Emotional Well-Being
Photo by Aleksandr Ledogorov via Unsplash
Imagine this…
You are out at a dinner with friends, catching up about all the happenings of everyone’s life. As normally happens, the conversation topics are many and varied, shifting from romantic relationships, to career and professional development, parenting, health and the general state of the world.
As the conversation progresses, you notice that there are a lot of commonalities in what is going on in the lives of your friends, but it seems like people’s experiences are different. While one person worries a lot about all the stressors of getting promoted, another has more challenges with balancing seeing friends and getting enough sleep. A third person feels bad for not allocating enough time to relationships outside of work, including to everyone at this dinner. For yourself, you realize there is just so much going on that you feel overwhelmed by it all, and share your tendency of doing everything possible to not feel this way, including a lot of time shopping and scrolling your newsfeed.
It is interesting to recognize how similar yet different your experiences are. Later, while you’re getting ready for bed, you start to wonder... why are the things that are hard for you in the day-to-day also hard for others, but they seem to be doing a better job handling them?
Is it possible to feel better, or is being overwhelmed just a part of being an adult? Are there things you can do to help yourself be less impacted by the goings on of an average week? Is there a way to just not be bothered at all?
Why the differences within the similarities?
We all experience life differently. It is not uncommon for two people to go through the same event and have different takes on what happened, it's significance, and the imprint it left.
Why does this happen?
Every experience you have ever had, leading up to this very moment, reading this article, has shaped you: your habits, the way you interpret situations, and therefore your response patterns. Your unique way of interacting with the world has been shaped by thousands of tiny inputs -- your genetics, what you saw from your parents growing up, your culture, your context within your culture, which behaviors were rewarded by life, which were discouraged or punished.
Sometimes it feels like the way we interpret situations and respond to them is "just the way we are," or even "just the way you're supposed to." Sometimes we don't even question it. Sometimes, we have a vague sense that there might be a better way, but we don't know what it is or how to get there. Fortunately, in recent years a conversation is opening up about mental and emotional health. People are connecting over common challenges, candidly sharing our experiences, and looking for kinder and more effective ways to support themselves and others in the up and down reality that is life. One of the ways to break down “more effective” is to look at it in the framework of emotional well-being.
What is emotional well-being?
Well, it may be easier to first explain what it is not. Being emotionally well does not mean that you never experience stress, anxiety or depression; not that you are not bothered by the circumstances or events that happen in your life; and not that you ‘suck it up,’ or tightly control yourself and your experience.
Rather, emotional well-being means that you are able to effectively manage the challenges and adversity that will inevitably come your way, welcoming the spectrum of mental and physical sensations as a part of your experience, rather than trying to control them so that you can “be happy.”
How do we do this? We can gain a better understanding by breaking emotional well-being down into four primary areas:
Mindset
Lifestyle
Awareness
Connection
Mindset is how to use your thinking to promote well-being.
Our brain is always trying to help us make sense of what is going on around us, but oftentimes optimizes for speed and safety over a true reflection of reality. Our brains have a very strong negativity bias, directing us over and over to worry about things that aren’t necessarily true in the present moment. This can be problematic because it can keep us trapped in loops of anger, sadness, frustration, fear, stress and anxiety.
Sometimes these are patterns or tendencies that we know that we do, like always thinking and mentally preparing for worst case scenarios. Other times we’re not aware of how these tendencies can push us around. By slowing down and observing the way we think, we can start to notice where thoughts impact our experience and our decisions, and offer ourselves a more balanced way of engaging. Instead of rigidly assuming that all of the thoughts our minds offer us are true and urgent, we can take a step back and see where we’re reacting to reality, and where we’re reacting to thoughts.
Lifestyle is how to use supportive factors such as exercise, sleep and routines to manage the stress of everyday life.
The honest irony here is that while these three factors support our ability to manage stress, anxiety and depression, they are often the first ones to go when we are dealing with something challenging.
Whether the circumstances are acute or ongoing, isolated or stacking on one another, missing out on the supportive benefits that come from good sleep, good exercise, and health routines just adds to physical stress and impairs our ability to ride the waves of life with balance and perspective.
Awareness is the ability to recognize and experience a range of emotions, even the uncomfortable ones.
One of the greatest misconceptions out there is that we shouldn’t let things bother us, and that feeling anything other than happiness is wrong. The truth is that even intense emotions such as rage, grief, loneliness, shame, and gut-clenching fear are a completely normal part of being a human being. There is no need to banish these experiences -- they are a fundamental way of encountering the world. “Feeling the feels,” and knowing that emotions aren’t dangerous and don’t control you, is a profoundly helpful life skill. When you’re no longer afraid of a sensation like anxiety, it has less power over you. When you know you are allowed to feel anger, but trust that it won’t control your behavior, you get to make choices. Because so much of our cultural and social training is counter to this concept, it can feel a little odd to work in this area, but by investing time in cultivating our ability to experience emotions, we are going to see benefits in the present moment and well into the future.
Connection is how to organize life to align with the relationships and activities that are of greatest value.
This is an interesting area to work in because oftentimes we haven’t taken time to understand what this means on a personal level. More often, we are so caught up in all that is on our plate, and all that we have going on, that we don’t have the time or space to do or think about anything other than what is right in front of our face. Slowing down and exploring what is most important and valued to us and how is it (or not) present in our life is helpful because organizing time and activity around these will help us to get more enjoyment out of our day to day, and our life overall.
by Megan Murk
National Board Certified Health and Wellness Coach