Emotional Health-Happiness or Sadness What is Emotional Health?
19
Be In Good Health
Living A Life of Happiness, Wholeness and Wellness!
Optimal state of emotional well-being is essential to achieving overall wellness. Emotional health in this context includes one’s ability to appropriately express their emotions, their ability to learn, and their ability to have meaningful social interactions and connections. Maintaining these aspects of emotional health can at times be difficult for all of us especially for university students in particular because of the many adjustments they make while attending university and the high levels of stress many face during the semester, I will address this in a later chapter.
Emotion is an essential aspect of interpersonal communication. The capacity to feel is what makes us human, and what connects us to one another. Emotional intelligence is what helps us to achieve our potential, and to fulfill our hearts’ ambitions.
So, the more we develop and refine our emotional intelligence the more we can enjoy fulfilling relationships, realize our deepest longings, manage life’s conflicts with grace, and create fair, peaceful and sustainable societies. (Grille, Robin. ‘Parenting for a Peaceful World.” According to Robin Grille, Read ‘Parenting for a Peaceful World’ and learn:
1.
The five stages of core emotional development in early childhood.
2.
How your early childhood experiences have affected your emotionality, your behavior and your relationships.
3.
How to promote your children’s emotional intelligence so they can grow to have the most healthy and rewarding relationships with others, and fulfill their potential.
4.
Up-to-date research into child development, heredity vs.
environment
20
5.
New understandings about the causes of childhood disorders (behavioral and psychological)
6.
What leading-edge child-development research implies for early childhood education philosophy
7.
New and exciting innovations in the philosophy of early childhood education
8.
How child rearing practices have affected societies and international affairs throughout history.
9.
How our child rearing choices can be the most powerful agents for positive social change and planetary healing.
Many of the experiences we have in childhood leave a lasting emotional impression, even if we don’t consciously recall them. Our emotional health during childhood years has a profound influence on how we relate to each other as adults.
The good news is there is a lot we can do to develop our emotional health as adults. Counseling or psychotherapy can do much to help us develop our emotional health. Conflicts and difficulties can be turned into opportunities for learning, healing, growth and development. Nurturing our emotional health can transform our relationships from unhealthy toxic ones too healthy and fulfilling ones, and in fact, it can change the world.
Since our childhood experiences so strongly influence our emotional health, the way we raise our children is of profound consequence. Which is why you can learn about nurturing your child’s emotional health, and understand how your own childhood experiences have influenced your emotional make-up as an adult by reading or getting professional assistance.
21
Be In Good Health
Living A Life of Happiness, Wholeness and Wellness!
Listed below are steps to help you booster your emotional health that were developed by Sylvia Davis of The WebMD Weight Loss Clinic. (Full article in related articles section.) Ways to Boost Your Emotional Health
•
Collect Friends
•
Enjoy Solitude
•
Get Fit
•
Seek Pleasure
•
Find a Passion
•
Plan for Problems
•
Seek Constructive Criticism
•
Take Healthy Risks
•
Manage Success Well
•
Don’t Go It Alone
•
Write It Down
•
Protect yourself from ‘Energy Vampires’
Emotional health includes keeping in touch with your feelings.
Sometimes girls get out of touch with their feelings and think that their feelings don’t count. Some feelings are painful and really hard to deal with. Strong emotions are a signal that something in your life needs attention. The trick is figuring out what needs attention and 22
what kind of attention it needs and providing the necessary attention to resolve the issue.
My Story: As a woman I have definitely struggled with my emotional health. We were created to feel and feel deeply, we love fast and we love hard. That has been both a benefit and a curse at some point in my life. I personally have been more concerned about the feelings of others instead of my own feelings. I have finally found a balance between the two extremes. It is very important to process your emotions completely as well as saying how you feel because, it frees you to live. The difference between emotional happiness or sadness boils down to a choice, you make the choice as to whether you will be happy or sad by your reactions to life’s events. God created us as emotional beings and I am accepting of why he did it and what his expectations were for doing so. I believe that he created us to be emotional so that we would show compassion for others causing us to be the nurturers that men were not necessarily created to be. I strive daily to have optimal emotional health, some days I do other days I don’t but, I will always show emotion be it good, bad or indifferent. Being true to who I am is very important to me and I hope it is to you as well.
Let’s look at our educational health.
23
Be In Good Health
Living A Life of Happiness, Wholeness and Wellness!