As September ends and the leaves continue to change, October ushers in Emotional Wellness Month, which is a period devoted to supporting and bolstering your own mental health. Whether you’re at work, on the road, or spending time at home, mental and emotional stresses are often unavoidable. They can even contribute to negative physical reactions, weakened immune systems, and generally poor health.
Essentially, “emotional wellness” is a term that describes a person’s ability to process emotions in a healthy, positive way to help mitigate and manage the stresses of everyday life. If you or a loved one feel stressed or overwhelmed, try prioritizing activities that help slow down and clear your mind.
As for Emotional Wellness Month itself, you can think of this time as an opportunity to take charge of your emotional wellness and prioritize the activities that help you bolster and manage your sources of stress while providing comfort and good feelings.
Let’s take a closer look at some personally useful ways to celebrate Emotional Wellness Month that help reduce stress and better focus on the things that make you feel great.
Go Over Your Financial Plans
While going over your finances can be a stressful event, having a plan in place is a great long-term way to ensure both emotional and financial stability. Make sure your finance goals and habits are aligning with your savings and income goals. You may find that you need to reconsider your goals or strategies to achieve what you want for the future, be it greater savings, a new purchase, or anything in between. Even organizing a plan toward a new dream destination abroad can improve emotional wellness when done responsibly.
Set Aside Time To Disconnect
Especially now, almost everyone is constantly connected to the digital world by phone, computer, television, and more. People are bombarded with and even seek out trending data, breaking news, and alerts every day, even casually. While this can be a good thing, it’s important to consider reducing the amount of time spent in front of screens. One way to reduce online and screen time is to unplug one day a week. You can devote this time to reading, setting up something relaxing (like a massage), and even going for a walk. Be sure to briefly document how you feel before and after your unplugged time to see how it affects your emotional wellness.
Adopt New Coping Skills
Plenty of people have coping behaviors they prefer when feeling overwhelmed or anxious. This could be as simple as deep breathing and brief meditation to more planned events, like going out to a favorite place with friends and family. Especially if you don’t have coping mechanisms in your life, try to take some time to create a list of simple activities like breathing practices, simple exercises, or drawing that help you calm down and self-soothe during stressful times.
Prioritize Your Positive Relationships
There may be no advice more important to emotional wellness than making time for the good people in your life. Friends, family and even co-workers contribute enormous positive impact to our emotional health. They better our social and spiritual wellbeing by helping you stay connected. Human beings thrive on social interactions. Without them, it’s easy to feel isolated. Big or small, a well balanced, healthy, and social community offers emotional, recreational, and educational benefits. Because of all this, our close friends and family provide a reliable support system when a crisis strikes.
If you need help prioritizing your emotional wellness this month (or any time), you can also seek professional treatment services and support from trusted friends and family. Combined with professional treatment, like the kind you can get through clinical trials with the Lehigh Center for Clinical Research, getting the emotional support you need to be mentally well is essential to maintaining a high quality of life at home, work, and beyond. Especially for this October, let your emotional wellness be front and center for your sense of comfort and health.
