What Is Emotional Health?
You can care for your emotional health in the same way you do your physical and mental health.
By Kate Lawless, Lifestyle Editor
We often use the phrases “mental health” and “emotional health” interchangeably, yet the two are notably different areas of well-being that require different kinds of attention and care.
Your mental health affects how you process information and perceive the world around you. Mentally healthy people have a realistic interpretation of what is happening to them and can work through confusing or upsetting experiences in a productive way. They can focus on information and make reasoned decisions based on that information.
Emotional health is a little different, but still related to mental health. Your emotions are how you react to what has happened to you. Emotionally healthy people are aware of what and why they’re feeling something and can express those feelings in “an age-appropriate” manner.
In a way, mental health is how you react to external factors and emotional health is how you react to your own internal factors.
Mental health is also more widely talked about, in terms of caring for oneself. People are encouraged to go to therapy, to take medication and practice self-care, all to improve their mental health. While conversation on mental health is becoming increasingly broad and common, emotional health is still just entering the vernacular of mainstream health topics.
So, how do you take care of your emotional health and what does that even mean?
First of all, being emotionally health does not mean that you’re always cheerful. There is no such thing as a “wrong emotion” and you don’t have to pretend to be happy if you aren’t. It’s okay to be angry or sad, to scream and cry. That is a normal and natural reaction to life’s challenges, big and small. What can be unhealthy is feeling those emotions for reasons that you don’t understand and either not expressing them or expressing them in a way that harms you or others. Don’t ignore your emotions instead of processing them.
Just like for mental health, you can go to therapy to work on your emotional health. There is a specific area of therapy, called emotion-focused therapy (EFT) that helps people “identify, experience, accept, and tolerate difficult emotions, people can learn to regulate, explore, make sense of, transform, and flexibly manage their emotions.” A therapist can help you identify patterns of how you relate to your own emotions and to others and expand your understanding of how you feel. Then you can accept how you feel and what your emotional needs are in relationships to have more positive interactions.
There are significant challenges to improving one’s emotional health. With that being said, some people face more challenges than others. Expressing emotion is associated more with women and therefore gets the same kind of negative Western cultural connotation as anything else associated with women. But your emotional health matters. Expressing your emotions if you’re upset, annoyed or distressed doesn’t make you a bitch. Belittlement of women’s emotions is a serious obstacle to understanding and bettering your emotional health.
Acknowledging your emotions, not feeling ashamed of them or forced to repress how you feel allows you to give credibility to your own lived experiences. Doing this can validate you, make you feel like your thoughts and feelings matter, like you don’t have to hide who you are just to make other people comfortable. You deserve to understand and to express yourself in a way that makes you feel heard and honors your experiences.