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Emotional wellbeing is the ability to manage your emotions for your overall wellbeing.
Emotional wellbeing has other synonymous words like emotional intelligence, emotional wellness, and emotional quotient (EQ).
According to Daniel Goleman – a renowned Author and Psychologist who made a seminal contribution to popularizing the importance and understanding of emotional intelligence defined –
Emotional Intelligence is a range of abilities in self-awareness, self-management, emotional empathy, and social skills. It is your ability to manage feelings to express them appropriately and effectively.
An emotionally intelligent person is capable of managing his emotions by understanding them. And, uses emotions for its own advantage while communicating, empathizing, relieving stress, defusing conflicts, and most importantly overcoming challenges. Managing all these emotions affects your wellbeing.
Research shows that, generally, women tend to manage their emotions better than men. Men, on the other hand, are better able to manage distressing emotions and grief.
As people develop emotional skills, they become more efficient. Emotional intelligence is universal, but it looks different in different places and different situations. And, different people manage emotions differently. However, the fundamentals of emotional wellbeing remain the same.
You must have an understanding of your emotions. You should be able to identify and feel your emotions to effectively manage them. Likewise, you are to name and differentiate among feelings like sadness, grief, happiness, disgust, fear, surprise, and many more.
For your emotional wellbeing, understand how, when, and why these emotions affect you. You should practice naming your feelings. Always use “I feel happy/sad” instead of “I feel like_______”, adding a word ‘like’ before feelings create confusion in your mind. If you are feeling an emotion, you may be able to identify the cause of the feeling that will assist you in managing emotion to your advantage.
Therefore, it becomes important for you to be skillful in understanding and perceiving emotions. By understanding, you will be able to influence the emotions and change the direction of the impact of the emotion. These all are benefits for you to become an emotionally aware person and use your emotions for personal wellbeing and happiness.
You can improve your relationships with your spouse, friends, family members, and colleagues by developing your emotional skills.
Now the question arises, “How should I develop or increase my emotional skills? Here are a few tips to help you increase your emotional wellbeing –
Self-Awareness
It starts with recognizing the feeling, and the reason behind it. After an angry outburst-Have you ever tried to find the reason behind it? Think “Could it have been handled differently?” Such critical self-evaluation helps in building a strong base of emotional intelligence. You may not repeat the same mistake and channelize your emotional energy accordingly.
A person with emotional self-awareness is usually receptive to new ideas and can learn from constructive criticism. Therefore, you should encourage people around you to share feedback.
The main point is how much you are interested in knowing about yourself. The popular “Johari Window” framework for the understanding of conscious and unconscious bias can help increase self-awareness and your understanding of self and others.
It was created by psychologists Joseph Luft (1916–2014) and Harrington Ingham (1916–1995) in 1955.
It consists of four areas about you and “Arena” is the characteristics of your personality that is known to you as well as others.
For overall effectiveness, the idea is to increase the “Arena” by decreasing other areas through self-awareness, self-discovery, feedback, self-disclosure and shared discovery. You can talk to your trustworthy friends or your well-wishers and seek feedback. It will be helpful in understanding your feelings and emotions.
How do you increase self-awareness? In addition, as suggested above, by spending time with yourself. Ask questions to yourself? Positive self-talk will help you for sure. Self-talk is a powerful motivator, it also heals your inner self.
Refresh yourself as you do the with your smartphone. Consciously delete unwanted and unpleasant memories and thoughts from your mind.
To recharge yourself, now-a-day, social media detox is advised. It is staying away from smartphones and social media, one day per week, just like weekly fasting or as per convenience. By doing so, you will be able to spend time with yourself and your loved ones.
Self Management
Handling distressing emotions is necessary so that they don’t cripple you. Align your actions with your passion.
A person with high emotional intelligence can exercise restraint and control when expressing their emotions.
You should know how you think and how to act? Your emotions and feelings depend on your thoughts. And, thoughts are reflected in your actions.
Everything is created twice, first in the mind and then in reality.
Emotions are driven by your feelings. And, your feelings are influenced by your thoughts. The way you think and feel; similarly, you express your emotions. Don’t let your feelings be hurt easily, by doing so you will be taking care of your emotional wellbeing.
Channelize your emotions
By recognizing emotions through self-awareness, you will be better able to channelize the emotional energy.
Emotional wellbeing examples – When do you get angry? Why do you get angry? How much anger is being felt? How do you react or respond to anger from someone else?
In every situation, the intensity of the anger is not the same. You must understand this point. Try to make note of trigger points for anger. What triggers you the most? It is very necessary to learn how to manage anger because anger has harmful effects on nerves.
When anger rises, think of the consequences. – Confucius
Learn to motivate yourself
People with high emotional intelligence are self-motivated, resilient, and driven by inner ambition rather than being influenced by outside forces, such as money or prestige.
As far as possible, keep yourself motivated and feel energetic. You should stay positive. Burdening yourself must be avoided to be able to complete your tasks. And, you will manage your personal or professional tasks.
Along with this, identify your motivations. Suppose you go for a morning walk, so what is that which keeps you motivated to go for a morning walk? Keep them alive.
Recognize the emotions of others
Developing interpersonal relationships and a network is implied for emotional wellbeing. If you start to listen to other people, their trust and confidence in you will increase.
In addition to your family, you must know how to skillfully perceive and understand the emotions of your friends, relatives, and colleagues.
Strong relationships are the base of a happy life. Choose your words wisely. Remember these two sayings-
Words, once, spoken can not be taken back.
Emotional Empathy
In addition to the emotional feeling of self, knowing about the feeling of another person is equally important. By correctly recognizing the emotions, you will be able to emotionally empathize with your relatives, spouse, friends, family members, and colleagues.
You should be aware as to which of your words or reactions may hurt their feelings? And, if they are hurt, or you are hurt by others; talk to each other, and sort out the matter.
Social Skills
People with emotional intelligence can build trust with others and can gain respect from the people they meet and interact with.
Social skills are used on an everyday basis to interact and communicate with others. These can be categorized into verbal and non-verbal skills. Effective communication, conflict resolution, active listening, empathy, relationship management, and emotional intelligence are a few of the social skills that must be learned for success and wellbeing in life.
The hatred all around and the level of familial abuse are indicators that emotions are out of control dangerously. That’s why social and emotional intelligence is needed worldwide.
Since early childhood, it is necessary to teach children the skills so that they do not develop anti-social behaviour.
Emotional intelligence helps our Human Resource managers in the organizations while recruiting new candidates and determining leadership roles and positions.