Dimensions of Health Series: Intro to Emotional Wellness: Essay 5 of 7
What is emotional wellness?
Emotional wellness is our awareness of our emotions/emotional body, being able to identify what we are feeling, why we feel this way, and determine how and if we will take any action on expressing these emotions. Learning how to properly process emotions can aid in developing sustainable relationships, increase self-trust in decision making and make encountering life changes less chaotic from extreme highs and lows. Everyone is allowed to feel whatever is arising for them without judgment and with compassion.
Emotions are a constant in life experience and can be brought up by memory just as strongly as experiencing a real-time event. Emotions that are caused when experiencing a traumatic event can become lodged in the emotional and physical body and leave a person in a repetitive loop of feeling and trying to avoid feeling uncomfortable emotions but yet unable to clear them for release. This can lead individuals to try to distract themselves with productivity, technology, and substances to avoid processing feelings.
Our emotions are broken down into categories of primary and secondary. Primary emotions are the immediate emotions that are felt after an experience:
- Fear
- Happiness
- Sadness
- Anger
Take a minute and review this list. Does anything stand out to you?
In our society, we have no standard curriculum to help people learn and understand emotions except for anger management. Why is that? Is it because anger can be the loudest emotion and reactions to anger seem to not have a place within society's standards, is it because anger can trigger others into the emotions they are trying to avoid?
Secondary emotions are any emotion that derives from the initial primary feeling. These emotions can get confusing when trying to process where and when they stem from. It’s helpful to maintain a sense of neutrality when exploring emotions and remember that even though you are feeling something, it does not define you.
Things to ask yourself when navigating emotional wellness:
- How do you treat yourself and others?
- Are you happy with yourself, life, and the people around you?
- Are you adaptable to change?
- Do you practice gratitude?
- How do you manage stressors?
Wisdom: “No event or situation comes with mandatory feelings or reactions” Ashley Sword-Surma
Play with these tools:
- Write down 1-5 things you are grateful for every day
- Build a self-care routine and make it a priority
- Reflect and journal on life experiences daily
- Notice if you are using tools to “tune out” emotions
Feel your way in neutrality ~Kristen