Emotional Fitness
Resilience is the capacity to adapt successfully in the presence of risk & adversity. Emotional fitness is the ability to enhance positive emotions, self-regulate emotions, & enhance one’s relationship to their emotions by using acceptance & mindfulness strategies.
Emotions are normal & healthy. We must learn to be able to sit with them. Learn distress tolerance exercises & build your ability to tolerate uncomfortable emotions without engaging in unhealthy coping.
Negative emotions are signals that something is wrong, something is going on we need to attend to. We can learn to take this information in to inform our actions. Using mindfulness activities you can learn to observe your emotions or thoughts, without the need to judge or act on them. It’s natural that we try to avoid things we fear.
But avoidance only strengthens the fear. Instead learn to practice visualizing what you want to happen in the feared situation. Visualization works for elite athletes & it can work for you too.
You can do some reality testing around your fears with trusted others. This means asking others to help you test out how reality based your fears are because anxiety & trauma can make us exaggerate how real the feared outcome may be.
If you have had trauma, learning to share your story can help. You can journal or blog to work through past experiences. Increase your awareness of what is triggering for you & develop a plan of action for when you are triggered.
Write that plan down & post it where it can be easily seen, perhaps share it with someone who can remind you to use your plan when triggered, because most of us have a hard time accessing rational thought when triggered, & what seems obvious now can be incredibly hard to access in moments we need it most.
Become aware of your self-talk & how it impacts your emotions. Then start changing how you talk to yourself to improve how you feel. Get creative as a means to express & process your emotions. It does not matter if you are good, what matters is the doing & enjoying.
