Our daily habits can help us improve our emotional heath or it can do the opposite. It’s just a matter of which habits we choose to keep and discard in order to start getting back on track towards our health goals and to maintain our health for the long term. Here are 5 daily habits you can develop to improve your emotional health.
If you do not feel that you are emotionally healthy, then try to get a clearer picture of your current state. You can ask yourself these questions to asses your emotional health. Remember that emotional health plays a significant factor in your success in life.
You may not always feel good but integrating these daily habits in your routine can greatly boost your emotional health.
1. Meditate
Practitioners of meditation attest to its many benefits and scientific research can be easily found proving the positive effects of meditation. Aside from calming your mind and body, it helps you take control of your thoughts and stabilize the emotions associated with these thoughts. It can even help you reframe your perspective on certain things that stress you out. Negative emotions can also manifest as illness in your body and meditation allows you to release these emotions and ease the tension that they cause in your body.
If you haven’t started yet, then learn more about meditation and how to do it. If you’d rather do it with someone guiding you; guided meditation videos are easily available online. There are different kinds of meditation for different goals. Try out some of them and see which one works for you.
2. Stay Grounded
Yes, stay humble but also be actually connected to the Earth. Grounding or Earthing is a practice that we can consider as almost lost and buried under all the trappings of technology that we surround ourselves with daily. If you remember the good feelings you had when you were a kid, after playing outside on your bare feet, then you already have an idea of the positive effects of grounding.
In the morning, before the rush of day starts, go out to the garden and stand on bare feet on the grass to ground yourself to the earth for several minutes. The longer the duration the better. Just be sure the ground is dry and it’s not raining when you do this. You can also ground yourself while meditating to save time and maximize the effects. If you can’t do this daily, then at least make sure that you spend some time with nature during your weekends or off days.
For most of us who can’t spend time with nature that much, using natural products for our personal care needs is one way to detox our bodies. Maintaining positive energy in our homes is also a good way to help us feel emotionally well.
3. Practice Self Love Daily
People learn from example and that includes how they treat you. If you cannot take good care of yourself physically and emotionally, then you can be sure that the people around you will be treating you the same way, even if it’s not their intention to do so.
Learn to love yourself more and adopt habits to show your self some love daily. You will not only feel good; you will notice that the good that you feel will multiply as you keep on showing yourself the love that you know you deserve. This is one of the most important daily habits that you can do to improve and maintain your emotional health.
4. Practice Gratitude
Another way to be and to feel emotionally healthier is to be grateful. We know the daily grind may not offer much to be thankful for, so go back to the basics. Are you able to breathe deeply? Are you able to eat 3 meals a day? Do you have a house to go home to and a bed to sleep in? Do you have people who love and value you? Is your body allowing you to do the things you need to do when you want to? Do you have a job that allows you to buy what you need in order to stay alive? Regularly experiencing feelings of gratitude is one of the daily habits that can greatly improve emotional health.
Make a daily habit of thanking the creator or the universe for the blessings you enjoy each day. Start with the basic comforts that you have. These are things that we mostly take for granted but other people lack some of these things in their lives. Gratitude can be life-changing too. Just like meditation, it can help you work through your issues of “lack” in different areas of your life, just like this inspiring story. You can incorporate this gratitude practice in your daily meditation too. You can also keep a gratitude journal and each morning or night, list down at least 3 things that you are grateful for.
5. Unplug and Disconnect
Social connections are important to each person but everyone needs some downtime throughout the day. Don’t wait for your vacation leave to unplug. At the end of each day, set a time to turn off your Internet connection and any other media device (TV, radio, etc.) and read a book, write on your gratitude journal or meditate instead. Ideally, this should be done at least an hour before you go to bed.
Unplugging lets you spend time with your own thoughts and feelings and sort them out if you need to. Reflect on the day’s events and lessons learned instead of drowning yourself on Facebook, Twitter or Instagram. Unplugging will keep you from being distracted from the irrelevant noise from the outside world so you can quiet your mind and get ready for a restful sleep.
Updated. First published on Pinoy Smart Living on 2019.08.06
Feature Image: Original Photo by Sarah Brown on Unsplash.
