Emotional Fitness
Your mind is just like your body—both can be exercised and trained in order to be healthy and strong.
Endure
Intense emotional situations will arise in your life. Do you feel capable of enduring them without withdrawing?
Building your emotional fitness helps you develop the strength necessary to withstand any emotionally challenging moments and rise above, learning from your experiences. It’s a natural way to reduce stress and anxiety.
Adapt
In life, you never know what’s coming. Are you willing to adapt and make the best of unknown situations?
Being emotionally flexible can help you protect yourself and others in moments of confrontation or crisis. Learning to respond with the right emotion for each moment can make or break your work and personal relationships.
Manage
Every moment requires different emotional output. Can you switch quickly from one emotional situation to another?
Going from a stressful phone call with a client to speaking with your partner requires a level of emotional agility that is difficult to obtain
By working on your emotional fitness, you can endure, adapt, and manage your emotional intelligence and discover your true potential.
All of us, especially busy professionals, can reach a point in our lives when it seems the challenges are unbeatable. Our work lives and personal lives don’t intertwine in productive ways, and we feel the candle burning at both ends. Don’t despair; needing a bit of support is normal.
Reflect on Your Emotional Fitness
In order to achieve a healthy level of emotional fitness, you have to treat your mind and body with the right care. A plant only grows under certain conditions, and we only thrive under the right conditions as well.
What Am I Eating?
Nutrition is key to supply our minds with the nourishment they need to be strong and fit. Check-in with yourself often about what you are eating. If you are busy day and night, chances are you are making meal decisions that may not be beneficial for you in the long run.
How Am I Moving?
Exercise is necessary for a healthy body and a healthy mind. It produces important chemicals that you’ll need to be emotionally healthy. Make mental notes about how much movement you are including in your daily life, and if you find it’s not enough, look for easy ways to build it into your schedule.
How Am I Adapting?
As you’re settling down for the evening, remind yourself of the challenges you faced that day and reflect on how you are adapting. This is not about judging yourself or feeling like a failure—on the contrary. It’s about using your lived experience as a learning opportunity.
Improve Your Communication Skills
We are social creatures and rely on communicating with others for practical and emotional purposes. Below are some quick tips to improve your communication skills.
- Learn the basics of non-verbal communication
- When in doubt, provide more information that you may think is needed
- Avoid relying on visual aids
- Learn to read people’s body language
- Engage your audience or discussion partner in a dialogue
- Bookend your thoughts—begin and end with your main point
- Record yourself talking and watch the clips to see how others see you
- Get comfortable speaking on topics without memorizing word-for-word
- Focus on earning respect instead of laughs
Emotional Intelligence in the Workplace
If you’re a busy executive, emotional intelligence can give you a leg up in the workplace.
Be Promoted
It is important to understand the nuances of emotional intelligence and how this plays a part in the workplace. Your coworkers are not just employees—they’re humans, too. And so are your bosses, the people who have a say in your promotion potential. By showing your colleagues what emotional intelligence can look like and how successful it can make you, you’ll elevate your performance and make it easier to thrive in the workplace.
Be Respected
Emotional intelligence is not all about receiving a promotion or making more money. More than superficial gains, we seek to be valued, but it’s difficult to become respected if your emotional fitness is not in a healthy place. Emotional intelligence and emotional fitness provide meaningful benefits in multiple aspects of life beyond workplace performance.
Improve Your Emotional Fitness
Below are three quick tips to exercise your mind and build your emotional fitness.
Be Mindful
Mindfulness is incredibly helpful in all walks of life. Learn to train your attention and control how you allocate your awareness. Here, you can create a formal mindfulness practice or simply perform daily moments of mindfulness that will slowly develop your conscious experience.
Accept
When you feel overwhelmed by your emotions, practice emotional acceptance and validation. Accepting your current emotional state with nonjudgement and thinking of areas for change as opportunities for growth will help you achieve the right attitude necessary for progress.
Elevate
Take your current state of mind and enhance it by restructuring negative thoughts and habits. This is easier said than done, but if you learn to transform unhelpful thought patterns into productive ones that serve you better, you’ll be on the road to emotional health and wellbeing.
Here at Pacific Integrative Psychiatry, we believe in wholeness of body, mind and spirit. To achieve greatness, your body and mind must be treated with care and trained with the right set of skills.
If you feel emotionally incapable of handling the challenges of your busy schedule, call us to set up a consultation where we can talk about your needs in specific detail and create a path to enhance your emotional fitness.
Take The First Step On Your
Journey With Us
Perhaps you have questions you’d like to ask before you make a decision to become a patient. Our patient coordinator is standing by, happy to answer any questions you have to determine if Pacific Integrative Psychiatry is right for you.
Contact Us
18 Bartol Street,
Suite 1370, San Francisco CA 94133
Phone: 415-231-6100
contact@pacificintegrativepsych.com