Emotional Hygiene: Try These 5 Effective Techniques to Elevate Your Health & Relationships
Emotional hygiene –how to stop negative emotions from destroying our healthy mind.
We all know that we experience good feelings and bad feelings everyday. Many of you are even aware how those feelings affect your day. And, have you ever paid attention to your emotions/feelings?
What I mean here is to recognise and describe the exact emotions you are experiencing, identifying and noting them clearly. Recently, this helped me stay calm and focused when it felt like the world was against me. Paying attention to our emotions is the key to stay healthy, especially when you are in a stressful, difficult, or emotionally challenging situation.
Emotional hygiene is a practice of regularly checking in with your emotional health. It’s the same as your physical hygiene practice such as brushing teeth or washing hands. A way of dealing with the stuff that can potentially damage your health, and make room for the good stuff to thrive.
In this post, you will learn the importance of emotional hygiene, examples of practices you can try, and how they can change your life.
What is Emotional Hygiene?
Think of your teeth and your dental hygiene practice. You brush your teeth everyday so that the “bad” stuff won’t build up. The bad stuff is called plaque, a layer that coats your teeth and gums, which causes tooth decay and gum disease (nasty!). And, we know that brushing our teeth properly and regularly is the best way to remove plaque and stop it from building up.
So, what is the “bad” stuff in our emotional health? It’s called negative emotions –anger, guilt, shame, blame, etc. Emotional hygiene meaning it’s an intentional practice of identifying, processing and managing negative emotions to stop them from building up.
However, unlike brushing plaque off our teeth, negative emotions can’t be simply brushed off from our mind. Read on to find out different ways of emotional hygiene practice.
5 Practical Emotional Hygiene Examples You Can Try
Here are five emotional hygiene examples. Remember, emotional hygiene practice may take time and effort, but it will seriously improve the quality of your life. You should feel lighter and more hopeful when you do it.
I recommend you to choose just one from the list below and practise it for a week or so. After a week, if you like it, stick to it and master it! If you don’t feel the improvement, that’s totally okay. Simply pick a different one and practise it for another week. Try out different techniques, figure out which are easy to implement and feel effective for you.
Technique 1: Daily reflection or journaling to release emotions
I believe this is the most effective practice to start with. Why? Because like anything else, it takes time to get into the habit of taking note of your emotional health. Schedule 5-10 minutes everyday to write down your emotions and thoughts without any judgement, and make it into a daily ritual. This makes it easier for you to open your journal and write down your emotions when you’re facing a stressful, difficult, or emotionally painful situation.
Technique 2: Speaking openly about emotions/feelings with a partner or friend you trust
If you know someone who can listen to you without interruption or judgement, this is a great way to release negative emotions. Finding support groups such as Samaritans in your area is an option if you are in emotional distress or thinking about suicide. Members of organisations like these are usually qualified therapists and trained volunteers who know how to listen to people.
Technique 3: Practising self-compassion
Say, you made a mistake at work today. You came home still frustrated, angry with yourself and dominated by the feeling of failure… all negative emotions. How can we shift this and not let these emotions build up? The first thing is to take a step back and look at the events from someone else’s point of view. What would you say to your best friend if it was her/him who made the mistake, not you? How would you support them? This is a practice to be kind to yourself when you feel negative emotions. A practice of self-compassion.
Technique 4: Reframing negative thoughts and emotions
It may not always be easy, but you can train yourself to reframe your negative thoughts. Find meanings or positives in the situation that has brought you negative emotions. Jeffrey Allen calls it the “Growth Period” when we are feeling stuck or grumpy. This is truly the time we grow. We grow through pain.
So, for example, you are feeling sad because of the loss of your loved one. Although it’s crucial to give yourself time to grieve, if you find yourself struggling to move forward after sufficient time has passed, you may need to reframe your way of thinking about the loss. Can you find meaning in the loss? What does it teach you? You may be touched by the people who care about you. You may appreciate your life more and treasure the time that’s left.
Technique 5: Distracting yourself from the urge to ruminate
For many people, rumination is a habit that’s hard to break. But, if you try to force yourself to concentrate on something every time you have the urge to ruminate, you’ll have a better chance to break this harmful habit.
Studies show that even two minutes of distraction is sufficient to disrupt unhealthy rumination. I like listening to good podcasts and audio books, but it can be something like doing crossword puzzles, Sudoku, playing chess, etc. In his TEDx talk, a psychologist Guy Winch Ph.D. shares his experience on breaking the habit of rumination by distracting himself. He tells us that within one week, his whole outlook changed, and he became more positive and hopeful.
Benefits of Emotional Hygiene
For Prevention
Prevention is better than cure. Use one of the above five emotional hygiene techniques to prevent negative emotions from taking over your life.
Daily cleaning: Just like dental hygiene, daily cleaning is the best way to stop the “bad” stuff from building up.
Routine check-ups and deep cleaning: Often, even with daily cleaning, negative emotions can slowly build up (like nasty plaque slowly builds up on our teeth and gum). So, check in with yourself and clear the built-up negative emotions weekly or monthly, depending on your current situation.
For Emotional Wound
“Everyone has situations in their life that cause them pain. The situation with my grandson and my son hurts my heart. It’s like a wound. Now, if I cut open my knee, what am I to do? I can give it some attention, clean it off, bandage it up, and make sure it heals properly. Or, I can ignore it, and pretend it’s not there. Pretend it doesn’t hurt or sting. And, I just pull my pant leg down over it and hope it goes away. Is that the best way to heal it? No… It’s the same with the wounds in our heart. We need to give them our attention so that they can heal. Otherwise the wound continues to cause us pain.” (from “Into the Magic Shop” by Dr James Doty)
Most of us neglect our emotional wounds, and this comes with a huge cost. We are putting ourselves at risk of developing depression, alcoholism, eating disorders, and even cardiovascular disease. So, if something has hurt your heart, don’t ignore it. Your emotional wound needs first aid. Give it attention by keeping it clean and protecting it from getting worse. Use emotional hygiene techniques to help it heal.
For Self Intimacy and Relationships
You become self aware and build self compassion when you practise emotional hygiene. This makes emotional hygiene one of the core elements of deepening self intimacy. And, deepening self intimacy is a powerful step in strengthening the relationship with your partner.
For women in our 40s and 50s, staying emotionally healthy is more important than ever. When we desire good relationships, fulfilling life with our partners, we must look after our emotional health. You’ll be surprised how practising personal emotional hygiene affects your relationship with others.
Wrap-up
Taking care of your emotional health is as important as taking care of your physical health. It’s time that we pay more attention to what most of us can’t see, such as emotions and energies.
Incorporate one emotional hygiene technique into your daily routine today. Maybe write it down and put it up on the bathroom mirror to remind you. One small step at a time makes a big difference in a week, month and in a year’s time.
Emotional hygiene will bring you not only deeper self awareness, hope and health, but also a more fulfilling and harmonious relationship with others.
In this post, you learned the importance of emotional hygiene, examples of practices you can try, and how they can change your life.
