Emotional Health Exercises To Brighten Your Day
Sometimes the simplest of exercises and practices can be most therapeutic in improving the emotional stability of your patients. Furthermore, many emotional health exercises are far easier to apply than others.
Much like addressing physical health and strength, the smaller practices significantly impact improving or deteriorating emotional health. Let’s review some practical exercises that boost emotional health and provide a sense of health and well-being.
What is Emotional Health?
Many people incorrectly assume that mental health and emotional health are the same things, but this is not exactly true. The term “mental health” is a larger category that includes emotional, mental, and social health. Mental health can be affected by various conditions and circumstances, including genetic and environmental factors.
But emotional health is something different altogether. Emotional health is all about how we understand and experience emotions and what reactions they cause inside.
So even though mental health and emotional health are not the same, there are many places where they overlap. Cultivating a stronger sense of emotional well-being is essential to strengthening mental conditions.
Emotional Health Exercises
There are many actions your patients can take to begin improving emotional health. As with any program, the effects of these activities will not be apparent from day one. The dedication and discipline of the task are what bring about the sweet fruits of emotional well-being and serenity when they are continuously applied.
Furthermore, many emotional health exercises are far easier to apply than others. Let’s begin with one of the simplest and most effective means of improving emotional health.
Improve and Explore your Quality of Sleep
When there are faults in health, one of the most important things to examine is the three basic activities. When sleep, exercise and nutrition are in perfect balance; being healthy is not just possible, it is inevitable. By the same measure, if one of these critical activities is out of line, the effects can be pervasive.
If you are not getting the proper amount of sleep at night, one of the first places it will show is mental and emotional function. It is harder to deal with the stressful situations that inevitably arise in human life without proper rest. If the problem is ignored, the effects are cumulative, and soon a lack of sleep will convert into a lack of patience and resolve to handle the daily toil.
For optimal results, everyone should get adequate sleep each night. Poor sleep habits don’t always come from getting too little sleep, but sometimes from getting too much sleep. Irregular sleep habits can be even more damaging.
Encourage your patients to take a slow and intuitive approach to improve the quality of their sleep. It can include keeping a sleep journal, improving their sleeping environment, turning off electronic devices for at least an hour before bedtime, and carefully watching their diet.
Does Exercise Help Emotional Health?
Regular physical activity are also emotional health exercises that must be appropriately balanced to better balance responses. When engaging in physical fitness activities, the brain and body come together to focus on performing a single action.
When your patient chooses an exercise form that they especially like, their minds fall into a state of flow, where performance and observation provide a positive feedback channel to the awareness. The result is a sense of fitness, accomplishment, satisfaction in one’s capacity, and a broader perspective of life and circumstances that can also improve.
For this reason, it is essential to carefully consider the reasons one is investing their time and energy in physical exercise. Going to the gym but hating every minute is as bad as not going at all. Best of all, exercise doesn’t need to be complicated or strenuous. Your patients can gain all the benefits with only a few hours per week when they exercise regularly.
Exercise also improves sleep quality and reduces the time to fall asleep. Overall, getting regular exercise is one of the foundational activities upon which a life of stability can be constructed.
Deep Breathing
According to many ancient traditions and cultures, the breath links the spiritual and the physical. Bringing awareness to the breath is an essential function of the mind and body that has excellent benefits when practiced regularly and with intention. Even modern medical science supports the benefits of breathing on psychological distress.
One of the fundamental reasons it should be practiced regularly is to be used when facing emotions that threaten calm and serenity. When emotional responses become too great to endure and risk provoking an unhealthy reaction, a well-practiced breathing exercise is enough to cool burning anger, calm an aggressive response and make the best of what would otherwise be an unpleasant outcome.
Finally, one of the best things is that they can be practiced anytime, anyplace, with good results. When preparing for a presentation in a board meeting, stuck in traffic, or listening to your neighbors partying in the early hours of the morning — there is no wrong time to begin an effective breathing exercise.
Volunteer Your Time
Giving oneself has been found to have a huge benefit on the way a person sees themselves and their situation.
When taking the time to give selflessly, especially when giving time and attention, as these are the most valuable things we can offer, the thoughts, feelings, and focus are shifted to the world around us. If you are counseling a patient who is beset by emotions they can’t control, suggest they try volunteering to help their community somehow. It provides a much-needed break from emotions and a fresh perspective.
Spend Time With Friends
For better or worse, humans are social creatures, and we gain a considerable amount of support from our close friends and family (except for the energy vampires). One of the best ways to achieve an emotional wellness through improved perspectives comes from the people closest to us and creating stronger bonds through interactions and shared experiences.
Spending time with others provokes emotional reactions, both positive and negative. It provides the perfect accepting and caring support team and helps us balance emotional responses. Furthermore, there is something rejuvenating in the company of people.
Make A Gratitude List
Making a gratitude list is another helpful activity your patients can use to take their minds off the negativity that often threatens to cloud their minds. Take a moment to sit down and think of all the things that add value to your life. As you make a list, you will see that it gets longer and longer, and you feel more thankful and positive about your life.
Take Time To Unplug
It is so easy to become fully absorbed by communications and technology in this modern technological age. We are never more than a second away from our social and professional demands at every moment of the day. It can seem like it is impossible to get a moment of peace. It can be challenging to take a moment to breathe and balance mental states when it feels that every moment our attention is caught in a multi-directional strain.
It is healthy to take an emotional break from all of this and focus within. To some people, it can mean sequestering yourself in your home with nothing but a new book, hot tea, and music. Other people may prefer to disappear into the forests and trails outside town. The important thing is that everyone finds their way to disconnect from the world.
Do Some Journaling
Now that we have looked at some of the basics for maintaining balanced emotions, let’s look further into the activities your patients can apply to understand their feelings better. One excellent practice is journaling.
Taking the time to describe emotions and articulate how you feel and thoughts associated with your feelings is a great way to gain some perspective.
Talk About Your Feelings
Taking the time to speak about the emotions that you are feeling has a great wealth of benefits and is an excellent exercise in gaining a better understanding of your emotions. Your patient will be able to see the steps they will need to take to achieve a more lasting balance in their lives and gain a higher level of mental wellbeing.
One great way to begin is by speaking out loud to yourself. Canine and feline companions work as excellent sounding boards.
If your patients have no one in their lives with whom they feel good sharing express emotional issues, it may be best to refer them to a licensed specialist. A competent health professional knows how to listen to the emotions expressed and helps their patients cope with complex topics and situations.
Benefits Of BioScan Testing
Addressing the main factors that can promote stress and unpleasant emotional responses is another way for your patients to find a better balance on an emotional level. BioScan combines Acupuncture, Biofeedback, and Homeopathy to provide important clues on what the patient is experiencing from different elements of their lives.
Data collected from patients can be analyzed against a database of similar responses to understand better how dietary elements and emotional responses affect their mental health.
Information provided from BioScan Systems can be used to build an effective plan for improving emotional balance through strength-building. It may include minimizing the negative stressors in their lives or learning how to develop new strategies to part with things that can’t be avoided.
Importance Of Emotional Health Exercises
Emotional health problems are something that everyone will have to deal with at some point. It is essential to remind your patient that these negative emotions are not powerful. Even though it can feel daunting to face these continuously, emotional upset is not a life sentence. With a tiny bit of commitment and some professional advice, patients will be able to improve their emotional health.