You can boost your emotional wellness. Try embracing these ten terms and feel-good tips to manage your thoughts, feelings, and actions. Feel-good results may follow, along with emotional fitness and sound mental health.
Note: Always know that helpful, compassionate care is available from licensed mental health professionals. Helpful advice is available from MyTherapist. Please reach out if you are concerned about a mental health condition or would like to learn about benefits of counseling.
1) Practice giving gratitude:
Research shows that gratitude—feeling and giving thanks—is linked to greater happiness and health benefits.
Practicing gratitude can help you:
• Boost well-being and self-esteem.
• Protect against stress.
• Enhance relationships.
• Find meaning.
• Increase positivity and productivity at home and work.
• Protect against depression.
• Help the immune system.
• Reduce blood pressure.
• Improve sleep.
Giving thanks is good for the body and the mind. You can reap the benefits of gratitude by practicing it daily and intentionally and focusing on the small, good things, which can be a mighty force for happiness.
2) Grow your resilience:
When the going gets tough, how do you react? Resilience is the practice of bouncing back, even in the face of problems and challenges. Resilience can help you not only survive but thrive.
Proactive ways to build resilience include:
• Building positive connections with others (a support system).
• Favorably accepting yourself, your strengths, and your problem-solving skills.
• Making your days meaningful by setting and working toward goals.
• Learning from experience.
• Maintaining hope.
• Addressing problems.
• Embracing change, which is part of life.
• Keeping a realistic, healthy, and optimistic perspective.
• Believing that crises can be faced.
A resilient attitude can help you tackle hardships, increase your strengths, and meet the world with positivity.
3) Have a growth mindset:
Having a growth mindset means you believe you have the capacity to grow and adapt, and you’re willing to put in the effort to do so.
Tips to develop a growth mindset include:
• Viewing challenges and mistakes as opportunities for progress and growth.
• Recognizing imperfections along with your capacity for self-improvement.
• Valuing the process of learning.
• Growing your grit (perseverance even when life is hard).
• Addressing challenges.
• Setting goals.
4) Sharpen your healthy coping skills:
Healthy coping skills are positive ways to manage challenges or problematic situations.
Healthy coping skills include:
• Seeking support when needed from friends, family, or professionals.
• Problem-solving to find solutions.
• Adjusting expectations if situations don’t go as planned, imagined, or hoped.
• Accepting imperfections and letting go.
Healthy coping skills can make navigating challenges more manageable.
5) Practice self-care:
Self-care means purposefully taking steps to support your mental and physical health.
Basic self-care steps for wellness include:
• Calming your mind and managing stress. Deep breathing and stepping outside for fresh air are quick calming activities.
• Eating well and nutritiously.
• Getting enough sleep and maintaining a regular, healthy sleep pattern.
• Being physically active.
• Focusing on positive connections with others.
• Managing your time and knowing when to say no.
6) Be kind:
Being kind is a win-win. It benefits both the recipient and the giver.
Benefits of kindness include:
• Enhanced self-esteem and feelings of compassion.
• A boost in mood.
• A decrease in blood pressure and the stress hormone cortisol.
• A positive sense of connecting with others.
• Increased levels of serotonin, dopamine, and endorphins in the brain, which are linked to satisfaction, well-being, and pain relief.
Simply considering how you can be kind to yourself and others each day and then taking action, even in small ways, is a great first step to reaping—and giving—the benefits of kindness.
7) Learn stress management:
Stress is part of being human. Everyone feels it. In fact, it serves a positive purpose when it motivates us accomplish things. However, too much stress can be uncomfortable and even overwhelming. Making stress-management a habit can improve your emotional well-being.
Stress management tips include:
• Identifying stressors and brainstorming ways to manage them.
• Taking care of yourself with exercise, nutrition, and healthy sleep patterns.
• Taking time to relax.
• Changing your outlook by considering positive alternatives when thoughts are negative.
• Learning to prioritize, plan, and accomplish what is realistic.
• Recognizing and accepting what you can’t change.
• Saying no if taking on too much is stressful.
Learning how to manage stress can benefit both your mental and physical health.
8) Be optimistic:
Being an optimist—someone who is hopeful and positive—is associated with lower levels of stress and better health. Optimism does not mean putting on blinders to avoid seeing reality. It means approaching reality with a positive and productive attitude. Even if you tend to think negatively, you can learn to be an optimist.
Steps to optimistic thinking include:
• Practicing positive self-talk. Try making a conscious effort to notice your feelings and then address them positively. For instance, instead of considering what can go wrong, consider what can go right. Instead of thinking about what you can’t do, think of what you can do.
• Connecting with positive people and limiting talk of doom and gloom.
• Identifying areas in your life that you’d like to change for the better. Try reflecting on what leads to negative feelings and purposefully consider what you can do to develop a more positive approach.
With practice, you can become more positive and hopeful and less critical. That’s an optimistic outlook.
9) Help yourself and help others:
Research shows that those who help others experience less depression, better health, and a greater sense of calm.
Helping others boosts positive feelings of:
• Human connection.
• Being needed and valued.
• A break from your own worries.
• Meaning and purpose.
• Seeing the perspectives of others.
Gestures don’t have to be grand. Offering small, daily doses of help can increase your own happiness as well as that of others.
10) Find your sense of purpose:
Research shows that having a meaningful sense of purpose is associated with contentment and happiness.
Tips for finding a sense of purpose include:
• Setting long-term and short-term goals and working to achieve them.
• Developing meaningful relationships and connections.
• Engaging in activities that you find gratifying or rewarding.
• Considering how you can improve the world, even in small ways.
