Who cares about emotional health?

Our emotions help us to navigate through the labyrinths of life. Be they jealousy, joy, anger or excitement, our feelings lead the way. Enjoy better relationships and greater success by learning how to become more emotionally healthy

Emotions serve a multitude of functions. Not only do they help us to communicate with each other, to form relationships and to better understand the world around us, but they also determine how we respond in certain situations.

As our emotions underlie our behaviour and motivations, they also affect how we are perceived by the people around us. By becoming more emotionally healthy, we become more socially healthy too - building stronger, happier relationships.

Being self aware

How aware are you of your emotional responses? For example, have you noticed how when you feel surprise your eye brows lift to give a better view, when you feel fear blood rushes to your legs to prepare you to run, when you feel anger it races to your hands so you are prepared to defend yourself? Emotions cause us to act, to do. They form the cornerstone of our behaviours and motivations.

Having good emotional health means being self aware which is the ability to read and understand your emotions more intimately. A capacity not only to recognise various feelings and discriminate between them but also to explore their origins and why you tend to react as you do.

For example, think about the people in your life who make you feel uncomfortable: a loud or dominant person, someone who takes ‘unnecessary’ risks or a colleague who you cannot fully trust. What lies beneath your feelings? Often they are associated with formative experiences from childhood: a parent that shouted a lot, the death of someone in an accident or a friend who shared your secrets with others. Our emotions are not neutral - they exist to protect us as well as to express us. Knowing what drives your emotions is a big step towards being self aware.

Balancing moods with behaviours

Think of your brain as split into two sections. The emotional brain (amygdala) and the thinking brain (neo cortex) - both of which have differing response times. As the emotional brain controls our most primitive responses associated with survival, the fight or flight reflex, its response time is quicker than the thinking brain, which is more concerned with analysing information and working out what to do next.

In times of stress, conflict or anxiety, the emotional brain has the power to over-rule the thinking brain. For example, have you ever been in a public park, sensed a ball was coming your way and flinched as a response, only to realise moments later that the ball was actually feet from causing you any harm? That, at its simplest level, is your rapid response emotional brain hijacking your slower, more measured thinking brain to keep you out of a potentially harmful situation.

These primordial instincts are played out in our daily interactions with each other all the time, often with problematic consequences. People often jump to the wrong conclusions, make assumptions or bowl into a situation only to later think ‘I shouldn’t have said that’ or ‘I wish I’d said that’ – that is your thinking brain ticking your emotional brain off for being so impulsive.

When interacting with others, managing your moods means being able to pause and read an emotion before you react. In simple terms, engaging brain before mouth, taking a deep breath and giving yourself a little extra time to let your thinking brain catch up. Are you letting a previous similar experience cloud your judgement? Have you looked at this from other perspectives? This helps you feel your way into a response rather than letting your emotions take you to a place you later regret visiting. This does not mean you don’t trust your instincts – just free up some space to check them out a little closer.

Survival of the emotionally fittest

Good emotional health can also help you be clear about what you want and realise your ambitions. Cognitive intelligence (your IQ) can only take you so far. It can tell you where your strengths are, and what line of work would most suit your abilities, but it cannot determine how well you will navigate life and achieve your potential. Even in a room of astrophysicists with IQs of over 160 – not all of them are destined to reach the stars. In fact, some of the most successful people in history are believed to have had pretty low IQ scores.

Competition has grown with the ever increasing emphasis on the individual to succeed. This is highly stressful; not least when many people have the same or greater abilities and experience on paper as one another. What separates you is how you understand yourself, and those around you. Your broader ‘success’ in life is often related more to your attitude and behaviour, than it is to your ability.

Showing empathy

Ever wondered why couples who have been together a long time often finish each other’s sentences, or know what the other is thinking? Neuroscientists have discovered that our brains sense how the people around us are feeling, anticipating their actions by mimicking their emotions, and feeling them for ourselves.

In the case of those who have been together a long time, the mental bridge that connects them is so strong that they have, over time, fine tuned this phenomenon, making them highly receptive to each other’s emotional state at any given time.

Being on good terms with your own emotions, allows you to more easily pick up and read the emotions of others, sharpening your emotional radar to identify and recognise the verbal and non verbal cues of their emotional state.

Feeling empathy for the people around you gives you a unique opportunity to see things from their perspective. You don’t even have to be particularly close to someone to empathise with them; you might ‘sense’ for example that someone you are interviewing for a job is feeling nervous as soon as they walk in the door, giving you the opportunity to do something to help them relax and do their best.

Being empathic can therefore help you to manage your relationships better, solve conflicts more effectively and build stronger bonds with the people around you.

When emotions turn sour

It is important to mention that emotional health is also associated with your physical health. Stress is known to increase heart pressure, anxiety provokes digestive and skin disorders and excess anger could increase your risk of a stroke. So addressing your emotional health – tackling your stress levels, relaxing when you feel anxious, controlling your anger - will have a knock on effect on your physical health too.

Interestingly, some relationships can be toxic for our physical health. Scientists have proven that toxic relationships cause stress hormones in our bodies to rise to such a degree that they cause damage to our immune systems and prevent our bodies from fighting illness. So telling someone who stresses you out that ‘they will be the death of you’ is perhaps more accurate than you think!

Reference: Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ by Daniel Goleman

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