Apologies for no posts for a while......
The aftermath of the Covid pandemic and lockdown has left so many people trying to cope with emotional pain in a fast changing world.
Emotional pain often exacts a greater toll on your quality of life than physical pain. The stress and negative emotions associated with any trying event can even lead to physical pain and disease.
In fact, emotional stress is linked to health problems including chronic inflammation, lowered immune function, increased blood pressure, altered brain chemistry, increased tumor growth and more.
Of course, emotional pain can be so severe that it interferes with your ability to enjoy life and, in extreme cases, may even make you question whether your life is worth living.
Healing Emotional Pain
Let Go of Rejection
Rejection actually activates the same pathways in your brain as physical pain, which is one reason why it hurts so much. The feeling of rejection toys with your innate need to belong, and is so distressing that it interferes with your ability to think, recall memories and make decisions. The sooner you let go of painful rejections, the better off your mental health will be.
Avoid Brooding
When you brood, over a past hurt, the memories you replay in your mind only become increasingly distressing and cause more anger, without providing any new insights. In other words, while reflecting on a painful event can help you to reach an understanding or closure about it, ruminating simply increases your stress levels, and can actually be addictive.
Brooding on a stressful incident can also increase your levels C-active protein, a marker of inflammation in your body linked to cardiovascular disease.1
Turn Failure Into Something Positive
If you allow yourself to feel helpless after a failure, or blame it on your lack of ability or bad luck, it is likely to lower your self-esteem. Blaming a failure on specific factors within your control, such as planning and execution, is likely to be less damaging, but even better is focusing on ways you can improve and be better informed or prepared so you can succeed next time (and try again, so there is a next time).
Make Sure Guilt Remains a Useful Emotion
Guilt can be beneficial in that it can stop you from doing something that may harm another person (making it a strong "relationship protector"). But guilt that lingers or is excessive can impair your ability to focus and enjoy life.
If you still feel guilty after apologising for a wrongdoing, be sure you have expressed empathy toward them and conveyed that you understand how your actions impacted them. This will likely lead to authentic forgiveness and relief of your guilty feelings.
Use Self-Affirmations if You Have Low Self-Esteem
While positive affirmations are excellent tools for emotional health, if they fall outside the boundaries of your beliefs, they may be ineffective. This may be the case for people with low self-esteem, for whom self-affirmations may be more useful. Self-affirmations, such as “I have a great work ethic,” can help to reinforce positive qualities you believe you have, as can making a list of your best qualities.
Emotional Healing
Many, if not most, people carry emotional scars, traumas that can adversely affect your health and quality of life. Using techniques like energy psychology, you can correct the emotional short-circuiting that contributes to your chronic emotional pain. Such a technique for this is the Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT)(http://eft.mercola.com/), which is the most comprehensive and most popular version of energy psychology. EFT is a form of psychological acupressure based on the same energy meridians used in traditional acupuncture to treat physical and emotional ailments for over 5,000 years, but without the invasiveness of needles.
Instead, simple tapping with the fingertips is used to transfer kinetic energy onto specific meridians on your head and chest while you think about your specific problem, whether it is a traumatic event, an addiction, pain or anxiety- and voice positive affirmations.
Ongoing Care
Just as eating healthy, exercising and getting a good night’s sleep are habits that must be held in the long run to be effective, your emotional health requires ongoing care as well. And, just like your physical body, your mind can only take so much stress before it breaks down. Yet many neglect to tend to their emotional health with the same devotion they give to their physical well-being. This is a mistake, but one that is easily remedied with the following tips for emotional nurturing.
Be an Optimist
Looking on the bright side increases your ability to experience happiness in your day-to-day life while helping you cope more effectively with stress.
Have Hope
Having hope allows you to see the light at the end of the tunnel, helping you push through even dark, challenging times. Accomplishing goals, even small ones, can help you to build your level of hope.
Accept Yourself
Self-deprecating remarks and thoughts will shroud your mind with negativity and foster increased levels of stress. Seek out and embrace the positive traits of yourself and your life, and avoid measuring your own worth by comparing yourself to those around you.
Stay Connected
Having loving and supportive relationships helps you feel connected, accepted and promotes a more positive mood. Intimate relationships help meet your emotional needs, so make it a point to reach out to others to develop and nurture these relationships in your life.
Express Gratitude
People who are thankful for what they have are better able to cope with stress, have more positive emotions, and are better able to reach their goals. The best way to harness the positive power of gratitude is to keep a gratitude journal or list, where you actively write down exactly what you are grateful for each day. Doing so has been linked to happier moods, greater optimism and even better physical health.
Find Your Purpose and Meaning
When you have a purpose or goal that you are striving for, your life will take on a new meaning that supports your mental well-being. If you are not sure what your purpose is, explore your natural talents and interests to help find it, and also consider your role in intimate relationships and ability to grow spiritually.
Master Your Environment
When you have mastery over your environment, you have learned how to best modify your unique circumstances for the most emotional balance, which leads to feelings of pride and success. Mastery entails using skills such as time management and prioritisation along with believing in your ability to handle whatever life throws your way.
Exercise Regularly
Exercise boosts levels of health-promoting neurochemicals like serotonin, dopamine, and norepinephrine, which may help buffer some of the effects of stress and also relieve some symptoms of depression. Rather than viewing exercise as a medical tool to lose weight, prevent disease, and live longer, (all benefits that occur in the future), try viewing exercise as a daily tool to immediately enhance your frame of mind, reduce stress and feel happier.
Practice Mindfulness
Practicing mindfulness means that you are actively paying attention to the moment you are in right now. Rather than letting your mind wander, when you are mindful you are living in the moment and letting distracting or negative thoughts pass through your mind without getting caught up in their emotional implications. Mindfulness can help you reduce stress for increased well-being as well as achieving focus.
It is a mistake to view your emotional health as a separate entity from your physical health, as the two are intricately connected. You will have an easier time bouncing back from emotional setbacks when you are physically well, and healthy habits will also help keep your mood elevated naturally in the midst of stress. Happy people tend to be healthy people, and vice versa.
Meditation
Last but by no means least, it is important to not overlook the healing power that meditation has on emotional pain. Meditationdeeply focuses one’s mind for a period of time. This can be done in silence or with the help of chanting or music which evokes relaxation in the body and a feeling of peace to an emotionally stressed mind.
In our modern, hectic world, meditation has gained traction in recent years as a way to manage stress. Scientific evidence has also emerged that shows meditation can be a helpful tool in fighting chronic illnesses, including depression, heart disease, and chronic pain.
All it takes is twenty minutes a day out of our busy schedules, to to benefit from the healing power of meditation.
