Your Emotional Health

What is Emotional Health?

Emotional health is…

• part of our overall health concerned with the way we think and feel.
• it refers to our sense of well-being, our ability to cope with life events.
• and our ability to acknowledge and respect emotions, our own and those of others.

People do not automatically have either good or poor emotional health; you’re not given a particular level of emotional health at birth. Your emotional health depends on the circumstances you grow up in, the knowledge and skills and experience collected throughout life, and how these are used.

You can think of emotional heath as being a sort of sliding scale. At one end of the scale you have a sense of distress and despair, at the other a feeling of security and being able to cope. And people will go up and down this scale – that’s part of life and an important part of being emotionally healthy.


 

Is it the same as happiness?

Not exactly.  Happiness is an emotion which people feel for a short period of time, often alongside many other emotions. Emotional health is about more than this, it is the ability to cope with difficult times in life, and this depends on a person’s knowledge, skills, experience, social and environmental circumstances. If someone has good emotional health they are more likely to cope with difficult times, and hence they may be happier in life.

How do I improve my emotional health?

You can think about emotional health as a sliding scale, from poor to good, which we all sit on somewhere. We slide along the scale, depending on how we are coping with what is going on in our lives at that moment.

Good emotional health is about keeping yourself emotionally balanced. But life is full of ups and downs and coping with these isn’t easy. Even an event that many would say is positive, like starting a new school, moving house, having a baby or getting married, can be extremely stressful.

Improving emotional health is done through looking after yourself day to day, and through developing emotional skills, improving awareness, living in a supportive family or community and in a healthy environment.

Emotional skills

The ability to cope with difficult times in your life is not something we are born with, it is something we learn. We learn from our own experiences and from copying, or avoiding, the experiences of the people around us.

For example, if you have grown up in a family where people do not talk about their feelings or what is worrying them, then it is likely you will find it very difficult to do so. 

Skills considered to be important for emotional health are:

• Self awareness
   
• Empathy
   
• Social skills like listening and relationship skills
   
• Managing difficult feelings
   
• Motivation

These skills can be taught for example in schools or work place training, or learnt through life experience. For information on Samaritans schools and workplace programmes click here:
                                                    SCHOOLS | WORKPLACE

If you would like someone from Samaritans IOM
to give a talk to your group or workplace please email:
Needaspeaker-iomsams@manx.net

How do I look after myself day to day?

If you were trying to keep a healthy body, what would you do? You would keep active and eat healthy foods, and make sure you got enough rest to recover for the next day. Keeping a healthy mind, works in exactly the same way. Keep the brain active like through work, learning, reading, writing and thinking. De-stress through expressing your thoughts and feelings, either through talking or activities. Examples could be art, music, games, sports, a hobby and spending time with friends. Give your mind time to relax through good rest or meditation.

The trick is to keep mind and body balanced. A quick way to check is to ask yourself how are you feeling? If it is not good then consider if there is something more you could do to either to keep your brain active or to de-stress. If you are not coping that well, make sure you tell someone and get some help.

Emotional awareness, attitudes & stigma

People generally have a far better understanding of physical health than of emotional health. Whereas people feel comfortable talking about most physical health problems and illness, they don’t like to talk about emotional problems or mental illness.

Talking about feelings is sometimes seen as taboo or a weakness. When people suffer emotional or mental health problems, like depression, a phobia, a eating disorder, or dementia, this is often not openly talked about. People suffering mental health problems say the stigma they experience is sometimes more stressful than the illness itself. Inaccurate media reporting which makes people with mental health problems sound dangerous or unstable is also unhelpful. The result of this is that people feel excluded from society and in some cases don’t get jobs, or housing they are entitled to.

The more people know about emotional issues and talk about them, the more accepted these become and the more included people feel. To find out more about emotional health problems click the following link:

Hearing someone else’s worries or problems can be distressing for you too. Samaritans volunteers often talk through a conversation that they found upsetting with another volunteer, in order to get some support themselves. We would encourage you to do the same.

Talk to another friend about it or, if you have promised not to tell anyone else, you can call Samaritans who will keep the information confidential. Take care not to take on so much of other people’s problems that you yourself start feeling depressed.

How do Samaritans help support emotional health?

Our core service is provided by phone, email, letter and face to face in our branch. If we can improve someone’s emotional health, they become more confident, secure and self-aware. These people are then more likely to be able to support others. In this way,
Samaritans IOM can benefit everyone in the Island's community.

For Samaritans IOM, our work in emotional health promotion very much represented the logical extension of our helpline services. We feel that if we can reach people earlier, create more supportive peer groups and address the stigma associated with help-seeking, then we would be closer to our vision of a more emotionally healthy society where fewer people die by suicide, or suffer pain from self harming. We decided early on to stick to specific target groups where we already had a presence and where our specific knowledge and experience would be useful. To find more information on the ways Samaritans help with Emotional Health support click the following link::

 

www.samaritans.org/youremotionalhealth