Your emotional health is important (too)

Source: TEDTalks — Guy Winch

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The fact: We all know how to maintain our physical health since we were five years old. But how about emotional health?

An example: A five-year-old boy before getting to bed, standing on the stool by the sink, brushing his teeth. Then he slipped and scratched his leg on the stool when he fell. He cried for a minute but he got back up, got back on the stool, and reached out for a box of Band-Aids to put one on his cut.

This kid knew how to cover a cut so it doesn’t become infected. He also knew how to care for teeth by brushing twice a day.

The questions:

• What do we know about maintaining our psychological health?
• What do we teach our children about emotional hygiene?
• Why is it that our physical health is more important to us than our psychological health?

When somebody feeling depressed, people said, “Oh, you’re feeling depressed? Just shake it off, it’s all in your head.”

But if there’s somebody with a broken leg, nobody said, “Oh, just walk it off, it’s on your leg.”

It’s time time to close the gap between physical and psychological health.

Psychological injuries are included loneliness, failure, rejection, rumination.

• Loneliness. It increases your likelihood of early death by 14%. It suppresses the functioning of your immune system.
• Failure. We have to aware of how our minds react to failure. If your mind tries to convince you’re incapable of something, and you believe it, you’ll begin to feel helpless and stop trying too soon.
• Rejection. After the rejection, we all start thinking of all our faults and all our shortcomings. What we wish we were and we weren’t.
• Rumination. By spending so much time focused on upsetting and negative thoughts, you are actually putting yourself at significant risk for developing clinical depression, alcoholism, eating disorder, and even cardiovascular disease.

This is how to practice emotional first aid to overcome the psychological injuries

1. Pay attention to emotional pain
2. Stop emotional bleeding
3. Protect your self-esteem
4. Battle negative thinking

By taking action when you’re lonely, by changing your response to failure, by protecting your self-esteem, by battling negative thinking, you won’t just heal your physical wounds, you will build emotional resilience, you will thrive.