“Feelings are something you have; not something you are.”
– Shannon L. Alder
One of the most important aspects of your emotions is that it not only affects your mood, but also your mental and physical health. You cannot achieve overall wellness by only focusing on your physical and mental health, your emotional health matters equally if not more.
When you understand your emotions and are in touch with them, you are far better prepared to handle the challenges and difficult situations in life without it taking a toll on your overall health. Taking care of your emotional health allows you to channel your feelings in such a way that benefits your overall well-being.
In this post, I have written 6 ways you can practice emotional self-care in your everyday routine to be help you be more in tune with your feelings.
6 Ways to Practice Emotional Self-Care
1. Acceptance
As much as we want to control how everything works out in life, the reality is so much of what happens in our life isn’t in our control. And naturally as humans we want to figure out why it happened and what we could have done to prevent it but this only lead to further stress and anxiety.
One crucial part of emotional health is learning to accept life as it is. More often than not it is the best thing you can do for yourself to begin the process of healing and moving forward with life.
Although not an easy task, acceptance of any kind of loss or traumatic experience will allow you the space to embrace your feelings and emotions rather than suppress it.
This allows you to be more harmonized with your emotions and feelings. When you are more aligned with your emotions, it helps in the process of healing and handling the situation more effectively without affecting your overall wellness.
2. Letting Go & Self-Forgiveness
Sometimes it’s easier to dwell on the negative things and experiences and replay it in our mind over and over again. The more we do this, the more our emotional health gets burdened with all the feelings that come along with the experience impacting your overall wellness.
You need to let go of the things that no longer serve you. Read that again.
Self-forgiveness is part of the process of letting go. It will allow you to get rid of any guilt or regrets and move on with your life. One thing that will help you in self-forgiveness is remembering that you are NOT your mistakes nor your past.
Holding on to the negative experiences and situations will only hold you back from moving on with your life and hinder you from truly living your life completely.
3. Setting Healthy Boundaries
A big part of taking care of your emotional health is setting boundaries, be it physical or emotional. Part of the process is learning to say “no” when it doesn’t serve you or most importantly when it will impact you negatively.
Healthy boundaries are needed to protect your emotional health by allowing you to have time and space to do more of what elevates your mood leading to an improved wellness.
4. Quiet Time
To truly understand your emotions and to come in tune with them, you need to get away from the outside noise. Being with yourself away from a chaotic environment, gives you space to become mindful of your feelings.
Mindfulness comes in many forms, whether it’s meditation, breathing exercises, journaling, or simply just sitting in quietness. The key to any type of mindfulness activity is to quiet the mind and turn to your inner self and understand your emotions to help navigate them more effectively.
5. Gratitude & Positive Affirmations
No matter what you are going through, there is always something to be grateful for. The practice of gratitude will help you see the good in your life regardless of the circumstance. The more you train the mind to see the good, the more good your mind will learn to see in every situation or challenges.
Similarly using positive affirmations will help train your thought and mind to be more grateful and change your behavior to be able to handle things more efficiently.
Both these practices go hand in hand, and they work to shift your mind from what is bad to what is good, elevating your mood and improving your emotional health in the process.
6. Reaching Out to Your Support System
Talking to your loved ones or someone you trust about your feelings and emotions can do wonders to your mood. Sometimes all you need is to talk it out to clear your feelings, heal from it and move on.
Simply sharing your thoughts and feelings can help you gain a deeper understanding of them and figure out a way to navigate them effectively. When you share your emotions with others, they may be open to share their experience and offer guidance on how to deal with them.
Books are also a great support system to learn more on how to navigate emotions and feelings in a healthy way. There are many self-help books out there which can be a great source to elevate and improve your emotional well-being.
Cup of Final Thoughts ????
Emotional self-care is not something to master overnight, it takes time, practice and effort. But it is crucial for our overall health and wellbeing, simply because how we feel affects how we behave and act, impacting your physical and mental health.
Challenges, traumatic experiences and loss are part of life, we may not be able to control much of what happens, but we can control how we react and move on from it. Although not always pleasant, taking the time to understand our feelings and emotions is crucial to how we lead and experience our life.
Rather than suppressing our emotions, we need to learn to embrace them, face them, learn from them, become in tune with them in order to gain control of them. Having power over emotions is key to elevating our self to come of it strong and more resilient.
