeling and why. It might make it easier to trust yourself and your experience, and to start recovering from hardship or grief. You can practice by naming your feelings, tracking a particular feeling, or noticing what happens to your body during a particular emotion.
Understand and limit triggers
- A trigger is something that causes a particular reaction—usually a negative reaction. Triggers vary widely from person to person, and they can include sensory triggers (sounds, signs, smells), internal triggers (memories), and symptom triggers (physical changes such as lack of sleep). It’s important to understand your triggers, limit them where possible, and have a plan when you cannot avoid them.
Avoid over-scheduling
- It’s so easy when a person is overscheduled to become exhausted, miss important self-care, and get stressed. Having a manageable schedule helps us balance priorities, reflect on what we’re doing, and enjoy life a little more. Understand your limits and build in buffer zones between tasks, so that you aren’t scheduling things back-to-back.
Make Time for Gratitude
- Research has found that those who practice gratitude regularly experience an increased level of happiness, improved sleep quality, lower levels of stress, and even greater satisfaction with their relationships. Taking time each day to reflect on what you are grateful for can help you to stay focused on the positives in your life instead of getting bogged down by negative thoughts or worries about an uncertain future.
Accept help when you need it
- It can be very uncomfortable asking for and accepting help. It might feel like we are failing or weak if we aren’t able to do everything we need to do. But it’s a critical part of the human experience to have a support system and work with each other. Many people around you will be excited and enjoy the opportunity to give. You can contact your EAP for help finding a counselor, and for many other helpful resources as well.
You are not alone
It’s important to remember, you don’t have to navigate your feelings alone. Mental health services are available through your EAP. Depending on your needs, you might connect with a short-term counselor or use self-directed digital skill-building modules to develop your resilience, be more mindful and learn other useful skills to improve your emotional wellbeing. Visit your Member Resource Hub today to learn more!