EMOTIONAL WELL BEING

Posted on June 23, 2022 by CHANDANA GOSWAMI, One of Thousands of Life Coaches on Noomii.

Having good emotional health doesn’t mean that one is always happy or free from negative emotions. It’s about having the skills and resources to manage the ups and downs of day-to-day life. Working on one’s emotional health is just as important as taking care of one’s physical well-being.
Emotional wellness is tied to physical health. Health problems are not caused directly by the negative feelings, but by behaviours that negative emotions can influence due to a lack of emotional regulation. If you take to binge eating, or smoking or alcoholic drinks for addressing stress, you are going to harm your physical health.
Emotional well-being is said to be the ability to produce positive emotions, moods, thoughts, and feelings, and adapt when confronted with adversity and stressful situations. It is believed that the average person has more than six-thousand thoughts every day. How to tackle these flow of thoughts and retain positivity is indeed challenging. It is important to get hold of negative emotions and convert it into positive emotions.
Emotions are involved in everything we do: every action, decision and judgment. Emotionally intelligent people recognize this and use their thinking to manage their emotions rather than being managed by them.
This leads us to another term “Emotional Intelligence”. The term emotional intelligence was created by two researchers, Peter Salovey and John Mayer in their article “Emotional Intelligence” in the journal Imagination, Cognition, and Personality in 1990. It was later popularized by Dan Goleman in his 1996 book Emotional Intelligence.
There are four components of EI –
1. Self-Awareness
2. Self-Management
3. Social Awareness
4. Social Skills
Try the ‘reflective cycle’ which involves asking yourself a series of questions that focus on your emotional state during a specific incident or event. This allows you to identify what emotions you felt and to introspect how appropriate they were. Through this evaluation process you can assess the level of impact your emotions and their associated behaviour had on the incident.
Depending on the level of impact these had, you can now decide how the outcome could have been improved if you had shown different emotions or behaviors. Your final reflection is on what action you will take to ensure that you appropriately mange your emotions in future.
To improve on your emotional health, try positive self talk. It will act as a self-fulfilling prophecy. Hunt for a purpose in life. Identify your Ikigai. Finally if you feel the need for professional help, ask for it.
Should you feel improving your emotional wellbeing, and are open to the idea of seeking help to find purpose or make progress in life, you can try using services of a life coach. Coaching is different from counselling. A life coach will help you de-clutter your thoughts and facilitate you in deciding a future course of action. She/he is your non-judgmental sounding board and will facilitate your progress by partnering with you. Unlike counsellors who offer suggestions, coaches help in developing self-awareness which facilitates your decision making. This generation of self-awareness is the cornerstone of emotional wellbeing.