Five ways to boost emotional wellbeing

Here are five ways you can start boosting (and practicing) emotional wellbeing 

1. Build optimism: Build resilience and boost your mood by appreciating positive experiences. Savouring is a particular practice that helps make the emotions associated with positive experiences last longer. Ways to do this: 
   • Share your good feelings and experience with others  
   • Take a mental photograph by focusing on what you want to remember about the moment  
   • Slow down to really notice the sights, smells, sounds or tastes of something that you enjoy so that you can evoke this good memory in greater detail later on.  
2. Strengthen social connections: Relationships are profoundly life-affirming and provide us with a network of support. Did you know that healthy, supportive relations with partners, family, friends, neighbours and others help to boost emotional and physical health and potentially lengthen life? Ways to strengthen social connections include:  
   • Recognizing how other people influence you,  
   • Volunteering 
   • Engaging in acts of kindness.  
3. Set manageable weekly goals: Rather than adding to your to-do list, focus on what you already have to do and channel those tasks into simple and time-bound goals. This will help relieve some of our stress, and provide a sense of accomplishment.  
4. Find meaning and purpose: Often used interchangeably, these linked concepts are different. Meaning refers to the emotional significance we place on something and purpose is about having meaning in life. Three paths to cultivating meaning and purpose are wonder, gratitude and altruism.  
   • Wonder is the sense of being awed. Think of any experience where you feel connected to something greater than yourself.  
   • Gratitude is about being appreciative and thankful to others, a higher power, or to the natural world around us.  
   • Altruism is about giving back and extending kindness towards others. Gratitude and altruism may work in tandem; studies are showing that people who practise gratitude are more likely to be altruistic. In fact, brain scans show that gratitude and altruism are neurologically linked through reward circuitry.   
5. Practice reappraisal: This strategy has us re-frame negative or stressful situations in a more positive light. Not all experiences are going to be appropriate for this technique, but for everyday stressors, the re-interpretation of situations can help enhance emotional wellbeing.
   • Reflect on where there is an opportunity for growth, and what you learned from that experience.
   • Like any skill, re-appraisal requires practice for it to become a go-to method to manage stress and regulate emotions.  

References: 

https://www.nih.gov/health-information/emotional-wellness-toolkit 

https://www.berkeleywellbeing.com/reappraisal.html