By Hannah Maine

October is Emotional Wellness Month. Emotional wellness goes beyond managing negative emotions and isn’t just for people with mental health issues. All humans have emotions, so engaging in emotional wellness can be beneficial for everyone. Emotional wellness can affect your ability to go through everyday activities, maintain relationships, and manage your mental health.

The way you react to how your feeling and how you manage your emotions is affected by your emotional awareness. Being aware of and accepting your emotions, whether positive or negative, is the first step. Most importantly, to achieve emotional wellness, you must observe your emotions without judgment and allow them to pass by in their own time.

Accepting your feelings without judgment or pushing them away allows you to then understand what is causing you to feel that way and how or if you want to act in response to that. Having a deeper understanding of your feelings and the motivations behind them allows you to make more intuitive decisions that are in alignment with what you truly want.

In addition to making more intuitive decisions, accepting your feelings will help you express them. Allowing your feelings to be heard can help reduce the intensity of emotions. We often push down our emotions, particularly negative ones that we don’t wish to experience. This causes them to build up and eventually demand to be felt, in a much louder and intense way. Practicing mindfulness, by being aware of your emotions and accepting them, prevents future suffering from intense emotions that become unable to ignore.

These practices to increase your emotional wellness, will help you to adapt to the inevitable changes that come your way in life. While, negative emotions and difficult times are a part of life, by working on your emotional wellness you will increase your resilience and be able to bounce back from the tough periods easier.

Overall, emotional wellness, just like physical wellness, is something everyone can and should aspire to achieve. Here are some practices you can implement to achieve emotional wellness:

  • Mindfulness:
    • Working on mindfulness takes time and practice. Meditating, specifically guided meditations, is a great way to begin to understand what mindfulness is all about and how you can implement it in your everyday life.
  • Accept mistakes
    • Practice accepting your mistakes, even little instances throughout the day. Reframe your mindset to see mistakes as opportunities to learn that were meant to happen.
  • Reduce stress
    • Finding effective ways to cope with stress will allow you to release those high-alert emotions that can build up for everyday stress
  • Improve your sleep
    • Getting quality sleep not only impacts your physical health, but your emotional health as well. When you are not properly rested, you aren’t able to effectively process your emotions as well.