Mental balance is often forgotten about when you take active steps toward living a more natural and sustainable life. However, research has found that putting a deeper focus on your emotional well-being is one of the most critical aspects of health. If you’re looking for ways to incorporate new emotionally healthy skills into your daily life, here are some emotional self care ideas to try out.
Emotional Self Care Ideas to Try
You will only become part of the emotional health conundrum by embarking on a self-care journey that simply prioritizes how to quote-on-quote deal with your emotions.
Fortunately, that is not the outcome we are hoping for — rather it is our desire to inspire new ideas and techniques that will promote emotional balance in your life.
We are not perfect, and time-to-time we all fall into a downward spiral headed to a pit of emotional despair.
Our turn-key response to emotional overload is often indulgence in unhealthy habits like overeating, drinking, recreational drugs, burrowing ourselves into social media, withdrawal, denial, and even self-harm.
Unfortunately, these responses are damaging to our mental, emotional, and physical well-being. We must find new ways of developing emotional stability. Some fantastic recommendations from Mental Health America include:
Taking Care of Yourself
Address your basic needs like enjoying a nice meal, taking a warm bath, or taking a long-overdue nap.
Engaging In a Mood-Boosting Activity
Play with your pet, read a positive book, paint a picture, or focus on your dreams.
Recognize the Process of your Feelings
Oftentimes sitting in your feelings is okay.
Be the Problem Solver
Replay the situation that has charged your emotions. Figure out how a different approach or response could have altered the state you currently find yourself in.
Be of Service
Helping others or doing something for a cause is enriching to one’s soul. Plus, these very acts of kindness promote personal healing and a sense of purpose.
Hobby Time
Just do something that you love, whether it’s writing in a journal, gardening, playing an instrument, or pursuing an active sport such as running or cycling.
If you don’t have a hobby, there is no better time than now to learn something new. Or, challenge yourself to do something you’ve never done before.
Relax
I’m not going to tell you to just relax. However, it’s important to engage in something that will help you to release.
You may want to try following a guided meditation, do some yoga, practice breathing exercises, listen to music, or just completely unplug for a while.
Ask for Help
Photo by Dustin Belt on Unsplash
If you are having a really difficult time figuring out how to balance your emotions, ask for help. Remember you are special, needed, and loved and that you are never alone. Reach out to a friend, family member, pastor, or someone you look up to in the community. You could even spark up a conversation with a stranger at the coffee shop.
The point is there is always somebody willing to listen. If you feel that your mental balance is nearing a point of crisis, then please reach out to one of several amazing organizations such as SAMHSA at 1-800-273-TALK (8255).
Achieving Mental Balance
In addition to the emotional self care ideas listed above, another useful tool that you can implement into your life is the practice of mindfulness.
According to Greater Good Magazine, “mindfulness also involves acceptance, meaning that we pay attention to our thoughts and feelings without judging them—without believing, for instance, that there’s a “right” or “wrong” way to think or feel in a given moment.”
So, with mindfulness, you are in each moment, understanding and appreciating what you are going through presently, without worrying about the past or the future.
Each task and activity gets your full attention. Then, you can enjoy and embrace it before moving on to the next.
As you can see, mindfulness is an outstanding resource to tap into your ability to become emotionally balanced.
Recognize the Leading Contributor to Failing Emotional Self Care: Stress
Start now trying to figure out your stress triggers and begin work to manage it in healthier ways.
For starters, you must invite the process of understanding your own signs of stress, for example:
- Being overly tired or fatigued
- Craving a lot of sugar and refined carbs
- Lack of focus or brain fog
- Chronic pain
- Digestive issues
- Mood swings and irritability
Once you can identify what is causing the stress, you can begin tracking how you personally change when faced with certain environments or situations. The next step will be understanding how to manage your stress a little better.
Takeaway
Developing emotional stability and learning how to balance emotions is a lifelong journey. This is because our environment is regularly changing and we are constantly placed in new and sometimes uncomfortable situations.
Here at A Diligent Heart, we hope that you walk away from reading this article armed with some new emotional self care ideas and tools for achieving greater mental balance in your life.