Emotional Health Starts With Understanding Yourself

Emotional wellness is knowing, understanding, and accepting the gamut of feelings we have and managing them effectively. One way of improving our emotional health is by understanding ourselves better. According to Psychology Today, we need to discover how and why our thoughts, emotions, and behaviors work. “Relationships either sustain us or destroy us, wreaking distress or creating joy as we move through our lives. Our first task is to figure out how our thoughts, emotions, and behaviors work within us. Then we can apply the same task to understanding how we relate or don’t relate with others in beneficial ways.” Psychology Today recommends asking the following questions:

Behaviors
Here are some examples of behavior scenarios that we can work on understanding:

• Why do you pout, go into your room, and slam the door when someone disagrees with you?
• Why do you behave rudely knowing it upsets people?
• Why do you try and do what others want when it may harm you?
• Why are you quiet when you know you want to speak up?

Thoughts
Here are some examples of thinking we should understand:

• Why do you think you have the right answer to everything when you know nothing about some subjects?
• Why do you think you rapidly change your thoughts without any new input?
• Why are you logical in your thinking style?
• Why do you hold back in expressing your thoughts?

Emotions
Here are examples of emotions that beg for understanding:

• Why do you yell at your child when you’ve said you’re never going to do it again?
• Why are you angry if someone holds a different opinion from you?
• Why are you sad and despondent if you don’t please others and make them happy?
• Why are you anxious when your teacher calls on you in class?

The article in Psychology Today provides the reasons for going through this self analysis: “By identifying and then understanding our behaviors, thoughts and emotions, we can master and control ourselves. In turn, this mastery makes us feel better, think clearer and behave in non-destructive ways. Also, we can decide how much control to exercise. Do we want to make a huge change in a behavior — not yell at our children — or only a minor change in an emotion — move from debilitating despondency to having only intermittent periods of brief sadness?

“Another benefit of self-understanding is altering who we are behaviorally, cognitively, and emotionally to be more helpful and less destructive to ourselves or to others. We can gain insight not only into how we treat ourselves and expect to be treated, but also how we treat others and expect they should be treated. Often, we harbor double standards, one for us and another for others. Double standards create much miscommunication and conflict in relationships.

“Self-understanding allows us to appreciate how we evaluate other people. We can discover the people we are attracted to and why. And we can learn about the people we spurn or avoid, because they don’t interest us, and why we have such disinterest. We can discover if we ignore the very people who could be the most appealing and most helpful to our well-being.

“By discovering who you are and gaining thorough self-understanding, you gain insight, mastery, and control. This improves your mental and emotional health by giving you broader options and allows you to live an enhanced life that is grounded in reality.”