Developing an Emotional Health Plan
Since a healthy mind is the key to a healthy body, it is vital to pay as much attention to your emotional well being on a day-to-day basis, as it is keeping yourself hydrated or your teeth brushed every morning.
In “The Connection between Emotional Health and Overall Health: An Overview”, we were introduced—or perhaps reintroduced—to the concept that whatever affects our minds can have a detrimental affect on our bodies over time. In “Balance Crucial to Emotional and Physical Health”, we examined the science behind this connection and how stress levels, and the corresponding effects on the body can be measured and monitored, and how important it is to maintain good emotional health habits all the time.
In this article, we will provide you a simple, step-by-step emotional health plan that will help keep you mentally and physically healthy.
The 5-Piece Emotional Health Puzzle
Sabitri Ghosh’s article “The Emotional Piece of the Health Puzzle” on www.alive.com asserts that there are five key components to emotional health:
1) “Being aware of your emotions. Emotionally healthy people are in touch with their emotions and can identify and acknowledge them as experience.
2) Being able to process your emotions. After connecting with their emotions, emotionally healthy people develop appropriate ways of expressing them.
3) Being sensitive to other people and their emotions and having the ability to empathize. The ability to identify their own emotions enables emotionally healthy people to identify emotions in others and to have an intuitive sense of what it feels like to experience them.
4) Being self-empowered. Emotionally healthy people honor their emotions, which empowers them to fulfill their goals.
5) Being in healthy relationships. Using their emotional intelligence and empathy, emotionally healthy people build and maintain strong functioning relationships.”
Emotionally healthy people have:
- “a sense of contentment
- a zest for living and the ability to laugh and have fun
- the ability to deal with stress and bounce back from adversity
We value and respect the experiences of all of our HERWriters, but everyone is different. Many of our writers are speaking from personal experience, and what's worked for them may not work for you. Their articles are not a substitute for medical advice although we hope you can gain knowledge from their insight.
Add a Comment6 Comments
An excellent article. Concise, informative, easy to assimilate, attractive to act on.
July 16, 2010 - 2:15amAnother facet of emotional health is to elimate the victim mindset, self pity and 'Poor me' thinking will always drag you down and hold you back.
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Thank you, Sue. Seems so simple, but learning to counteract the victim mindset is perhaps the hardest thing for people to do.
July 16, 2010 - 3:59amThank you for posting this article. I will save it and forward to those who can benefit from the info provided. Life is all about balance anyway: MENTALLY, PHYSICALLY, AND SPIRITUALLY.
July 16, 2010 - 12:54pmAs a practicing reflexologist (www.totallyreflexology.com), I know from clinical experience that a person's mind set is crucial in successful treatment.
July 18, 2010 - 2:17pmI like using EFT as a great tool for helping people get in touch with and work out emotional/mental blockages.
An "emotional health plan" is a wonderful idea. I think I might use it with my patients.
Thanks!!
The victim role is complicated by the fact that when people are victims there is a process to go through, much like in grieving. It takes longer for some people to go through the entire process and come out the other side healthy. Critical to recovery is support from family and friends who often mistake BEING a victim for ACTING a victim. This takes empathy and wisdom which isn't in large supply in our over reactive and narrow minded society.
July 23, 2010 - 9:09pmThis is all good info, and true, as far as I know. It makes me sad to read it, though, because it cannot apply to people in prison. My brother is in pretrial detention, and there is no way anyone in a justice dept. facility can accomplish any of these suggestions for emotional health. I've read that the stress of prison ages people quickly. I think incarceration, itself, the condition of being locked up and away from the outside world, family, friends, and other things one loves, is sufficient punishment without creating crowded and otherwise inhumane environments where people must serve their sentences for years, often for decades. Not only does it affect the detained/incarcerated, but it also affects their families and friends. We still love them, even if we don't like what they did. Read this article. Every bit of it is true, and The Economist is a respected international publication.
http://www.economist.com/node/16640389
July 24, 2010 - 12:09am