Keys To Emotional Fitness

There is a lot of talk about the importance of mental health and wellness - but what does it really mean to be mentally healthy or well? How do you know when you’ve arrived?

Is it just a feeling? No. It’s much more than that.

While it is the case that we experience a sense of ease, or more positive sensations and emotions when our mental health and wellness are thriving, this “feeling” isn’t the exclusive indicator of wellness.

To the misfortune of the masses, however, most people still base important decisions about their self-care and health on whether or not they “feel good”. To call this an oversimplification is an understatement.

In order to get to a place where you can rely on your own ability to arrive at your optimum level of health and wellness, and stay there for longer periods of time, consistently, you must be able to conduct a proper assessment that is based on something more substantial than feelings and sensations.

Why does it matter?

It matters because most people are operating on a very low baseline of awareness as it relates to the status of their health and wellness. Over the years, we learn to tolerate, accommodate, and even become comfortable with our persistent suffering to the extent that it becomes our baseline or “new normal” - eventually, we may completely forget what it’s like to feel well, much less thrive.

The human body and brain are incredible adaptation machines. Unfortunately over time, chronic stress, inflammation, and toxicity in the body and brain result in mental, emotional, physical, and even spiritual distress and dis-ease (the lack of ease).

Without context about what the experience of thriving truly is, we lose sight of the signs and signals inside of us that indicate that something needs to be addressed - whether that be adrenal fatigue, unresolved childhood trauma, or misaligned value systems.

Your body gives you signs and signals all of the time. They are mental, emotional, physical, and even spiritual. But you can’t hear these messages if you don’t know how to listen to what’s coming up from inside of you because you’re too busy judging it and making yourself wrong for feeling negative emotions and thinking the thoughts associated with them.

This blog invites you to consider Emotional Fitness as a primary indicator of mental health and overall wellness. It’s a better measuring stick for self-assessment than your personal judgments about your feelings.

If in making this assessment, you find yourself “emotionally unfit”, you have specific options for getting well that aren’t contingent on how you feel at any given moment.

What is Emotional Fitness?

There are two foundational components to Emotional Fitness; 1) your ability to feel, sense and trust the full spectrum of your emotions, and 2) your capacity for strength, flexibility, and agility in your emotional responsiveness. Let’s look at each foundational component in more detail.

1) The Spectrum of Emotions

True freedom is in being able to feel and express the full range of all of your emotions rather than hiding or repressing negative emotions.

It’s important to understand that human emotions exist on a spectrum and while they are all interconnected, they are also experienced at different frequencies. This is why some of them “feel good” and others “feel bad”. However, they’re all intended to give you important information about yourself!

One of the most important things to understand about this spectrum is that it’s not possible to resist, mute, or avoid feeling our negative/low vibration emotions without also resisting, muting, and avoiding the experience of feeling our positive/high vibration emotions.

If you mute one side of the spectrum, you mute the entire spectrum of your emotions to an equal extent!

This is why so many people feel numb… they’re not sad, but they’re not happy either - they might be able to play the part on a day-to-day basis, but inside they’re unfulfilled, feeling depleted, empty and maybe even have some sense of depression.

Most people judge their emotions as good or bad and fail to realize that emotions are messengers to help us understand where to direct attention and support for healing. From that perspective, it’s understood that we stand to benefit from the ability to feel and interpret the full spectrum of our emotions - before taking action on them!

If only we could learn to judge them less and instead, discern the important information about ourselves that is attempting to reveal itself by way of the emotional experience. All emotions can be valuable if we know how to use them as opportunities for personal growth and emotional maturity.

2) Emotional Strength, Flexibility, and Agility

Physical fitness is defined as having strength, flexibility, and agility. Drawing parallels between physical fitness as it relates to strength, flexibility, and agility is helpful to understanding Emotional Fitness because it includes the same three aspects.

• Strength - the emotional strength to take action. The strength to handle emotional situations without collapsing, exploding, or disassociating from them or from yourself.

• Flexibility - the ability to get up off the (emotional) floor. The flexibility to muster up the emotional fortitude to handle confrontation, or to stand up for yourself or a loved one, or to be tender and connect with someone who is in need of empathy and compassion, such as a child.

• Agility - The ability to deal with differing emotional extremes within close proximity and transitioning between different emotional states with greater ease - with or without the use of tools such as breathing exercises, bioenergetic exercises, mindfulness, etc.

Keys to Improving your Emotional Fitness

Just as physical fitness requires consistent engagement in the work associated with advancing your physical fitness goals, emotional fitness also requires you to consistently stay in the work! If consistency is a struggle or you’re not sure where to start, consider getting professional help to raise your baseline of wellness and ability to cope. Here are some suggestions:

• Decide to stop being a slave to your emotions and how you feel on any given day

• Get clear on your values and priorities and use them to formulate goals for your life and career

• Move away from compulsive behaviors based solely on how you feel at any given moment. Do this by practicing valued actions that help build self-discipline - so you can take action on creating what you value - even when you don’t feel like it

• Practice Mindfulness - you are not your thoughts. The purpose of mindfulness is to separate the observer of your thoughts (you/your identity) from the thinking monkey-mind that dictates your erratic thoughts and feelings. Your thoughts don’t represent who you are - but if you over-identify with them they will dictate your emotions and actions. Learn more about Cognitive Defusion.

• Use tools such as breathing exercises, bioenergetic exercises, meditation, journaling, quiet time-outs, etc to become more agile

Your Emotional Fitness is a significant influence in creating the events that occur in life - as our emotions and emotional programming are a major influence in creating the thoughts we think, and our thoughts are directly associated with our actions and behaviors. If you find yourself displeased with the reality of your life experience, becoming more Emotional Fit is key to your ability to create new and different experiences and the outcomes you prefer.

If you’re looking for a place to find like-minded individuals to collaborative with and get support for your relationship and business pain-points, we invite you to become a member of the Edgy Entrepreneur Community on Facebook and join us for Unf*ck Your Mindset Friday at 12:30pm ET on October 7th where we’ll discuss this topic in more detail, answer your questions, and help you unpack this topic further.

Stay Edgy-

Coach Oriana Guevára, MHR, MBA

Co-Founder, The Edgy Entrepreneur

© Edgy Entrepreneur, LLC. • 51 E. Jefferson St. #3292, Orlando, FL 32802 • www.edgyentrepreneurs.com