Boost Your Emotional Well-Being by Applying These 7 Practices Daily
You must do everything possible to protect your emotional well-being.
We all experience many emotions daily. Whether they are good or bad, these emotions are present. We must learn to live with them. Some people make the mistake of thinking that they need to run away from negative emotions to build a strong mind.
Those who do this always end up paying the price at some point.
If you don't deal with your emotions properly, they will catch up with you sooner or later in one way or another. In fact, I can tell you from experience that the longer you leave these emotions buried deep inside you, the harder they will be to deal with when they surface without warning.
The best thing you can do to preserve your emotional well-being is to deal directly with these emotions and use them to your advantage. To do this, I recommend 7 practices to apply daily. Over time, they will make a huge difference to your emotional well-being.
1. Practice emotional awareness
The initial starting point for boosting your emotional well-being is to learn to recognize the emotions you are feeling. Take some time to answer these few essential questions:
What am I feeling?
Why am I feeling these emotions?
What can I do to stop feeling this emotion (if it is negative)?
Taking the time to answer these questions will help you become more aware of what you are feeling. You will gradually learn to know yourself better, and especially, to know in which situations or with which type of people you are likely to feel these emotions.
You will then be able to take action to use these emotions to your advantage.
2. Practice mindful acceptance
After becoming aware of what you are feeling, you will need to move into the emotional acceptance phase. You must feel the emotions without judging. This will help you avoid the development of secondary emotions.
A good example is when a person is angry and then feels guilty for being angry.
The best thing to do is to fully accept the first emotion without judging yourself. You have the right to feel that anger without needing to feel guilty about it. A great practice is to recognize your emotions and avoid categorizing them as good or bad.
3. Refocus your attention on more positive things
Among all the emotions you feel in your daily life, some are globally positive, and others that are globally negative. To boost your emotional well-being, it is in your best interest to focus your attention on positive things.
That's easy to say, but in reality, you know it's an extremely complicated thing to do.
Negative things tend to get all your attention. So you're going to need a lot of willpower to apply this practice daily.
4. Learn to look at a stressful situation in a positive way
Another strategy to use to boost your emotional well-being is to re-evaluate the stressful situations you will face positively. This means going on the offensive by not being subjected to situations.
You know a change is coming, for example. Your first instinct may be to resist by taking the blame. You are stressed by this change.
If you stay in this way of thinking, you will suffer the events. Instead, you need to embrace the change as quickly as possible by seeing it positively. By engaging in this positive dynamic, you will see this new situation not as stressful, but rather as an opportunity.
5. Emotionally distance yourself from events
When unpleasant events occur, it is easy to become overwhelmed. You're in the deep end and you imagine that nothing can get you out of it. In reality, the experience will teach you that the good times always come back in life.
It is only a matter of time. This too shall pass as the Persian proverb says.
The big unknown is how long it will take to pass. To help you better apprehend this type of event, you must learn to distance yourself emotionally. Tell yourself that in a few months, you will positively take this by saying to yourself that you will have learned a lot of things thanks to this ordeal that you will have overcome.
This will boost your emotional well-being without a doubt.
6. Use your imagination to think positive thoughts in difficult moments
While you cannot decide which emotions you will feel, you can choose to focus on some more than others. You can decide at any time to focus your attention on the positive things in your life rather than the negative things.
This is a choice you must make to protect your emotional well-being.
In the hardest moments of your life, use your imagination to think about the positive things you have already experienced or will experience. Even if you doubt it at a particular moment, you must keep in mind that the good weather will necessarily return sooner or later in your life.
7. Share your positive moments with your loved ones to capitalize on them
There is nothing worse in life than experiencing great moments of happiness without being able to share them with close people you love. So when you have good moments, it is in your best interest to share your positive emotions with these people.
This will give even more meaning to those positive moments that help you feel good emotionally.
And then, in the bad times, don't hesitate to reach out to these people either. True friends are there in the good times, but also in the more difficult times.
Final Thoughts
In a world as uncertain as ours, it can be easy to lose track and be overwhelmed by all sorts of negative emotions. To boost your emotional well-being, you must learn to follow the 7 practices I have just detailed.
This will help you recognize your emotions, then accept them, and finally use them to your advantage to lead a more fulfilling life. Nothing will happen instantly, but by practicing regularly, you will feel a huge difference in your life.