At the beginning of a new year we often focus on self-improvement - better health, more success, etc; however we overlook one extremely important factor for happiness and good health: emotional well-being.
In his TED talk "The Importance of Practicing Emotional Hygiene", Guy Winch, Ph.D. explains that we learn from a very early age how to take care of ourselves physically, but we have no idea how to take care of ourselves emotionally. Ironically, we sustain emotional and psychological injuries (such as loneliness, failure or rejection) far more often than physical injuries.
Left unaddressed, these emotional and psychological injuries can have as strong a negative impact on our life expectancy as physical diseases. The effect of long-term loneliness can shorten one's life by 14% and is as dangerous to one's life expectancy as cigarette smoking (Winch).
The areas most vulnerable to emotional pain are loneliness, failure and rejection. When wounded in these areas, not only do we feel pain, but we inaccurately perceive life and the people around us to be harsher and more painful than they actually are. Winch explains how to heal these types of injuries:
Loneliness is defined as feeling emotionally or socially disconnected from people and can occur even when surrounded by others.
Loneliness won't just make you miserable, it will kill you. Chronic loneliness causes high blood pressure, high cholesterol, negatively impacts your immune system and shortens life expectancy by 14 years (Winch).
It's essential to build connections and create a sense of community for yourself.
Failure
It's important to be very aware of how you handle failure. If your mind tries to convince you that you're incapable of something, you will begin to feel helpless and will give up - thus proving to yourself that your mind was right and you are incapable. This is clearly nonsense, but it becomes truth if we allow it to and is the reason why so many people function below their potential. Einstein said "it's not that I'm smart; it's just that I stay with problems longer."
It's critical to fight feelings of helplessness, gain control over the situation and break the negative cycle of feeling incapable before it begins.
Rejection
Rejection is extremely painful. When our self-esteem is lower, we are more vulnerable to stress and anxiety, failures and rejections hurt more and take longer to recover from; however, instead of soothing and nurturing ourselves after rejection, we tend to criticize and demean ourselves in ways much worse than we would ever do to someone else. We damage our self-esteem while it's already hurting. This is very poor emotional hygiene.
When you experience rejection, the most important thing to do is rebuild your self esteem and treat yourself as kindly and gently as you would your most cherished friend.
Protect your self-esteem.
Just like your physical health, your emotional health is your responsibility and the attention you give to it will have a tremendous impact on the quality and length of your life. While you cannot control all variables in life, just like with physical health, there are basic things you can do to maintain a baseline of good health, and steps to take to recover when feeling poorly: by building connections when you're lonely, changing your negative responses to failure and protecting your self esteem you will be following the basic components of good mental hygiene. You will quickly see a drastic improvement in your well-being, build emotional resilience and begin to thrive.
