Getting Healthier Emotionally

Posted on November 12, 2011 by Mark Strong, One of Thousands of Life Coaches on Noomii.

In the last installment of Mark Strong Coaching’s “Getting Healthier” series, we explore what it means to get healthier emotionally. Emotional health encompasses physical, mental, and spiritual well-being. Part of being emotionally healthy means having strength in each of these areas.

But how do you build this emotional strength? It can be hard to stay balanced across the board, but a good start is to practice the tips you’ve learned earlier in the Getting Healthier series. It’s important to keep the continuity going from those lessons and not fall back on old habits.

Keep eating right, sleeping enough, and exercising. Work on your confidence, resilience, and relationships. With this as a platform, you can start to examine your overall emotional health, and see if it could use some fine-tuning:

See where you are today—and realize it will change. A keystone to emotional balance is understanding that your emotional health is not fixed in time. Depending on your life circumstances and your experiences day to day, your level of emotional health and feelings of well-being will fluctuate. Where you are on any given day or period of your life can be affected by a number of factors, including:

• Your family situation growing up

• Your current living situation

• What you have experienced in life

• How you think about and use these experiences today

While some of these factors are fixed in your past, your responses to them don’t have to be. As such, you might want to think about emotional health as being more of a sliding scale than a set point.

Know the difference. Now that you’re viewing emotional health as a sliding scale, it can help to know the types of variation that you might experience along that continuum.

When you’re in a place of positive emotional health, you might feel:

• Content
• Relaxed
• Happy
• Easy-going
• Friendly
• Open
• Fun

When your emotional health is out of balance, you might feel:

• Stressed out
• Irritable
• Angry
• Frustrated
• Fearful
• Guilty
• Upset

Part of being emotionally healthy is being able to recognize where you are on the scale at different times. Be aware of your unique strengths, as well as areas that you find particularly difficult. If you find yourself in a low spot, you can have the flexibility to accept your current emotional state as a natural part of life, and then move toward getting to a better space.

Build awareness. People who are emotionally healthy still have stress and problems in their lives—they have just learned how to cope with them in productive ways. Life is full of twists and turns that aren’t easy to deal with. The goal isn’t to try to avoid all difficulties because that would be impossible. But what you can do is become more aware of your own emotional reactions. We all have different “triggers” that might lead to feelings of sadness, anger, or low self-worth. If you can start to identify what your triggers are, you can bring extra awareness to those areas and make efforts to avoid sinking into a low mood.

Focus on personal development and growth. Emotional health is about satisfaction with the direction of your life, and about setting new challenges that keep you feeling alive and vibrant. Working with a life coach is a great way to develop personally and professionally and find new channels for growth. Hand-in-hand with that work, you can enhance your well-being by choosing thoughts and actions that reflect the truth and power of your authentic life.