The 5 factors That Rule our Emotional Well-being
Featured on Elephant Journal
“I don’t want to be at the mercy of my emotions. I want to use them, to enjoy them, and to dominate them.”
I was under a lot of pressure. Cash flow and sales were down at my company. The bank was rethinking their support to us and was demanding an urgent meeting. I was also feeling anxious and dreading the day of my son’s impending travel to the UK. He was leaving our home, in Ghana to study in England.
I was driving towards the bank for the meeting when I crossed a traffic light that was yellow, not red, but yellow. One hour later after an ill-advised argument with two police officers, I was being led to the police station and asked to make a statement. Things were spiralling from bad to worse.
After apologizing, paying a fine for an offence that I didn’t commit and having had most of my day wasted, I felt stressed and drained. I drove to my favourite spot overlooking the ocean to sit and reflect. I had been an emotional mess for the past few weeks, and this was the universe reminding me that I needed to relax, or things might just spiral from worse to disaster.
This emotional breakdown is quite different from when we have a physical breakdown due to not eating well, lack of sleep or ignoring our need to exercise as part of taking care of our Physical Realm.
Emotions rule our daily life and our decisions, and if we can’t control them then we find ourselves being controlled by them. They are our conduit towards understanding how we feel about something or someone.
What are emotions?
“An emotion is a complex psychological state that involves three distinct components: a subjective experience, a physiological response, and a behavioural or expressive response.” (Hockenbury & Hockenbury, 2007).
The Subjective Experience
Emotions are highly subjective. What experience can make us angry, can make others feel a mild dissatisfaction.
The Physiological Response
Emotions cause strong physiological reactions, from racing heartbeats of excitement when finishing a run race to feeling your stomach lurch when you are anxious about a job interview. Brain scans have shown that the amygdala, part of the limbic system, is responsible for the response and memory of emotions, especially fear.
The Behavioural Response
Emotions felt internally are then expressed externally. A smile indicates pleasure and a frown will imply pain. Emotional well-being is more than just learning how to cope with stress, or developing a meditation practice. Our emotional well-being is influenced by these five factors:
Awareness that emotions don’t define us.
We are not our thoughts. We are not our emotions. We are rather the observer who sits behind and watches these thoughts and emotions appear randomly. As we grow and understand that we don’t have to identify with any negative emotions, we start to catch ourselves in the midst of expressing them.
After my unsavoury incident with the police, just watching the ocean from afar calmed me down to see that my reactions were not necessary and rather stupid. True, I was having a tough time, but expressing them senselessly was not the solution.
Facing our Emotions
Pain is part of life. Pain is the part that allows us to grow most in life. We need to be able to sit with our negative feelings and feel the sadness or hurt when someone hurts us, or when life hands us a bad hand—we need to cry our eyes out if we have to.
We need to feel guilty when we hurt someone, and it’s too late to do anything about it. We need to feel the regret of not getting what we wanted. We can’t run away and numb our feelings. The more we try to avoid those negative feelings, the stronger they come back to haunt us.
When my son left home, I would walk up the staircase to his room and feel its emptiness. I would sit with my feelings and cry for a while alone locked up in his room. I needed to express my sadness and feel how much I had missed him.
I am Enough
When our self-esteem is high, it forms a base upon which our entire personality, behaviour and circumstances are built. As a result our experiences validate and thereby strengthen our self-image.
When we feel enough and are content with what we have in our lives, then we stop judging, blaming and comparing ourselves. And when we actively remind ourselves with gratitude prayers or mantras, then we know that the effects of negative circumstances won’t last; our glowing self-image comes out to remind us that negative emotions are temporary but our positive true self is permanent.
Every morning when I wake up, I journal on the 3-5 things that I’m grateful for. That could mean being thankful for the state of my children’s health to the delicious croissant I had in the morning.
Relationships and Connection
We have an inner need to belong and connect. Relationships are the bedrock of our emotional well-being. No matter how strong we feel we are, we need to have relationships that nurture and sustain our strength throughout our lives.
Psychiatrist Robert Waldinger, the director of a 75-year-old study on adult development, states in his famous TED talk that people with healthy relationships live much happier and longer lives. The study focuses on having fewer but deeper longstanding relationships.
Fun and Laughter
We need to have some time where we can have fun, let our hair down and just forget all about the stress in our life. When we laugh regularly, it’s like emptying the “stress” garbage bag that we collect from numerous ways each day.
Laughter is a way we connect to each other. We communicate and express our emotions through laughter. It’s a spiritual form of communing; without words where we are telling each other “I get you.”
It’s common knowledge that children laugh much more than adults and as such live with less stress. In an article by Psychology Today, it was stated that the average four-year-old laughs 300 times a day. The average 40-year-old? Only four.
Emotional well-being is simply the state of our mental health, of how we are feeling about ourselves and our lives. We will all face setbacks, personal crisis and sometimes traumatic incidents that could spiral our lives downwards.
However when we take stock of the factors of our emotional well-being, and ask why we are having such emotions, then we halt the slide and remind ourselves that we are more than just our emotions.