Your emotional health is important–here's how to begin understanding it.
Emotional Health is the caring for and understanding of our emotional world. It intersects our physical health. It intersects our ability to make money and contribute to the world. It affects our relationships and can truly alter our life and most of us aren’t even aware of how it works, much less how to care for our own emotional health.
The good news?
Understanding how Emotional Health works is simple. And you can start immediately to improve your own-and see dramatic results in your life.
Emotional Health starts with understanding how emotions work within the body.
emotions communicate with the brain to stimulate behavior
emotions are vibrations within the body
lots of things dull, dampen or distort our emotions
nothing is wrong with having a range of emotions, but often we end up trying to avoid ‘negative’ emotion
discomfort is required for us to grow and evolve
we have 2 brains–our Pre-frontal Cortex and Primitive Brain and it’s really important to be able to understand the function of both and utilize them efficiently
Thoughts trigger EMOTION, and then EMOTION triggers ACTION (or inaction)
We choose our thoughts, they don’t just happen to us- which means our feelings don’t just happen to us either
I know that I had no understanding of this until I went to the Life Coach School and became a Certified Life Coach in 2016. It gave me such hope to understand this. My life has dramatically changed and improved because of this learning.
The First Step | The Model
You’ve got to truly accept that Thoughts are optional. That they trigger emotions. And that you have control over all of that.
Say it with me. “My thoughts are optional.”
The Second Step | Understanding your thoughts
You’ve got to start to understand yourself. I think the best way to start to understand yourself is to do many thought downloads, which create awareness of the thoughts you’re choosing, the feelings you’re feeling and the actions you’re choosing because of those thoughts.
Here’s how you do this.
Sit down and write all the thoughts in your brain. I would tend to choose one that feels like reality to you and causes you pain. Maybe something like, “I’ll never figure out what I want to do with my life.” Or something like that.
Then copy this down this formula on a piece of paper in a column.
C (circumstance)
T (thought)
F (feeling)
A (action)
R (result)
And you can either start with a THOUGHT or a FEELING and you then fill in the rest of the equation. Let me show you with that same example. Fill in the thought. Then ask yourself, how do you FEEL when you THINK that thought? When you are feeling that feeling, what action are you taking in regard to your life? And then what result does this get you?
C: My life.
T: I’ll never figure out what I want to do with my life.”
F: Despair.
A: Don’t work on anything.
R: Never figure out what I want to do with my life.
So, I’m not sure about you but I don’t want to live in ‘despair’ all of the time. But it’s good to know that this is what I’m feeling and what it’s linked to- a THOUGHT. Not a reality. It’s not true that you will never figure this out. It’s just true that you BELIEVE this thought right now.
But the good news is that you can believe something different and then you have an entirely different set of variables because of changing this one thought.
Now, do this for more thoughts.
Understand how your emotional life is contributing to the results (or lack of results) in your life.
Understand how much time you’re spending in certain emotions. Now, our lives are going to be made up of 50% ‘good’ and ‘bad’ emotions. Because we want to live a life a contrast (it’s impossible to know what happy feels like without sad, etc.). However, you might never be choosing a life that you want because you’re only trying to avoid negative emotion. And that never feels great, oddly enough.
Do these thought downloads until you get to know yourself. I suggest an hour a day at first, just starting to understand the thoughts you’re choosing, the results you currently have in your life, the results you want to have in your life, the feelings you’re having a lot.
This is not the only aspect of emotional health, but this is a HUGE part. There is still a lot of stuff that’s passed down through DNA but this is a really huge part of taking back your own emotional health.
Figure out what you’re choosing. What you’re avoiding. What you want in your life. What you don’t have and why (ps it’s only because of a thought, truly).
And if you need help, you know where to find me.