Why is Emotional Wellness Important in Recovery?
Emotional wellness is important for a person’s overall mental wellbeing. Read on to learn more about how it can help with stress.
What is Emotional Wellness?
Good emotional health helps individuals to better control their feelings, behaviors, and thoughts. It’s also imperative to help deal with life’s challenges. Individuals can easily put problems in the proper perspective and bounce back from significant setbacks with good emotional health and wellness learned during recovery.
Emotional Wellness and Recovery
In recovery, health and emotional wellbeing is a crucial part of an individual’s overall mental wellbeing. Recovery and wellness require the ability to cope and adapt to stress. For this reason, it’s essential to remain self-aware, resilient, and content.
Importance of Establishing Emotional Wellbeing
Another name for emotional wellness is emotional health or wellbeing. It defines an individual’s ability to handle emotions through various life challenges. According to the National Center for Emotional Wellness, emotional health is the awareness, comprehension, and acceptance of our feelings. It’s also the ability to manage those feelings through changes effectively.1Understanding health and emotional wellbeing helps individuals stay aware of their bodily and mental sensations. Paying attention to the importance of emotional wellbeing helps people live happier lives and provides them the opportunity to reach their full potential. Healthy emotional wellbeing doesn’t mean individuals always stay happy, but instead means that people can easily approach challenges from a different perspective and successfully handle setbacks.
Impact of Poor Emotional Wellness
Even though it doesn’t seem that emotions would have physical repercussions, poor emotional wellness can impact our bodies negatively. Here’s a detailed breakdown of the effects of poor emotional wellness activities on individuals.
Lower Immunity
Poor emotional health weakens the immune system and makes individuals more prone to infections. Due to stress, the body’s ability to fight off antigens is reduced. The body’s stress hormone, cortisol, increases blood sugars due to stress, affecting an individual’s immune system and also suppressing the digestive system.2
Increased Illness
Chronic stress due to poor emotional health and wellness in recovery can raise suppressor T cells and catecholamine levels. For that reason, there’s a suppression in immune system function and a higher chance of developing illnesses due to that suppression. Conditions like gastrointestinal problems, obesity, and heart disease are related to stress and a suppressed immune system.
Difficulties at Work
Negative emotion affects how an individual handles tasks at work. It may also create a hostile work environment that influences other workers and causes demotivation. Individuals who have challenges managing these feelings may experience problems surrounding creativity, work quality, and commitment.
Trouble Concentrating
Impaired emotional wellbeing influences a person’s ability to concentrate on daily activities. Due to grief, fear, sadness, or jealousy, keeping one’s concentration may be more difficult, even when it’s imperative. Due to problems with concentration, individuals may also find it difficult to maintain efficiency and productivity. In young adults, it affects school performance.
How Emotional Wellness Affects Your Life
Emotional wellness activities can affect different spheres of a person’s daily living. The inability to manage crucial life challenges may cause problems with many different areas.
Relationships
People who have good control of their emotional wellness can feel good about themselves, which helps their relationships. Individuals dealing with their emotions may face problems relating to their partner or other loved ones. Such people may be impulsive and cannot recognize and communicate their feelings.
Work and School
Better handling of emotions helps people’s performance in work and school due to lower levels of mental stress. Most people may find it easier to maintain concentration when managing their feelings. According to detailed research, emotions can even play a role in teaching and learning, meaning it’s necessary to remain self-aware of emotions and how to manage them for work and school productivity.3
Mental Health
Emotional wellbeing plays a big role in overall health and wellness in recovery. It’s also equally impactful for those experiencing mental health conditions or challenges. A good mental health state promotes productivity and may help individuals accomplish more milestones in life.
How to Cultivate Emotional Wellness in Recovery
There are steps to take for better emotional and physical health in recovery. Here are some ways of how to accomplish just that.
Getting Out into Nature to Find Peace
A close connection to nature helps effectively reduce stress, anger, and fear, which allows us to define any negative emotions. Research shows that even just having a single plant in a room can significantly help stress and anxiety. Getting out into nature helps improve positive feelings that promote emotional wellbeing and may also help reduce blood pressure, muscle tension, heart rate, and the production of stress hormones.
Connecting with Loved Ones
Cultivating good emotional health in recovery shouldn’t be a lonely journey. It’s imperative for individuals to learn to connect and communicate with loved ones and other supportive people. Talking about feelings can help deal with troubled times and promote overall emotional wellbeing. Ultimately, it helps boost the immune system and reduce emotional stress.
Meditating
In recovery, meditation is effective in staying emotionally healthy. It helps relaxation by ensuring individuals can focus and eliminate jumbled thoughts that crowd the mind. Mindfulness is also important during wellness addiction recovery. With mindfulness, one can experience reduced levels of negative emotions, including depression, anxiety, and stress.
Attending Counseling and Therapy Sessions
With therapy, mental health experts can help individuals develop positive emotional health. Counseling focuses on ensuring individuals can replace maladaptive coping skills with healthier ones.
How to Optimize Your Emotional Wellness
Optimizing emotional wellbeing is effective in realizing one’s full potential. Here are various ways to improve emotional health.
Practice Mindfulness
Mindfulness involves paying attention to the moment without an interpretation. It involves managing breathing methods, using guiding imagery, and taking note of other forms of body relaxation. People can practice mindfulness through meditation.
Manage Stress
Managing stress involves taking actions that improve physical and mental well-being. Some suggested methods to manage stress include exercising, reducing stress triggers, eating adequately, and doing other activities you or your loved ones enjoy.
Take Care of Your Physical Wellbeing
Taking care of one’s physical wellbeing may involve performing activities that improve endorphin production. Consider engaging in physical activities like swimming, walking, dancing, and other emotional wellness activities.
Invest in Sleep
Following a healthy sleeping pattern helps improve physical and emotional wellbeing. With enough sleep, especially deep sleep, a person’s brain can easily process emotional information better.4
Pursue Emotional Wellness at Alta Centers
Everyone needs to prioritize their emotional wellness to help overall mental and physical wellbeing. Emotional health is imperative for living a productive and purposeful life. Alta Centers provides support to individuals experiencing substance use disorder or who want to work on their emotional wellbeing as well. We also help individuals during the process of recovery to develop good emotional and physical wellness. Reach out to us today.
