5 Practices That Will Improve Your Mental And Emotional Health

Why it’s Important to Take Better Care of Ourselves

5 min readMar 23, 2018

Our mental and emotional health controls our daily experiences and has a major influence on our quality of life.

If we’re not mentally and emotionally healthy, not only will we tend to have some turmoil in life, we will also find it harder to cope with things that happen to us.

Mental health is becoming a more widely accepted area of focus now than it has been in the past. We’re becoming more aware that unless we’re healthy mentally, we cannot be healthy emotionally and physically.

If we consider the mind and body connection, it has been known that whenever we have a problem in our body, there’s a good chance we also have a problem in our mind.

Mental health refers to how well we use our mind through the thoughts we think and the images we hold in our minds. The thoughts and images we hold in our minds dictates our emotional state, which in turn, affects our physical state.

One of my mentors says that we cannot do positive things or make intelligent decisions if we’re in a negative emotional state.

When we’re healthy mentally and emotionally, we will:

Be in a better mood daily.
Not let problems slow us down.
Find it easier to do what needs to be done.
Not be as easily affected by other people’s actions.
Be a lot more relaxed and happier.

It’s up to us to learn how to improve our mental and emotional health.

In my experience, whenever I’ve had any physical pain or problem, it almost always is caused by a mental or emotional issue. A number of years ago, I started experiencing severe pain in my right knee. At first, I thought it would pass through in a couple of days.

When the pain continued on for a few days, I had some physiotherapy treatment, and while it helped reduce the pain, it still did not go away. It reached a stage where I decided to have an X-ray done on my knee just to be sure there wasn’t any physical damage. However, the X-rays did not reveal any symptoms that would be causing me pain.

After seeing my X-ray results, I knew the problem was a mental or emotional problem. As I had read a number of books on how we can heal our bodies, I looked up what could be potential causes for knee problems. I found out that having knee problems related to being inflexible, stubborn or not willing to give in.

I had to ask myself where I was being stubborn or inflexible, and I immediately knew the answer. After I acknowledged where I was not willing to give in, I went through a process to release the emotions I was feeling and chose to experience better emotions.

To my surprise, the next morning, I had no pain in my knee at all. After weeks of discomfort and pain, by becoming aware of my mental and emotional heath, I was able to overcome a physical discomfort in such a short period of time.

5 Practices That Will Improve Our Mental and Emotional Health

Adopt more mindfulness techniques. Mindfulness is not something new. It’s has been a practice that’s been around for centuries. Techniques or practices include meditation, deep and slower breathing, releasing techniques and just learning to be still.
Take better physical care. Through the mind-body connection, the better we take care of ourselves physically, the better we will feel in general. This can be done through better eating habits, drinking more water based on our physical condition, better nutritional health through supplements, cutting out acidic foods and drinks, and getting more sleep.
Choose wisely who you spend time with. As we’re affected by those we spend most of our time with, it’s vitally important we choose to be around people who will challenge and encourage us, and also lift us up as we go for our dreams. If we don’t have a positive peer network, it’s up to us to create one.
Learn more about mental and emotional health. We can read books or articles about topics on mental and emotional health, take classes to learn more about ourselves, or watch educational programs. The more we immerse ourselves into learning about how we can have better overall health, the more improvements we will notice.
Seek professional help as needed. Sometimes we may feel that we’re at a point where we need to get help in order to overcome a particular challenge. That’s more intelligent than struggling through hoping things will get better themselves. By working with a professional, we can get to the root cause a lot faster, and then we can take appropriate steps to address it.

If we start focusing on improving our mental and emotional health, we’ll start having a better experience of life and be a lot happier. If we struggle with our mental and emotional health, life will feel hard, heavy and even unexciting, which will affect our overall well-being.

Action Step: Start doing something simple each day to improve your mental and emotional health. It could be as simple as practicing to breathe slower and deeper, multiple times each day. Over time, you can continue adding other techniques.

Question: What is another practice that can improve our mental and emotional health?

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