What is Emotional Health?

In the late 19th century the concept of physical hygiene was discovered which resulted in dramatic improvements in human health and lifespan. Simple steps that we now take for granted like brushing our teeth, washing our hands, and cleaning our bodies, we don’t think about them anymore, or schedule them into our day, we just do them.

10 years ago Guy Winch psychologist, author, and speaker, introduced the concept of emotional hygiene, he believes this will have a similar impact on human health and lifespan and I agree with him.

If you haven’t come across this concept before I’ll briefly outline it – I highly recommend watching (or listening to) Guy’s TED talk or reading his book to get a full understanding.

In a nutshell, Guy wants us to ensure we give our emotional health the same level of care and attention we give to our physical health. We can do this by ensuring we have solid emotional hygiene routines in place to counteract and repair the day-to-day psychological injuries we endure and emotional first aid actions to apply to larger wounds. Emotional health is different from mental health, as Guy explains:

“Mental health is about diagnosable conditions like depression and anxiety. Emotional health is about common experiences like loneliness, failure, and heartbreak, the non-diagnosable stuff.”

This article is not intended to cover mental health and diagnosable conditions, but rather bring to your attention the concept of emotional health and outline steps you can take to put in place both emotional hygiene and emotional first aid practices.

I like to distinguish between emotional hygiene and emotional first aid as they are two different responses and we need both. I like to compare it to oral health, you still go to see the dentist even though you brush your teeth daily. Emotional Hygiene takes care of our daily psychological needs while Emotional First Aid addresses larger psychological wounds.

Emotional Hygiene

Emotional hygiene refers to being mindful of our psychological health and adopting brief daily habits to monitor and address psychological injuries when we sustain them.

I prefer the term Emotional Hygiene over self-care, in my experience, and what I have observed with my clients, self-care is seen as a bonus, an optional extra, and often the first thing to drop when the going gets tough. However, this is exactly the time when self-care is needed more than ever. This is where the term Emotional Hygiene fits better. You wouldn't stop brushing your teeth because you had a busy week at work and the same needs to apply to your emotional hygiene routine.

Psychological injuries come from things like loneliness, failure, and rejection. Humans are hardwired with a negativity bias - we are always on the lookout for anything that could harm us and alerted with a fight-flight response to take action. While this response ensured our ancestors survived, we need to counteract this hardwiring to reduce the stress it causes and spend more time in the parasympathetic nervous system. Practicing emotional hygiene is a good way to combat this negativity bias and heal the small psychological injuries we pick up.

The first step is awareness. Be aware of your emotions and what they are trying to tell you. Recognise, name, and acknowledge the emotion you are feeling and then let them pass – emotions are data, information that we can make a choice about what we do with. Put them down and move on.

Loneliness can be a major issue for many people, it doesn't necessarily have to do with how many people are around you - rather how connected you feel to these people. Taking steps to actively connect with others is a great way to combat loneliness - this could be joining a new group or club or finding a space to volunteer in.

Failure can take many shapes and forms and can be easy for us to focus our attention on. Keeping a list of your wins, the times you got things right, or the things you are proud of is a great tool for tackling failure. Give attention to your successes and the things you are doing well. Learning to do this also counteracts your negativity bias.

Rejection can be had to stomach, missing out on the job you really wanted, or the ending of a relationship. Keeping the rejection in perspective, rather than catastrophising is a great place to start. Leaning into your existing connections and looking back over your recent wins can help keep any rejection in perspective.  

Emotional First Aid

Emotional first aid refers to treatment of psychological wounds, having treatment and practices to promote healing so these wounds do not become trauma.

While small emotional injuries can be healed through our emotional hygiene practices we also need a way to respond to larger emotional wounds and this is where emotional first aid comes in. These emotional wounds can occur either through a specific event or through the compounding effect of small day-to-day psychological injuries. Just as the simple step of putting a band-aid on a wound or cut, having a "band-aid" for an emotional wound can speed up the healing process and stop the wound from festering.

Learning to manage big emotions needs to be part of your emotional first aid kit. Understanding that big emotions can arise like a wave, learning how to let the wave break and disperse without getting washed away by it. You may also need to schedule an emotional release, as you can't always deal with emotions the instant that they appear. Learning to schedule in time to process these delayed emotions can also be part of your first aid kit. Holding the tension of two opposing emotions is also a good tool to learn.

Rumination is one of the worst things we can do for our emotional health - replaying situations and scenarios causes us to relive the trauma and increase the damage. Like picking at a scab, we don't allow the injury to heal. You can counteract rumination by training your brain to hold focus elsewhere or using distraction techniques to interrupt the rumination. Training your brain can be done through learning and practicing meditation techniques, or using focusing methods like the Pomodoro Technique to hold your focus elsewhere. Distraction techniques can be doing things that require your full attention, this could be as simple as a math puzzle or as complex as rock climbing, as long as your brain is actively engaged and you are distracted from rumination.

By now you should have an understanding of both emotional hygiene and emotional first aid. What are you going to implement to build your emotional health?