100 years ago people started practicing personal hygiene and our life expectancy grew. We grow up learning about personal hygiene from all areas in life, school, parents, family etc. We are taught how it is majorly important that we take care of our bodies so we can look good and if we look good therefore we will feel good. We are taught how to take care of our bodies very early that way when we grow up it is now common sense that we brush our teeth twice a day and put on deodorant and shower daily. But why do we tend to favor our bodies over our minds? Growing up some of us NOT all were lucky to have families who were open with discussion and feelings, and weren’t afraid to be honest with one another and saying that sometimes they weren't always okay. Then others of us were not lucky, and no one ever taught what being emotionally healthy looked like. We are quick to get professional help from doctors, dentist, or registered nurses, whenever we hurt ourselves or get a cavity, but when it comes to our own emotions like loneliness, anxiety, depression, guilt, or shame we tend to not seek help for those as quickly. Why is that? Because no one took the time to explain to us how to be healthy emotionally. Too many of us deal with common emotional pain but are afraid to talk to someone about it because of the stigma around how we deal with emotions and feelings.
What is emotional hygiene? It refers to being mindful of our psychological health and adopting daily habits to monitor and address emotional wounds when we sustain them. Currently our general neglect of our emotional hygiene is profound. How is it we take more care of our teeth than our minds? We brush and floss daily but what daily activity do we do to maintain our psychological health? I would argue that the consequences of emotional hygiene are much worse than lacking personal hygiene. After all which would you rather lose, a tooth? Or your mind?
How many habits have you adopted and changed over the years to better your physical health? The constant diet changes and work out regime, annual check ups, physical therapy, and all the over the counter medicines for pains and aches. Now. Ask yourself what habits have you adopted to better your emotional health: Do you watch emotional injuries like failures or rejection when they happen, to make sure your self-esteem recovers and rebounds? Are you aware of the ways negative self-talk impacts your emotional state? Do you know how to break out of a cycle of pondering and sulking about distressing events? Chances are the answer to these questions is no.
We have to start paying attention to our emotional pain. If you were injured and the pain doesn’t go away after a couple of days then you would take some kind of action. The same should be true of emotional pain. If you find yourself hurting emotionally for several days because of a rejection, a failure, a bad mood, or any other reason, it means you’ve got an emotional wound and you need to treat it with emotional-first-aid techniques.
We have to learn how to stop emotional bleeding. Many emotional wounds lead to these vicious cycles that only make the pain worse. Example, failure can lead to a lack of confidence and feelings of helplessness that only make you more likely to fail again in the future. Having awareness of these consequences, catching these negative cycles, and stopping emotional bleeding by correcting them is important.
PROTECT YOUR SELF-ESTEEM. Our self-esteem acts as an emotional immune system which can buffer us and lend us greater emotional strength. Therefore, we should get in the habit of monitoring our self-esteem, boosting it when it is low, and avoiding negative self-talk.
Let's get informed and stop sitting in our complacency over mental health. Let's get serious about it, ask the tough questions, be open minded when talking about it, it’s not a joke, people aren’t being “dramatic” , people aren’t “crazy” , you just can’t say “you need to pray more”. It starts with us and how we talk about it. We have to be willing to change the stigma if not for us then for our children, and our children's children. When you learn how to treat emotional/psychological wounds and teach your children how to do so as well—you will not only build emotional resilience, you will thrive.
