Have you been wondering how to manage your emotions? For overall health and wellbeing, many consider emotional strength exercises and eating right as crucial tools in making this happen. However, it is more important to pursue a healthy emotional fitness plan in order to practice emotional strength exercises rightfully.
Cultivating positive emotions like happiness, gratitude, peace, joy can drastically improve your everyday life. Contrary to this, negative feelings like anger and fear demand you start looking into emotional strength exercises to practice.
According to Dr. Barbara Fredrickson, author of ‘Positivity’, we should cultivate at least three positive emotions for every negative emotion. I couldn’t agree more. A positive mind is a key success in all aspects of life.
Here some emotional strength exercises that you can do every day to improve your quality of life.
9 Emotional Strength Exercises to Help You Rebuild Yourself
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Breath
Breathing is one of the most successful emotional strength exercises. By simply breathing, you will not only be strengthening your heart muscles but also taking your emotional fitness to another level. Just like in meditation practices like yoga, breathing is about relaxation and letting go.
Conscious breathing helps to restore and replenish energy and even provide you with fresh ideas and inspirations. This is especially important if you are having a hectic day. Therefore, when you are in the midst of a busy day, take some time to inhale and exhale in a relaxed manner. These slower breaths will nourish your heart and benefit your total well-being. Remember, it should be done in a calm and peaceful environment.
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Love Yourself
While loving others is a good behavior, it’s also important to embrace yourself with more kindness, care, and patience. Loving yourself is treating your heart with more thoughtfulness and knowing that you will be here for you. To help you with this, you can come in simple phrases that will make you feel appreciated.
This may include words such as “I love you”, “I am sorry”, “you matter,” and more. Whatever phrases make you feel better, you don’t have to hear them from someone else but you. You will be surprised by how this can change your inner world and the way you view other things.
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Find Purpose and Meaning
This is one of the important aspects of how to improve emotional fitness. When you have something to look forward to each day, you will feel fulfilled, and this can take you through the day. It is even more powerful when we align our purpose with the mission to bring peace and harmony to the world. This could be as simple as appreciating others with a smile.
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Find Beauty in Things Around You
At times, just looking around to find beauty in things around you can have much effect on prolonging your life. Examine things more deeply in order to find more beauty. For instance, watch the clouds build or listen to your favorite music. Learn to compliment and find beauty in the faces of others. You will be surprised at how different you will begin to view things, as well as build your emotional strength.
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Treat Yourself
Get out of the comfort zone and do something for yourself once in a while. Although it’s important to consume healthy food. In fact, there is nothing wrong with having a cheat day every once in a while. This emotional fitness element can even help you stay on track with healthy food choices.
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Build Your Own Resiliency
Wondering how to manage your resiliency? Well, you can start by getting out of your comfort zone. Having something to do out of the usual routine is one of the powerful emotional strengthening exercises. Many times, we forget to stay connected with the natural world due to our busy lifestyles.
When you get out of your comfort zone, you will find yourself more likely to get out of your headspace. In return, you will start to see the bigger picture of things and understand what’s going on in your life. This will not only bring a meaningful contribution to our lives but to that of others also.
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Laugh
Laughter is one of the simplest and very popular emotional fitness activities with good reason. Laughter can offset everyday stresses caused by family and work and is good for the heart too. According to research, it boosts your immune system, relaxes your muscles, and triggers the release of endorphins that make your body feel good. Therefore, silly jokes, funny movies, and childish games should be part of your emotional workout plan.
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Practicing Kindness and gratitude
One of the ways in which you can exercise emotional fitness is by practicing kindness. Both planned and random acts of kindness will make you feel good about yourself and contribute to building peace in the world. Besides, it’s a healthy mission that costs nothing and lasts a lifetime. So, say thank you, compliment another, smile at a stranger, and your emotional-self will be grateful.
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Be part of an Emotional Fitness Network
Did you know that being part of healthy emotional fitness networks can have as much effect as prolonging your life? Studies show that one can improve their experience by networking with like-minded people who are looking to build their emotional strength.
Conclusion
By making time to stick to a daily emotional fitness program, you are able to build deeper connections, heal yourself and offer support to those around you. Well, with the emotional strengthening exercises above, you will be able to focus on more positive things and bring change to your life for overall well-being.