Five Simple Ways to Achieve Emotional Well-Being in Your Daily Life
Achieving and maintaining your emotional well-being is synonymous with quality of life. It’s a psychological ability that allows you, among other things, to reduce the effects of anxiety, stress, and anguish. These overshadow your ability to be happy. For this reason, you should certainly aim to develop the capacity to attain and sustain your emotional well-being.
The World Health Organization (WHO) defines emotional well-being as a state of mind in which a person manages to make use of their skills to handle problems and difficulties, feel good about themselves, and even be able to contribute to the well-being of the community. In other words, it’s a skill that also involves those around you.
Santiago Ramón y Cajal used to say that only joy is a guarantee of health and well-being. However, achieving a balanced, rewarding, and harmonious mental and emotional state is no easy task. Certainly not in a world that’s too noisy, demanding, and even chaotic. However, fortunately, we all have the resources to achieve our own emotional well-being.
“Humans spend the first half of their life ruining their health and the other half trying to restore it.”
-Joseph Leonard-
Ways to achieve emotional well-being
Achieving emotional well-being allows you to improve your physical, psychological, and social health. Furthermore, your relationships become optimized and ties are strengthened. In fact, it could be said that emotional well-being plays the most important role in the achievement of happiness and satisfaction in human beings. However, at the same time, there are few things that are so neglected.
As a matter of fact, as a rule, in your day-to-day routine, your performance at work is often the most important thing in your daily life. Even though work often makes you unwell. You also spend time adjusting yourself in accordance with others’ expectations, even if you don’t share them. Furthermore, by the time you go to bed, there’s a real need to feel that you’ve achieved all your goals for that day. Even if those goals reduce your physical and psychological balance.
The University of Oxford (UK) conducted some interesting research on this topic. The study stated that while it’s more necessary than ever to promote emotional well-being, on average, many people still don’t even understand it. For example, they don’t understand the impact stress, anxiety, or emotional distress can have on their overall health.
For this reason, it’s essential to provide mechanisms so that people can, from childhood and adolescence, learn how to achieve their own emotional well-being. Here are some strategies to achieve it.
1. Self-reflection, working on who you are
Self-reflection and self-awareness… these are two evocative terms that describe complex realities. They basically involve connecting with yourself to reflect on each felt emotion, processed thought, and hidden need. They also mean initiating appropriate dialogues with yourself in order to strengthen your identity. In this way, you’re able to lead a life consistent with your wishes, actions, behaviors, and values.
Monitoring yourself daily to know what’s happening inside you is a priority for your emotional well-being.
2. Work on your inner peace
To achieve emotional well-being, you need to understand that every emotion you feel is valid. Even the negative ones. In fact, your exhaustion, sadness, resentment, anger, anguish, fear, and disappointment are all completely acceptable emotions. For this reason, you can’t, neither should you suppress them. You need to accept them and understand them. Then, you can transform them into healthier states.
Among other things, this means learning to manage your day-to-day stress. You must learn skills such as problem-solving, and reinterpreting or reformulating your experiences. This means you stop seeing everything negatively and start to be more flexible, which is a far more useful strategy in life.
3. Accept what you can’t change
There’ll always be people whose behavior you don’t understand. There are also those who don’t act as you’d like them to. Indeed, you’d really like them to change. However, a key to achieving your emotional well-being is accepting that there are certain realities that you simply can’t change. These include the personalities of many of those around you.
The same thing happens with a good number of the experiences you must face. As a matter of fact, everyone wishes life were kinder and certainly easier. However, we all have to take on its complexities and ups and downs.
You can’t change some people. Nor can you prevent fate from bringing you certain adversities. However, emotional well-being means knowing how to adapt to these kinds of circumstances. As Viktor Frankl used to say, if you can’t change a situation, change yourself.
4. Give yourself what you deserve when you need it
Maybe right now you need to take a physical and mental break. However, perhaps you’re one of those people who just can’t slow down. You might be aware that a certain circumstance, person, or job is worsening your mental health. Nevertheless, despite this fact, you can’t decide to take the first step and put a stop to the situation.
We all have limits and, above all, needs. Giving yourself what you deserve in each situation isn’t selfishness, it’s psychological well-being. Achieving emotional well-being also means being attentive to your “red flags.”
What does this mean? Well, as the psychologist Frances Vaughan explains in her book Awakening Intuition (1998), we all have an internal voice that alerts us when something is wrong.
As a matter of fact, often, your intuition will you that it’s time to stop. Time to look after yourself and put certain things to one side. However, sometimes, you tend to live on automatic pilot mode. Consequently, you stop listening to your needs in order to prioritize your obligations.
5. Be open to change with a flexible mind
Achieving emotional well-being also implies you should stop resisting the inevitable: changes. If you cling to what no longer has any meaning or use, you’ll find yourself stuck in perpetual suffering. Therefore, you need to adopt a flexible approach. In this way, you’re able to adapt to each change without fear. Furthermore, you’ll see opportunities and, above all, look to the future in a hopeful way.
In conclusion, there are few life skills more useful than these. Nevertheless, emotional well-being does require a certain investment on your part. However, you’re already taking care of your physical health, so try also to take care of your emotional health.
All cited sources were thoroughly reviewed by our team to ensure their quality, reliability, currency, and validity. The bibliography of this article was considered reliable and of academic or scientific accuracy.
- Garling, G., Gamble, A, Fl Fors & M. Hjerm. (2014). “Emotional Well-Being Related to Time Pressure, Impediment to Goal Progress and Stress-Related Symptoms. Journal of Happiness Studies. 7(15), pp. 2789–1799.
- Lerner, M. (2019). The Center for Emotional Wellness, Inc.
- Stewart-Brown S. (1998). Emotional wellbeing and its relation to health. Physical disease may well result from emotional distress. BMJ (Clinical research ed.), 317(7173), 1608–1609. https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.317.7173.1608
- Vaughan, F. (1998). “Mental, Emotional, and Body-Based Intuition.” In Inner Knowing, by H. Palmer, Ed. New York, NY: Jeremy Tarcher.
