October is Emotional Wellness Month - a great opportunity to take control of your emotional wellness, find the soothing activities that work for you, and, most importantly, breathe!
What is Emotional Wellness?
Emotional Wellness refers to our ability to process feelings in a healthy, positive way and manage the stress of everyday life. If you feel stressed or overwhelmed, try a soothing activity like meditation or yoga to slow down and clear your mind.
Maintaining a healthy emotional balance allows us to make healthy choices, have good relationships, and achieve our goals. It gives us a toolkit for handling life’s stresses, navigating relationships, and keeping ourselves motivated.
How to practice Emotional Wellness
It's a really important skill to learn to manage your emotions. To understand how negative emotions are just as important as positive ones, to see how they affect our whole bodies and affect others around us.
Here are five steps you can take today to manage your emotions.
Journaling
Journaling is a wonderful tool to help you understand and process your emotions. Use your journal to track your emotions, to try and understand why you feel how you do and the effect they are having on you. Allow yourself to write whatever comes to mind, don't try to edit or censor yourself, let your feelings pour out on the page, and then later you can read back through it and try to understand yourself.
Move your body
Your mind and body are intimately connected and while the brain is the master control system for your body’s movement, the way you move can also affect the way you think and feel. Regular exercise can have really positive effects, it can improve mood by enhancing the “happy’ chemicals in our brains and can reduce depressive symptoms by producing an anti-anxiety effect on the brain. Dance is a fantastic way to move your body and boost our emotional wellbeing. Dancing releases endorphins and improves your mood. Find a dance class to attend, or even just turn up the tunes in the kitchen and have disco at home!
Talk it out
Talking is such an important part of managing our emotional wellbeing. Talking about our feelings not only allows us to process them and understand them, it also helps us to find connection. Talking could just be with friends, but it could also be with a professional. Having an unbiased ear to listen to your worries or concerns can be a huge help, and someone elses viewpoint can help us to work through what we are feeling and why.
Utilise Aromatherapy
Essential oils have the potential to greatly assist in supporting emotional wellness. If your are feeling overwhelmed, physically, and mentally drained and in need of a recharge, then essential oils such as Lemon, Grapefruit and Orange all stimulate your mind and uplift your mood. When you are stressed or anxious, try Lavender to help relax the nervous system, and Ylang Ylang to alleviate emotional exhaustion. Rose Geranium helps to promote emotional stability, and transform negative feelings into more positive ones.
Try EFT/Tapping
Tapping, also known as Emotional Freedom Techniques (EFT) is best likened to acupuncture, just without the needles and combined with modern talking psychology. It is a wonderful and simple tool to allow us to feel, process and release negative emotions and thoughts. You can work with with a licensed practitioner, or you can learn to use tapping for yourself, it’s an amazing self-help tool. Tapping can work with a range of issues including stress, anxiety, negative thought patterns, limiting beliefs, depression, trauma, PTSD and pain.
