The word health can be broken down into two components—physical and mental—and most people know that their mental health impacts their physical health and vice versa. In fact, personal health has four parts: physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual. Since there are so many different columns to personal health, this article will focus on the mental column of personal health, namely why it’s important and what you can do to keep it in tip-top shape.
Mental Health vs. Emotional Health
Let’s begin by saying there’s a distinction between mental and emotional health. Mental health is the health of your brain while emotional health is a person’s general mental wellbeing. emotional health involves issues like depression, anxiety, and psychological well-being, whereas mental health encompasses things like a mental illness or neurological difference.
With that distinction in mind, let’s talk about what you can do to care for your mental health.
Talk or Write
Whether with a therapist or a friend, one of the best feelings in the world is to just talk out your issues with someone. Being the social creature we are, it’s no wonder talking it out adds perspective and relief to an emotional situation. Bottling it up is not healthful for our emotional health; it’s meant to be felt.
If talking to someone isn’t your style, I recommend trying to write it down. It can be on a spare page of paper you later toss out or burn, or you can put it in a journal. Actually, in the last decade or so, science has come out suggesting those who keep a regular journal are healthier than those who don’t. (If you’ve ready the other posts in this series, you already know why.) It’s because all our columns of health are intertwined; if you better your emotional health, your physical, mental, and spiritual healths will also improve.
Meditate
No, I don’t mean shove it in a bottle and then lay on the floor listening to music. That’s not meditating; that’s procrastinating. (Don’t worry, I’m guilty of it, too.)
Meditation is the slowing of your thoughts and dreams so that you may focus on the here and now of yourself, which includes both the physical and metaphysical parts. To meditate on emotional entities is to allow yourself to sit with your feelings. You may allow yourself to feel them, or you may choose to observe them. Either way, it bridges any distance you may put between you and your emotions.
Don’t Bottle It
Bottom line, don’t bottle it up. Ignoring your feelings won’t aid in your emotional health; in fact, it’ll only damage it further. How ever you do it, you need to acknowledge its presence somehow.
SCREAM THERAPY
You’ve seen it on TV at least once — that character who’s had the worst time and just cannot get it together. Someone drags them to the middle of the football field late at night and tells them to scream it out. They demonstrate, and our character is appalled, but they eventually join in, too.
I don’t know about you, but I don’t have access to the local football field, and while I don’t live in the city, it’s not like there’s just wide open, empty green spaces galore. But here’s what that someone-character knew: Sometimes all you can do is let it go. But when you’re angry and bottled-up and sore from something eating at you, if someone were to tell you to just let it go, you might chomp their head off.
So, scream. Find somewhere you can just release it. Some college campus have them now; chambers of art or soundproof walls that encourage you to scream about it.
DEMO ROOMS
If you live in a little, thin-walled apartment in the big city where everyone else is packed right on top of you and screaming would not only disrupt but disturb the neighbours, then you’ll have to get a little creative with your release.
Thankfully, there are also demolition rooms. Much like escape rooms, these businesses have consolidated areas for pure destruction. The entire point of them is to destroy everything around you. Take a bat or a hammer and just go ham.
WEAPONRY RANGES
If above two options fail, you can always go to a good ol’ fashioned range. Whether guns, blades, paintball, archery, or axes, I guarantee you can find one in your city. Go blow off some steam in a controlled environment. I’m not a big fan of guns myself, but I will say, sometimes it feels good to shoot at a paper outline.
Have a Self-Pity Day
When it’s all said and done, though, sometimes the only thing you can do is wallow in self-pity. And that’s okay.
Part of recognizing and managing your emotional health is realizing we are, by nature, emotional creatures. Humans are sensitive and empathetic, although often not when it comes to ourselves. (Western) Society has associated emotionless with strong. Somehow we accidentally taught ourselves that too feel makes us weak, and that is not the case!
Being emotional creatures means we have to accept the basis that we are at our cores emotional. That means, we have to allow ourselves space to feel the things we feel: happy, sad, anxious, joyous, and indifferent.
So, in moments when we’ve had great disappointment, so much so it makes us sad and frustrated, we must allow ourselves space to feel all those things. If we cannot release or control those emotions, then just let them come out in their own way. Curl back up in your bed and do not come out. Grab your childhood stuffed animal (or pet), and cuddle with them and a comfy blanket. Maybe you cry, maybe you sit in silence, maybe you watch TV or read a book — whatever it is you feel you need to do to sit with your feelings, you do that. It’s okay. Let yourself have your emotions.
After all, we’re supposed to have them.
