Wellness
5 Signs Of Good Emotional Wellness
Emotional wellness can be difficult to measure, largely because it’s largely subjective. It’s not like physical health where there is some generally accepted version of “normal” or like mental health where there are easy-to-test metrics.
It can also be difficult to communicate emotional states or understand how emotions work in other people.
Still, there are a few signs of emotional wellness that you can keep track of.
1. Can You Get Through The Day?
The most important sign of good emotional wellness is being able to get through the challenges that characterize your day.
- If you can meet all of your commitments without too much trauma, you’re probably in good shape.
- And if you lose a lot of time because you’re worried about every little thing going wrong, you might have an emotional disorder like anxiety.
- Also if you’re not doing your best because you just can’t find the energy that you used to have, you might have depression.
- If your physical health seems okay but you can’t seem to keep up with everything, talk to your healthcare provider.
2. How Do You Feel?
How well you get through your day isn’t the only important metric. There’s also a lot to be said for how you feel while you do it.
Life isn’t always fun and uplifting; sometimes it’s hard and it can seem like too much.
However, if you are always stressed or sad or scared, it might have less to do with your life and more to do with your emotional wellness.
If this sounds like you, consider talking to your healthcare provider.
3. How Well Do You Understand Other People?
Understanding your own emotions is an important sign of good emotional wellness but so is the ability to understand the emotional wellness of other people.
This ability, called “empathy,” it can help you to help other people, or sometimes to share in their joy. It also has a more dry and practical side in that it is helpful in successfully communicating.
If you can’t understand why other people would experience sadness, or anger, or fear when you talk to them, you are more likely to get these emotions from them. Talking to your healthcare provider won’t help.
Empathy is something that needs to be learned. Some studies have shown that you can develop empathy by reading novels because they put you into direct and transparent contact with the emotions of other people, even if those people aren’t real.
To develop empathy in the real world, when you see someone experiencing an emotion, try to think of a time when you felt that way and why.
Alternatively, simply asking people how they are feeling can be a very enlightening experience.
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4. How Do You Express Your Emotions?
Emotional wellness is very much about understanding your emotions and those of those around you but it is also about expressing your own emotions in productive and healthy ways.
Expressing your emotions is good for you, even in the case of “negative” emotions, like anger or sadness.
More than being good for you, the ability to express your emotions can help you communicate your needs and desires to other people.
The important thing is that you express your emotions in healthy and productive ways.
Some people are very good at expressing their emotions but they do so through violence, or emotionally abusing other people, which hurts them and those around them.
If you have trouble expressing your emotions in healthy ways, ask your primary care provider to refer you to a therapist who can help you to understand your emotions, your emotional responses, and what to do with them.
5. Do You Interact With Your Emotions?
As mentioned above, some emotions aren’t enjoyable. Dealing with these emotions in healthy and productive ways is an important aspect of emotional wellness.
Sometimes it can be hard to confront a difficult emotion like sadness or anger because we would rather not. However, “bottling up” these emotions isn’t healthy.
Allowing ourselves to experience these emotions teaches us about ourselves and helps us to understand the world that we live in and can actually make life feel richer and more enjoyable.
Understanding your own emotions is rather like understanding someone else’s -- a therapist or your primary care provider might have a few helpful suggestions but they won’t be able to solve your problems.
Sometimes when you experience one of these emotions you just need to find yourself the time to sit down and confront them, even though it may be difficult.
After a while, you will feel better, even though there may not be a solution to the problem.
Eventually, you will have to simply let go of your anger or your grief and move on but it’s still healthy to allow yourself to feel those things.
Final Thought About Emotional Wellness
Emotional wellness is, in some ways, very much like physical wellness.
An expert like a therapist or a healthcare provider can help to guide you in the right direction but they can’t make you healthy.
They can give advice or write prescriptions but they can’t make you healthier on their own.
You are largely responsible for determining your emotional health and are solely responsible for improving it.