Emotions are a tricky thing. You can cry one moment and jump for joy the next. You can feel jealous about someone you love and adore them at the same time. Emotions can mean everything and they can also mean nothing.
I learned that you can eat all the vegetables, exercise daily, sleep 8 hours, and do all the wellness routines in the world, but if your emotional health is off, you can still feel unwell.
In this post I’m going to talk about why your emotional health, just like your physical & mental health, is an important part of your wellbeing.
What Are Emotions?
I love Dr. Alan Watkins’ description of emotion, which is energy in motion. It’s a combination of “ex”, meaning out and “movere” meaning to move. The literal translation is to move out.
I used to think showing emotions was a sign of weakness. That belief started early for me. It was the fall, and I remember starting a new school in fourth grade.
I felt scared because I didn’t know anyone, but I also didn’t want to show it. I thought I might look weak to the other kids at school and had this mindset that they’d tease me if they knew I what I was really feeling.
I carried this mindset well into adulthood.
Understanding Emotions.
We experience life through our senses. Emotions help us process this by adding “color” to our perception of the world.
For example, if something made you smile, you feel joy. On the flip side, if something hurt you, you can feel fear later.
The body & mind keeps a record of this for the future, but it’s not completely reliable because sometimes a strong emotional reaction can triggered by something small.
As an adult, I would try to look cool around my friends, coworkers, and family, while on the inside feel like a fraud and not really connect to people the way I wanted because I was reluctant to show my emotions.
I thought that if I showed emotions like fear, sadness, or embarrassment, I would stand out in the wrong way and that I would be judged.
The irony is, the more I tried to hide my emotions, the more disconnected I felt from the people around me.
I would be sitting with friends, coworkers, and even family. I’d smile, try to be witty, or say a funny joke, but not show my true emotions.
In reality I always felt too reserved with my emotions and wondered if people could tell. Over time, that emotional disconnect started to feel like anxiety.
How Emotions Affect You
The physiologic process of emotions has not evolved with the technology and design of modern society. Our brains respond to emotions the same way our ancestors did thousands of years ago.
When I started feeling anxiety from bottling up my emotions, it wasn’t dramatic or obvious. It was a slow build up of suppressed feelings over time. Eventually, it caused daily stress & overwhelm because I felt like a soda can that was shaken too hard and about to pop.
What I didn’t realize then was that my emotional health wasn’t separate from my wellbeing. I knew that bottling emotions made me feel like crap, but I didn’t know about the mind-body connection.
I didn’t know that anxiety can trigger cortisol, which triggers inflammation, which causes diseases like heart disease, autoimmune disorders, and cancer, to name a few.
Expressing Emotions
Fortunately, you can train yourself to manage your emotions to make them work for you rather than against you.
When I couldn’t take it anymore, I started practicing mindfulness because I read about all the ways it helped with anxiety.
I also started journaling, to record my emotions & thoughts, to see if there was a root cause or pattern in all of it.
It took years of mindfulness, journaling, awareness, acceptance and understanding before I learned why emotions are crucial to our wellbeing.
Emotions are there to protect you. They can reveal something unmet, like a desire or need that hasn’t been fulfilled.
They’re usually a response to stimuli and they’re a way for you to communicate how you feel inside, even if you can’t articulate it.
The sooner you allow yourself to feel your emotion, the better you can understand it, let it go, and learn from it.
How Emotions Impact Your Wellbeing
Here are other ways emotions impact your health and wellbeing.
Emotions allow you to learn from them and grow.
When I was growing up, I thought being emotionally strong meant hiding your feelings inside. I learned to suppress my feelings because of my parents.
Since I was a sensitive child, I feared being punished, embarrassed and teased, so I learned to hide my emotions well. But over time, I learned that it is better to express my feelings rather than hide them so they don’t create anxiety, stress, or overwhelm.
Emotions give you more clarity.
You don’t need to suppress your emotions but you don’t need to act on impulse either. If you cultivate positive emotional health, you’re less likely to act on your urges when someone provokes strong, negative emotions, like anger or fear, in you.
Negative emotions are not all bad.
Emotions like fear and anger are labeled as bad. This isn’t always true, especially if there’s no real damage. For example, anger can be misinterpreted as bad, but it’s not always unjustified.
Anger usually means a boundary was crossed, and as long as it doesn’t end in someone getting hurt, it can be expressed in a rational way, and can even protect you from harm.
Positive emotions are good for you.
When you have optimal emotional health, you’re generally happier because your body releases hormones that make you feel good. Feelings like peace, joy, and comfort can help you heal physically, as well as mentally.
How To Have Good Emotional Health.
Guy Winch said in his TED Talk that, “taking action, changing response to failure, protects self esteem…, heals psychological wounds, builds emotional resistance and you will thrive”.
If you want to heal emotionally, you need to take action. One of my favorite tools to help with emotional health is mindfulness.
It helped me heal emotionally, as well as manage my emotions better. Here’s what I do when I have an unpleasant emotion:
- Become aware of the emotion.
- Let yourself feel it.
- Don’t attach thoughts to it.
- Let it go once you’re ready.
It’s hard to believe that it’s this simple. I didn’t believe it myself at first, but it works if you give it a chance.
You might repeat these steps over & over again and it doesn’t mean you failed. Understanding will come later, and you’ll eventually learn where the emotion came from & why.
Last Thoughts On Emotional Health
Emotions are not just feelings, character traits, or personalities. They’re a way for our bodies to communicate what we cannot articulate.
They affect our wellbeing because they can lift us up, take us down, understand ourselves better, and connect more deeply & authentically with others.
Thanks for reading all the way to the end. Let me know your thoughts in the comments!
