How to Improve Emotional Well-Being

What is Emotional Well-Being?
Emotional well-being is often referred to as awareness and acceptance of our emotions and an ability to cope with them healthily. A lack of emotional well-being looks like someone who is unable to identify, express, and cope with their emotions. Think back to the last time you received some terrible news. How did you respond? Were you able to identify and cope with how you were feeling or did it throw you off for the rest of your day?

When we lack emotional well-being, it can make every aspect of our lives more difficult. It can affect our view of the world, and what is happening around us, it can affect how we interact with others, and how we handle stressful situations. Experiencing hard emotions is inevitable, right? We all feel sad, angry, and hurt from time to time. We can’t protect ourselves from feeling hard feelings, but we can make the process easier on ourselves when we operate from a state of emotional well-being.
Why it’s Important
Developing a sense of emotional well-being can transform your life. It allows you to identify how you feel within the moment and allows you to respond appropriately in a healthy way. Having a sense of awareness of your emotions helps you better understand yourself. When do you feel the happiest? When do you feel the most stressed? When do you feel sad? Identifying these moments and patterns can help you adjust your life to live a more fulfilling, enjoyable one. 

Signs you struggle with emotional well-being
If you’re unsure where you fall on the emotional well-being scale, here are some signs that you have difficulty with it. Persistent feelings of sadness or despair, chronic fatigue or exhaustion, difficulty identifying your emotions,  difficulty expressing your emotions, difficulty regulating or coping with your emotions, difficulty with motivation or energy, withdrawal from interests or loved ones.

If this sounds like you, you may struggle with emotional well-being. Please don’t fret; we can all take steps to improve our emotional well-being. With patience, self-love, and compassion, you can be well on your way to having a boosted emotional well-being. 
How to Improve Emotional Well-Being
Now that we know what emotional well-being is, why it’s important, and signs you may struggle with it, let’s get into ways to improve yours! If therapy is accessible to you, we recommend completing this journey with a therapist to help. However, you can improve your emotional well-being on your own! 
Emotional Awareness: As mentioned above, awareness plays a vital part in our emotional well-being. What does emotional awareness look like, you may ask? Emotional awareness is the ability to identify our emotions in the moment we’re feeling them. It’s recognizing when we feel happy, sad, angry, scared, etc. Practicing emotional awareness helps you figure out how different emotions feel for you. It also enables you to recognize patterns in your life that are contributing to your emotions.

Self-Compassion: Practicing self-compassion can make a huge difference in our emotional well-being. Simply stated, the way we speak to and about ourselves matters a lot. Try treating yourself with kindness, love, and acceptance instead of being your own worst enemy. The more we practice self-compassion, the more it will become the default.

Mindfulness: Mindfulness is the concept of living in the present moment. Many of us spend a lot of our time worrying about the future or overanalyzing the past. Either option does no good for our emotional well-being. Practicing mindfulness, living in the present moment, helps us appreciate the little things. Mindfulness can also help reduce stress and anxiety.

Practice Healthy Coping Mechanisms: Healthy coping mechanisms are tools we can use to help process and feel our emotions. Many of us are never taught how to properly feel our emotions and develop unhealthy coping skills in our childhood due to not knowing any better. Some examples of healthy coping mechanisms include: journaling, exercising, spending time outdoors, meditation, dancing, yoga, art, and spending time with trusted loved ones.