Living with stress, depression, PTSD, an unhealthy relationship, etc can severely limit your life. When we are not feeling happy or healthy, we forget to take care of ourselves and tend to isolate ourselves, choose unhealthy foods to eat or rely on substances such as alcohol or other drugs to mask the emotions that we feel. Another effect of experiencing emotional health issues is that we tend become consumed by our emotions, focusing on our negative thoughts or our body reactions to situations and we stop noticing things around us.
Research has shown that tunnel vision and hyperfocus on our emotions that comes with poor emotional health is related to an exacerbation of mental health symptoms. In other words, if you are stressed about an upcoming exam, you are more likely to think only about the exam and not notice things happening around you. This can include forgetting friends’ birthdays, preferring to stay home alone to study and only talk about the exam when you are around peers or family. This over-focus on the source of your stress can actually make your stress worse.
The best way to improve emotional health is to find the right balance of experiencing and expressing your emotions so you are not minimizing them and being able to gain perspective that the overwhelming emotions do not actually make up your entire life or define you as a person.
Below, you can download a great, easy exercise that you can do to help you manage your emotions. While we take advantage of using or seeing everyday objects in our daily life, stopping to notice them and make a mental note that you’ve seen or used them slows down our emotions, forces us to step out of our daily routine and increases mindfulness which are all important in managing our emotions and improving emotional wellbeing.
Please note that this can only provide temporary or short term relief and that the best treatment for long-term positive mental health is counseling or therapy.
Everyday Objects: An Emotional Wellbeing Exercise
1. Make a list of all of the emotions that you feel (e.g. lonely, stress, sad, angry, jealous, etc.) and rate how severe the emotions are (0 = I do not feel this emotion, 10 = my life is significantly impaired because of the emotion).
2. For five days, put a check mark next to all of the items below that you notice during the day.
3. On the 8th day, rate your emotions again that you had identified on the first day. For mild and transient emotional health issues, you should see an improvement in your symptoms. If you don’t, please consider consulting with your physical or a mental health professional about your emotional symptoms.
Download exercise here for free!
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